This week’s evidence is on a critically important topic: chronic absenteeism. This is a leading cause of failure and, ultimately, dropouts. 

Dear Friends,

This week’s evidence is on one of my favorite subjects – the toxic impact of homework, especially on students from low-income families. The new article comes from a surprising source – Mike Petrelli of the Fordham Institute.

This week’s evidence is on a topic I have not addressed before – how to support substitute teachers. This is a critical issue for many of our clients, some of whom are staffed 50% by long-term (or a series of short-term) substitute teachers.  The evidence is from Edutopia (https://www.edutopia.org/article/supporting-substitute-teachers/), and some of the key findings include:

This week's research comes from Sarah D. Sparks. She covers education research, data, and the science of learning for Education Week.

3 Counterintuitive Findings About Motivation That Teachers Can Use

Dear Friends,

This week’s evidence comes from the Eberly Center at Carnegie Mellon University. It addresses a pervasive concern of teachers – classroom discipline. This is important because even with fully certified teachers, their undergraduate teacher preparation programs provided little help in classroom management. Moreover, many districts have a large number of long-term substitute teachers and non-certified teachers who have had no training at all in dealing with student discipline.

Dear Friends,

This week’s evidence comes from a forthcoming study by Chingos of the Urban Institute. The question is the impact of class size reduction on students. A recently signed New York law caps class size at 20, k-4; 24 5-8; and 25 9-12. California had already run this experiment in the 90s, and it was a disaster. Some students went four years without a qualified teacher. Why is this very popular law so bad?

Dear Friends,

Here's the latest evidence of interest to educators and leaders. There has been a lot of ink spilled about artificial intelligence recently, but here is the single best source I’ve seen so far. It’s Brave New Words by Sal Kahn. I’ve been converted from skeptic to advocate by this book. I had worried that Kahn Academy was just helping privileged kids, who had great internet connectivity, get their homework done.

This week’s evidence comes from a large (3 million students) study of primary age students – K-2 based on iReady data from Curriculum Associates.  The results are dismal with this group of students showing lower reading levels and slower growth than before the pandemic.  Entering kindergarten and grade 1, students have lower levels of reading readiness – obviously, not related to missed school during those grades. 

Dear Friends,

This week's evidence comes from our friends at Johns Hopkins University. Once again, I need to let the evidence get in the way of my preconceived notions. The study is about personalized learning. 

Dear Friends,

This week’s evidence is about how teachers can make constructive use of AI to cut the amount of time they spend on instructional planning. 

Dear Friends,

This week’s evidence is about Career and Technical Education (CTE). It is often overlooked, as policymakers tend to focus only on state test scores. But on the metric that really has a life-long impact, CTE is an enormously important factor to consider.  

Dear Friends,

This week’s evidence comes from one of the most profoundly important books of the decade – Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation.” Every parent, grandparent, teacher, school leader, and policy maker must read this. If you are on the fence about smartphones for adolescents and especially about smartphones in the classroom, the evidence in this book will settle any ambiguities that remain.

Dear Friends,

This week’s evidence comes from a new (April 24, 2024) study by Professor Onan Erdem and colleagues on the subject of “desirable difficulties.”  

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-024-00245-7

The authors found, not surprisingly, that students do not always seek out the path of challenge, what the Greeks called the Scholar’s Bench on the hill, but rather the value of indolence. I’m often the same way, so I can’t get very judgmental about students who prefer pleasure over pain.

Dear Friends,

This week's evidence concerns persistent disagreements among researchers about the degree of COVID-related learning loss in mathematics and reading. The New York Times claimed that students are making a “surprising surge” in learning (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/31/us/pandemic-learning-loss-recovery.html while other researchers, such as Joel Rose writing in Education Next claim that learning loss – especially in middle school – remains pervasive and persistent, forecasting huge challenges for these students who will struggle with the demands of high school math classes.

Dear Friends,  

This week’s evidence comes from a wonderful new book by Indiana University Professor Mary Murphy, “Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations” (2024, Simon & Shuster). Murphy was a graduate student of Carol Dweck at Stanford in the early 2000s and the exciting days of the original Mindset research. But now, almost 20 years later, Murphy provides powerful evidence that the previous emphasis on growth vs. fixed mindset at the individual level must be displaced by two realities.