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Our Best Education Articles of 2020

In February of 2020, we launched the new website Greater Good in Education , a collection of free, research-based and -informed strategies and practices for the social, emotional, and ethical development of students, for the well-being of the adults who work with them, and for cultivating positive school cultures. Little did we know how much more crucial these resources would become over the course of the year during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now, as we head back to school in 2021, things are looking a lot different than in past years. Our most popular education articles of 2020 can help you manage difficult emotions and other challenges at school in the pandemic, all while supporting the social-emotional well-being of your students.

In addition to these articles, you can also find tips, tools, and recommended readings in two resource guides we created in 2020: Supporting Learning and Well-Being During the Coronavirus Crisis and Resources to Support Anti-Racist Learning , which helps educators take action to undo the racism within themselves, encourage their colleagues to do the same, and teach and support their students in forming anti-racist identities.

Here are the 10 best education articles of 2020, based on a composite ranking of pageviews and editors’ picks.

Can the Lockdown Push Schools in a Positive Direction? , by Patrick Cook-Deegan: Here are five ways that COVID-19 could change education for the better.

How Teachers Can Navigate Difficult Emotions During School Closures , by Amy L. Eva: Here are some tools for staying calm and centered amid the coronavirus crisis.

Six Online Activities to Help Students Cope With COVID-19 , by Lea Waters: These well-being practices can help students feel connected and resilient during the pandemic.

Help Students Process COVID-19 Emotions With This Lesson Plan , by Maurice Elias: Music and the arts can help students transition back to school this year.

How to Teach Online So All Students Feel Like They Belong , by Becki Cohn-Vargas and Kathe Gogolewski: Educators can foster belonging and inclusion for all students, even online.

How Teachers Can Help Students With Special Needs Navigate Distance Learning , by Rebecca Branstetter: Kids with disabilities are often shortchanged by pandemic classroom conditions. Here are three tips for educators to boost their engagement and connection.

How to Reduce the Stress of Homeschooling on Everyone , by Rebecca Branstetter: A school psychologist offers advice to parents on how to support their child during school closures.

Three Ways to Help Your Kids Succeed at Distance Learning , by Christine Carter: How can parents support their children at the start of an uncertain school year?

How Schools Are Meeting Social-Emotional Needs During the Pandemic , by Frances Messano, Jason Atwood, and Stacey Childress: A new report looks at how schools have been grappling with the challenges imposed by COVID-19.

Six Ways to Help Your Students Make Sense of a Divisive Election , by Julie Halterman: The election is over, but many young people will need help understanding what just happened.

Train Your Brain to Be Kinder (video), by Jane Park: Boost your kindness by sending kind thoughts to someone you love—and to someone you don’t get along with—with a little guidance from these students.

From Othering to Belonging (podcast): We speak with john a. powell, director of the Othering & Belonging Institute, about racial justice, well-being, and widening our circles of human connection and concern.

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Awesome Articles for Students: Websites and Other Resources

All of these sites are free.

In today’s digital world, we seem to be surrounded by news. Clickbait, anyone? Yet the pervasive and often intrusive nature of internet news articles belies the fact that many of these sites are behind a paywall, biased, or feature low-quality reporting.

Still, online articles are a great starting point for all kinds of learning assignments across the curriculum. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of the best free article websites for students. Many of these sites offer not only high-quality topical articles on every subject, but also ideas for lessons, such as questions, quizzes, and discussion prompts.

Student Article Websites

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CommonLit With thousands of high-quality, Common Core-aligned reading passages for grades 3-12, this easy-to-use literacy site is a rich source of English and Spanish texts and lessons. Search by theme, grade, Lexile score, genre, and even literary devices such as alliteration or foreshadowing. Texts are accompanied by teacher guides, paired texts activities, and assessments. Teachers can share lessons and track student progress with a free account. 

DOGOnews News articles featuring current events, science, social studies, world events, civics, environment, sports, weird/fun news, and more. Free access to all articles. Premium accounts offer extras such as simplified and audio versions, quizzes, and critical thinking challenges. 

CNN10 Replacing the popular CNN Student News, CNN 10 provides 10-minute video news stories on current events of international importance, explaining how the event fits into the broader news narrative. 

KiwiKids News Created by a New Zealand primary school educator, Kiwi Kids News features free articles about health, science, politics (including U.S. political topics), animals, and the Olympics. Kids will love the “Odd Stuff” articles, which focus on unusual news, from the world’s biggest potato to centenarian athletes. 

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PBS NewsHour Daily News Lessons Daily articles covering current events in video format. Each lesson includes a full transcript, fact list, summary, and focus questions. 

NYT Daily Lessons/Article of the Day The New York Times Daily Lessons builds a classroom lesson around a new article each day, offering thoughtful questions for writing and discussion, as well as related ideas for further study. Perfect for practicing critical thinking and literacy skills for middle and high school students, it’s a part of the larger NYT Learning Network , which provides an abundance of activities for students and resources for teachers.

The Learning Network Current event articles, student opinion essays, movie reviews, students review contests, and more. The educator resource section offers top-notch teaching and professional development resources. 

News For Kids With the motto “Real News, Told Simply,” News for Kids strives to present the latest topics in U.S. and world news, science, sports, and the arts in a way that’s accessible to most readers. Features a coronavirus update page .

ReadWorks A fully free research-based platform, Readworks provides thousands of nonfiction and fiction passages searchable by topic, activity type, grade, and Lexile level. Educator guides cover differentiation, hybrid and remote learning, and free professional development. Great resource for teachers.

Science News for Students Winner of multiple awards for journalism, Science News for Students publishes original science, technology, and health features for readers ages 9-14. Stories are accompanied by citations, recommended readings, glossaries, readability scores, and classroom extras. Be sure to check out Top 10 tips to stay safe during an epidemic . 

Teaching Kids News A terrific site that publishes readable and teachable articles on news, art, science, politics, and more for students grades 2-8. Bonus: The Fake News resource section links to online games about fake news and images. A must for any digital citizen.

Smithsonian Tween Tribune An excellent resource for articles on a wide range of topics, including animals, national/world news, sports, science, and much more. Searchable by topic, grade, and Lexile reading score. Lesson plans offer great ideas for the classroom and simple, usable frameworks for implementing these in any grade. 

Wonderopolis Have you ever wondered if llamas really spit or if animals like art? Every day, the award-winning Wonderopolis posts a new standard-based article exploring intriguing questions such as these. Students may submit their own questions and vote for their favorites. Be sure to check out “Wonders with Charlie,” featuring acclaimed writer, producer, and director Charlie Engelman.

Youngzine A unique news site for young people that focuses on climate science, solutions, and policies to address the myriad effects of global warming. Kids have an opportunity to express their views and literary creativity by submitting poetry or essays. 

Scholastic Kids Press A multinational group of young journalists ages 10-14 report the latest news and fascinating stories about the natural world. Features sections dedicated to coronavirus and civics.

National Geographic Kids A fine library of articles about animals, history, science, space, and—of course—geography. Students will enjoy the “Weird But True” short videos, featuring fun animations about oddball topics.  

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Activities for students and lesson plan ideas based on times articles, photos, videos and graphs., student opinion.

Introduction to ‘Student Opinion Questions’

Want to learn more about this feature? Watch this short introduction video and start sharing your ideas and opinions today.

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176 Writing Prompts to Spark Discussion and Reflection

Here are all of our Student Opinion questions from the 2023-24 school year. Each question is based on a different New York Times article, interactive feature or video.

What Is Your Reaction to Trump’s Conviction on 34 Felony Counts?

Donald J. Trump is the first American president to be declared a felon, a stain he will carry as he seeks to regain the presidency.

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A school year’s worth of short, accessible image-driven posts that invite a variety of kinds of writing.

Tell us a story, real or made up, that is inspired by this image.

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Lesson Plan: ‘Noise Could Take Years Off Your Life. Here’s Why.’

In this lesson, students will learn about the dangers of noise in daily life, and the health risks excessive noise can pose. Then, they will document the noise levels in their own communities.

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Best Education Articles of 2020: Our 20 Most Popular Stories About Students, Remote Schooling & COVID Learning Loss This Year

This is the latest roundup in our “Best Of” series, spotlighting top highlights from this year’s coverage as well as the most popular articles we’ve published each month. See more of the standouts from across 2020 right here .

A ny student will forever remember 2020 as the year that the classrooms and campuses closed down. As coronavirus cases surged in the spring — and then again in the autumn — educators, families and district leaders did their best to pivot to a socially-distanced Plan B, building a new system of remote instruction overnight in hopes of maintaining learning and community.

Any education journalist will remember 2020 as the year that all the planned student profiles, school spotlights and policy investigations got thrown out the window as we scrambled to capture and process the disorienting new normal of virtual classrooms. Here at The 74, our top stories from the past nine months were dominated by our reporting in this area, by features that framed the challenges and opportunities of distance learning, that surfaced solutions and innovations that were working for some districts, and that pointed to the bigger questions of how disrupted back-to-back school years may lead to long-term consequences for this generation of students.

As we approach the new year, we’re continuing to report on America’s evolving, patchwork education system via our coronavirus education reporting project at The74Million.org/PANDEMIC . With school campuses open in some states and not others, with some families preferring in-person classes or remote learning alternatives, and with some individual classrooms being forced to close in rolling 14-day increments with new coronavirus breakouts, it’s clear that our education system will begin 2021 in a similar state of turmoil. (Get our latest reporting on schools and the pandemic delivered straight to your inbox by signing up for The 74 Newsletter )

But with the first vaccines being administered this month, we’re seeing our first glimpse of a light at the end of this chaotic tunnel — hope that the virus will quickly dissipate, that schools will fully reopen, and that we’ll then find a way to help all of America’s 74 million children catch up. Here are our 20 most read and shared articles of the year:

New Research Predicts Steep COVID Learning Losses Will Widen Already Dramatic Achievement Gaps Within Classrooms / By Beth Hawkins

Learning Loss: In the days immediately following the pandemic-related closure of schools throughout the country this past spring, researchers at the nonprofit assessment organization NWEA predicted that whatever school looks like in the fall, students will start the year with significant gaps. In June, they also began warning that the already wide array of student achievement present in individual classrooms in a normal year is likely to swell dramatically . In 2016, researchers at NWEA and four universities determined that on average, the range of academic abilities within a single classroom spans five to seven grades, with one-fourth on grade level in math and just 14 percent in reading. “All of this is in a typical year,” one of the researchers, Texas A&M University Professor Karen Rambo-Hernandez, told Beth Hawkins. “Next year is not going to look like a typical year.” Read the full story .

The issues of ‘COVID Slide’, learning loss and classroom inequity appeared regularly on the site through 2020. A few other notable examples from the year:

— Even Further Ahead: New data suggest pandemic may not just be leaving low-income students behind; it may be propelling wealthier ones even further ahead ( Read the full story )

— Teaching Time: How much learning time are students getting? In 7 of America’s largest school districts, less than normal — and in 3, they’re getting more ( Read the full story )

— Missing Students: Lost learning, lost students — COVID slide is not as steep as predicted, NWEA study finds, but 1 in 4 kids was missing from fall exams ( Read the full story )

— Learning Loss Research: Students could have lost as much as 232 days of learning in math during first four months of largely virtual schooling ( Read the full story )

— What History Tells Us: What lasting academic (and economic) effects could coronavirus shutdowns have on this generation of students? Some alarming data points from research on previous disasters ( Read the full analysis )

Parents (and Lawyers) Say Distance Learning Failed Too Many Special Education Students. As Fall Approaches, Families Wonder If Their Children Will Lose Another School Year / By Linda Jacobson

Special Education: A number of special education parents said their children didn’t receive services during school closures in the spring. That’s why, as Linda Jacobson reported over the summer, organizations such as the School Superintendents Association believed lawsuits and due process complaints were on the horizon, and that’s why they asked Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to waive federal special education laws as long as schools are trying to teach students remotely . But experts warned The 74 that there’s no proof districts are facing more complaints than usual and that as long as districts communicate frequently with families they’re more likely to avoid complaints — even if schools remain closed. Boston University’s Nathan Jones, an expert on special education, also stressed that going into this fall, it was important to focus on strong academic interventions to help students regain what they’ve lost. Read the full story .

— From March: ‘Absolutely, I’m worried’ — For children with special needs, unprecedented coronavirus school closures bring confusion, uncertainty ( Read the full story )

When the Point of the Pod Is Equity: How Small Grants Are Empowering Parents of Underserved Students to Form Pandemic Microschools / By Beth Hawkins

Remote Learning: A six-child school with a focus on Black girl magic. Bilingual materials for a living-room preschool in an English-only state. Lessons rich with art and self-expression for six foster kids. A curriculum built for kids affected by incarceration. The first round of microschool grants announced by the National Parents Union are nothing like the pandemic pods described in one news story after another last summer: Wealthy parents banding together to hire a teacher or take turns overseeing distance learning. The young organization’s inaugural grants were intended to support families often failed by traditional schools , so perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that many of the winning proposals center on celebrating underserved students’ heritage or meeting specific, frequently overlooked needs. Beth Hawkins talks to several grantees about their kids and their plans. Read the full story .

— Case Study — Pods to Augment Remote Learning: In parks, backyards and old storefronts across Los Angeles, small groups offer children some of what they’ve lost in months of online instruction ( Read the full feature )

How Missing Zoom Classes Could Funnel Kids into the Juvenile Justice System — And Why Some Experts Say Now is the Time to Reform Truancy Rules / By Mark Keierleber

Discipline: In communities across the country, social workers are walking door to door in search of millions of students their schools have deemed “missing” — a stark reality as districts combat an absenteeism crisis amid the coronavirus pandemic. Despite longstanding “compulsory education” laws that require students to attend school or face punishment — including fines and incarceration in some states — many districts have avoided pushing students into the juvenile justice system for truancy during the pandemic. But as growing evidence suggest that such an approach is counterproductive, some experts worry about what could come next . “Pretty soon, I think that folks are going to start relying on the stick more than they have been,” said Rey Saldaña, CEO of the nonprofit Communities in Schools. “That’ll be the completely wrong conversation to have because these students don’t need truancy court, they don’t need fines.” Rather than being willfully defiant, truant students are often suffering from homelessness or violence, he said. “They need interventions, they don’t need to be seen by a judge.” Read the full report . 

— Related: Research shows changing schools can make or break a student, but the wave of post-COVID mobility may challenge the systems in ways we’ve never seen ( Read the full report ) 

— School Finance: Phantom students, very real red ink — Why efforts to keep student disenrollment from busting school budgets can backfire ( Read the full story )

— Disenrollment: As families face evictions & closed classrooms, data shows ‘dramatic’ spike in mid-year school moves ( Read the full story ) 

— Catholic Schools: A glimmer of hope in pandemic for nation’s ailing Catholic schools, but long-term worries persist ( Read the full story )

DeVos on the Docket: With 455 Lawsuits Against Her Department and Counting, Education Secretary is Left to Defend Much of Her Agenda in Court / By Linda Jacobson

Department of Education: No education secretary has ever been sued as much as Betsy DeVos. In four years, over 455 lawsuits have been filed against either DeVos or the U.S. Department of Education, according to The 74’s analysis of court filings and opinions. Many of the cases, involving multiple states and advocacy organizations, were filed in response to Trump administration moves to reverse Obama-era rules in the areas of civil rights and protections for student loan borrowers. DeVos has always been outspoken about lightening Washington’s footprint in education. But in her department’s effort to grab what one education attorney called “quick political wins,” judges — even Trump appointees — are finding flaws in its approach. One exception might be the revised Title IX policy, which has already sparked four lawsuits, but might be hard for a future administration to tear down. Linda Jacobson has the story .

A 2020 EDlection Cheat Sheet: Recapping the 48 Key Races, Winners and Campaign Issues That Could Reshape America’s Schools and Education Policy / By The 74 Staff

EDlection: A first-ever ballot proposition on sex education in Washington state that critics decried as “school porn” but voters approved. A school board election in New Orleans, in part a referendum on closing failing schools, that remained largely undecided the week after Election Day. A victory by former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, whose education background runs deep and who is one of the few Democrats to unseat a GOP incumbent for U.S. Senate. While a historic presidential race — and a test of our democracy — fixated the nation, education was on the ballot this unprecedented election cycle . Elected officials, particularly at the state level, will play a pivotal role in steering schools through the public health and economic crises of the pandemic. That’s why we’ve curated 48 federal, state and local races with key implications for students, teachers and families. Here’s the full rundown of the 2020 votes that mattered most to education, plus a full archive of our Election Week livechat, which included rolling updates on candidates, votes and the national conversation. Read the full roundup .

As COVID Creeps into Schools, Surveillance Tech Follows / By Mark Keierleber

Student Privacy: When an Ohio school district saw a “significant increase” in COVID-19 cases among students and staff, officials made the difficult call of reverting to remote learning. But when kids return to class, they’ll be wearing badges that will track their every move — part of a pilot program in contact tracing that allows the Wickliffe district to follow students for up to a month and identify who comes into contact with infected classmates. The badges and other high-tech gizmos, including UV light air purifiers and thermal-imaging cameras that purport to detect fevers, have come under fire from student privacy advocates. But company executives and school leaders made clear they’re not likely to go away anytime soon — even after the pandemic subsides . “After the initial pushback, people are going to adapt and deal with it,” Superintendent Joseph Spiccia told The 74’s Mark Keierleber. “Some people would be angry, and after that anger dissipates, I think people generally will end up complying and falling in line.” Read the full story .

— Case Study: ‘Don’t get gaggled’ — Minneapolis school district spends big on student surveillance tool, raising ire after terminating its police contract ( Read the full story )

An Education System, Divided: How Internet Inequity Persisted Through 4 Presidents and Left Schools Unprepared for the Pandemic / By Kevin Mahnken

Student Access: When the COVID-19 pandemic spread into American communities, schools adapted by switching to online classes. But millions of families with no or limited home internet can’t manage that transition, drastically diminishing educational opportunities for the students who need them most. Local leaders have embraced creative solutions, loaning out thousands of devices and dispatching Wi-Fi-equipped school buses into low-connectivity neighborhoods. But the question remains: Three decades after the internet’s emergence as a boundary-breaking technology, how are vast swaths of the United States still walled off from the social, economic and educational blessings that the internet provides ? The answer, told to The 74 by experts and policymakers who have worked around communications access since the birth of the internet, implicate both the public and private sectors in a prolonged failure to extend the benefits of modern technology to countless Americans. “I think the large-scale tolerance for inequity in this country gave rise to an inequitable telecommunications system,” said one. Read Kevin Mahnken’s report .

New Poll Reveals Parents Want One-on-One Distance Learning Support From Teachers — but Aren’t Getting Much of It / By Beth Hawkins

Parent Priorities: Polling data released this past May from the national nonprofit Learning Heroes found parents were engaged in their kids’ distance learning but wanted more contact with teachers, both for their kids and for themselves as at-home learning coaches. Nearly half of more than 3,600 parents surveyed said personal guidance would be extremely helpful, but just 15 percent have gotten it . Only 39 percent said they had a clear understanding of teachers’ expectations, and few were getting the texts and phone calls they said are the most effective means of communication. The poll illustrated new implications of a longstanding, fundamental lack of information, which previous Learning Heroes surveys have found feeds parents’ near-universal belief that their children are doing far better in school than they really are. As schools plan for eventual reopening, Learning Heroes President Bibb Hubbard told Beth Hawkins, they should carefully consider what parents say is working for them — because while families are giving schools and teachers the benefit of the doubt now, that may not last. “There’s a lot of grace right now,” Hubbard says. “But I think that’s going to change next fall.” Read the full report .

Displaced: The Faces of American Education in Crisis / By Laura Fay, Bekah McNeel, Patrick O’Donnell & Taylor Swaak

Displaced: No two experiences of this pandemic have been the same, particularly when it comes to school communities. When we launched this project in late May, it had been several months since COVID-19 shuttered districts across the country. In what would have been the final months of the 2019-20 academic year, tens of millions of students, educators and parents saw their lives upended overnight. Still half of America’s school employees aren’t teachers. When the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States, millions of other workers integral to the American education system were similarly uprooted . As the country (and its school communities) continued to navigate its way through a disaster for which it was grossly unprepared, a team from The 74 set out to track how life and work has changed for the diverse universe of characters who make our classrooms work. From parents to teachers, counselors and even district warehouse managers, the pandemic has been a time of unprecedented hardships and challenges. Here: Eight faces and unforgettable stories from across the country that begin to capture the real story of the pandemic’s impact on the wider community. See all eight profiles .

New Report Estimates School Closures’ Long-Term Impact on the U.S. Economy at More Than $14 Trillion / By Linda Jacobson

Skills Gap: A paper from economists Eric Hanushek of Stanford University and Ludger Woessmann of the University of Munich presents a sobering prediction of how school closures could impact the U.S. economy for the next 80 years. The paper estimates that the shutdowns could ultimately lead to losses ranging from $14.2 trillion for a third of the school year to almost $28 trillion for two-thirds . That’s because “learning loss will lead to skill loss, and the skills people have relate to their productivity,” writes international education expert Andreas Schleicher, of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The U.S., Schleicher said, was actually better positioned than many other nations to make the transition to remote learning. But looking ahead, he said the country could do a better job of directing education spending toward quality instruction and the students who need resources the most. Read our full report .

Exclusive: NYC Teachers Union Launches Its Own Investigation of School Building Air Quality Amid COVID Threat, UFT President Says / By Zoë Kirsch

School Safety: Looking to spur the New York City Department of Education to take preventative action on airborne COVID transmission in schools, the United Federation of Teachers announced this past summer that it was taking the longstanding issue of poor ventilation into its own hands. President Michael Mulgrew told The 74’s Zoë Kirsch in an exclusive interview this past August that the union was sending its own health and safety workers into 30 “red flag” schools with the worst ventilation systems to do their own air quality testing. The move came as the UFT escalated its criticism of the city’s school reopening plan, saying it failed to meet student and staff safety standards on several fronts. Less than half of New York City’s roughly 1,400 school buildings are equipped with heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, which maintain indoor air quality. “One of the biggest risk factors is time spent in underventilated spaces indoors. You want to control the emissions and removal,”said Joseph Allen, who runs the Healthy Buildings program at Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health and estimates that 90 percent of U.S. schools are underventilated. A 2000 NYC report said, “The UFT receives more complaints from its members about poor indoor air quality in schools than about any other health and safety issue.” Read the full report .

Texas’s Missing Students: Weeks After Closures, Schools in San Antonio Still Couldn’t Locate Thousands of Kids. How One Band Director Finally Tracked Down His Musicians / By Bekah McNeel

Absenteeism: In its race to locate every student before school adjourned for summer, San Antonio Independent School District relied on faculty members like high school band director Alejandro Jaime Salazar to track them down. It became a daily task for Salazar, as he used every tool at his disposal and relied on relationships forged before coronavirus shut the schools . That included asking student section leaders to make contact with other kids. Once located, Salazar said, “my main priority was to keep in contact with these kids every day.” He and other educators told The 74’s Bekah McNeel that the hunt for “missing” students revealed the increasing importance of student-teacher connection, engagement and relationships. Read the full profile .

The Achievement Gap Has Driven Education Reform for Decades. Now Some Are Calling It a Racist Idea / By Kevin Mahnken

Equity: For decades, education policy has been shaped largely by an extended discussion of racial achievement gaps, and the lingua franca of that discourse is testing data. A reform coalition of educators, politicians and activists has labored to narrow the academic disparity between white students and students of color, placing the goal at the heart of media debates and state accountability plans alike. But in recent years, influential figures have begun to shift away from the achievement gap. Some say it’s more responsible to focus on resource disparities between student groups, even if standardized testing is still a necessary component in school improvement efforts; others go even further, arguing that the notion of an achievement gap is a racist throwback to the age of eugenics . As reformers choose whether to preserve or abandon the idea, some in the Democratic Party — including former educator and soon-to-be-congressman Jamaal Bowman — have grown louder in their calls to abolish high-stakes testing. Read the full report .

New Data: College Enrollment for Low-Income High School Grads Plunged by 29% During the Pandemic / By Richard Whitmire

Higher Education: Author and 74 contributor Richard Whitmire describes the cratering of college enrollment rates among 2020 high school graduates as a tragedy whose outline is just becoming visible. That picture grew clearer and more distressing in December with the release of new data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center showing college enrollment declined for low-income students at nearly double the rate of higher-income students — 29.2 percent versus 16.9 percent. The decrease for all 2020 high school grads, measured for the first time since COVID-19 wreaked havoc on the nation’s schools, is also alarming: a nearly 22 percent drop this year versus a 2.8 percent drop for the class of 2019. The crucial difference, Whitmire writes, is that those from more affluent and middle-class backgrounds will likely make their way back to college once the pandemic subsides, while the trajectory for low-income students may have changed forever. Read the full report .

A Time of Reckoning for Race & Education in America: 5 Case Studies in How Students and School Leaders Are Pushing for Culturally Relevant Curriculum Amid the Pandemic / By Emmeline Zhao

Curriculum: The American education system was not designed to operate — much less thrive — without physical, in-person interaction. And when the novel coronavirus forced indefinite emergency school closures this spring, concern ballooned over how to educate America’s 74 million school-age children from afar. That, coupled with this summer’s protests demanding social justice, led The 74’s Pandemic Reporting Initiative to dispatch correspondents across the country to take a hard look at how existing curricula may not be conducive to closing the achievement gap , particularly from afar; how some schools are addressing these issues to adapt to changing times and challenging learning circumstances; and how educators are tackling these tough but critical issues. Read our full series that dives into curriculum in light of the pandemic and social justice movement, with reports out of New York, New Orleans, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, D.C. See the full series here .

Youth Suicide: The Other Public Health Crisis / By Mark Keierleber

Mental Health: Brad Hunstable believes his son died of the coronavirus — just not in the way one might expect. As COVID-19 shuttered schools nationwide and put students’ social lives on pause, Hayden committed suicide just days before his 13th birthday. His father blames that pandemic-induced social isolation — and a fit of rage — for his son’s death. Though the national youth suicide rate has been on the rise for years, students say the unprecedented disruption of the last few months has taken a toll on their emotional well-being . Researchers worry that a surge in depression and anxiety could drive a spike in youth suicide. Sandy Hook Promise, which runs an anonymous reporting tool, has seen a 12 percent increase in suicide-related reports since March. The issue became a political football ahead of this year’s election, with President Donald Trump and others citing rising rates of depression and suicide as reasons to relax COVID-19-related restrictions on in-person classes. Read the full report .

Using Tutors to Combat COVID Learning Loss: New Research Shows That Even Lightly Trained Volunteers Drive Academic Gains / By Kevin Mahnken

Personalized Learning: With a return to full-time, in-person schooling still weeks away in many areas, families are searching for any solution to deal with their children’s COVID-related learning losses. Now, a working paper circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that tutoring programs — whether led by certified teachers, paraprofessionals, even parents — could play a significant role in getting students back on track . It’s a strategy that has already been embraced by parents blessed with the money and bandwidth to create small-scale learning pods, but experts suggest that supplementary instruction could be scaled up dramatically through the use of lightly trained volunteers and virtual learning platforms. Still, both the cost and the organizational challenges of expanding tutoring are great. “The logistics of setting this up on the kind of scale we need to to address the problem is more complicated than we initially realized,” said co-author Philip Oreopoulos of the University of Toronto. Read the full report .

Cleveland Schools Considering Bold Plan to Confront Coronavirus Learning Loss: A ‘Mastery’ Learning Initiative That Would Scrap Grade Levels, Let Kids Learn at Own Pace / By Patrick O’Donnell

Mastery Education: At the beginning of the summer, educators were grappling with the fact that when students come back to school, they will be at vastly different academic levels. So how can schools fairly decide which grade kids should be in? They can’t, said Cleveland school district CEO Eric Gordon — and maybe they shouldn’t try. His draft plan for reopening the district’s schools would instead put students in multi-age “grade bands,” under a mastery approach that lets them work at their own speed. Students would then have time to relearn skills they have lost and catch up without feeling like failures or being held back a grade. “We’ve got opportunities here to really test, challenge and maybe abandon some of these time-bound structures of education that have never really conformed to what we know about good child development,” Gordon said. Read the full report .

When Siblings Become Teachers: It’s Not Just Parents Who Find Themselves Thrust Into the Demanding Role of At-Home Educators / By Zoë Kirsch

Homeschooling: When the pandemic shuttered New York City schools, 22-year-old Lillian Acosta of Queens found herself suddenly relating to the experiences of her co-workers with kids, as they talked about the challenges inherent in remote learning. Lillian isn’t a parent, but for the last few weeks, she’s been assuming the responsibilities of one , spending hours a day — and paying $90 a day to a tutor — to make sure her 14-year-old brother gets through school. She isn’t alone: In Brooklyn, 17-year-old Melisa Cabascango coaches her little brother, and in the Bronx, Sarshevack “Sar” Mnahsheh sets up a makeshift classroom in his family’s apartment every morning. “I try to wake up early enough to check up on the little things,” says Sar, who works the night shift at a local grocery store. “I don’t try to be overbearing because I’m not a parent, but I have to make sure they’re up to par on the things they’re doing.” Lillian, Melisa and Sar are working overtime to fill the gap between what their siblings need and what the district is providing in this moment of crisis. They’re three of thousands of young people who are shouldering that burden in cities and towns across the country — and those in low-income communities of color are getting hit the hardest. Read the full feature .

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How Do Kids Learn to Read? What the Science Says

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Corrected : A previous version of this article misstated the year Keith Stanovich coined the term “Matthew Effect in Reading.” It was 1986.

NOTE: The text of this article contains annotations. To view the list of annotations, please scroll to the bottom of the page.

How do children learn to read?

For almost a century, researchers have argued over the question. Most of the disagreement has centered on the very beginning stages of the reading process, when young children are first starting to figure out how to decipher words on a page.

One theory is that reading is a natural process, like learning to speak. If teachers and parents surround children with good books, this theory goes, kids will pick up reading on their own. Another idea suggests that reading is a series of strategic guesses based on context, and that kids should be taught these guessing strategies.

But research has shown that reading is not a natural process (1) , and it’s not a guessing game. Written language is a code. Certain combinations of letters predictably represent certain sounds. And for the last few decades, the research has been clear: Teaching young kids how to crack the code—teaching systematic phonics—is the most reliable way to make sure that they learn how to read words.

Of course, there is more to reading than seeing a word on a page and pronouncing it out loud. As such, there is more to teaching reading than just teaching phonics. Reading requires children to make meaning out of print. They need to know the different sounds in spoken language and be able to connect those sounds to written letters in order to decipher words. They need deep background and vocabulary knowledge so that they understand the words they read. Eventually, they need to be able to recognize most words automatically and read connected text fluently, attending to grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure.

But knowing how to decode is an essential step in becoming a reader. If children can’t decipher the precise words on the page, they’ll never become fluent readers or understand the passages they’re reading.

That’s why we’ve put together this overview of the research on early reading, in grades K-2. It covers what’s known about how we should teach letter-sound patterns, and what we don’t know for sure yet. It touches on what else should be part of early reading programs. And it explains why we know that most children can’t learn to read through osmosis or guessing.

Here’s what the evidence shows.

Don’t children learn to read the way they learn to speak?

Infants learn to speak (2) by listening to and repeating sounds made by adults and connecting them to meanings. They don’t consciously distinguish individual sound units (called phonemes) when hearing spoken language. Some research suggests infants learn probabilistically—for example, hearing the sound “ball” at the same time as the sight of a round, bouncy object over time makes the child associate the two—while other studies suggest children map meaning to a word after experiencing it just once or twice. Within the first two years, typically developing toddlers’ brains focus on the most common sounds in their native languages and connect those sounds to meaning. A child develops understanding of speech through exposure to language and opportunities to practice the “serve and return”(3) patterns of conversation, even without explicit instruction.

By contrast, children do not naturally develop reading skill through exposure to text. The way they learn to connect oral and written language(4) depends on what kind of language(5) they are learning to read.

Alphabetic languages, like English or French, use letters to stand for sounds that make up spoken words. To read an alphabetic language, children must learn how written letters represent spoken sounds(6), recognize patterns of letter sounds as words, and match those to spoken words whose meanings they know. This differs from Chinese, for example. It uses a tonal spoken language, conveying meaning with small differences in stress or pitch. Its writing system is partially logographic—in which written symbols correspond directly to a word or concept—and also includes words that couple symbols for meaning and symbols for sound. Someone reading Chinese hanzi characters could not “sound out” unfamiliar words character by character(7).

What is systematic, explicit phonics instruction, and why is it important?

Connecting printed letters on a page to written sounds isn’t intuitive(8). While some young children may make those connections themselves, most do not. One set of studies from 1989-90 illustrates this phenomenon well(9).

In these studies, conducted by Brian Byrne and Ruth Fielding-Barnsley, researchers taught young children between ages 3 and 5 to read whole words aloud, like “fat” and “bat.” These children didn’t already know their letter names.

Then, the researchers tested whether the children could transfer their knowledge to reading a new word. They gave them the word “fun,” and asked whether the word was “fun” or “bun.” Very few of the students could do this successfully. They couldn’t break down the original word into phonemes and then transfer their knowledge of those phonemes to a new word.

But children could succeed on this task if they were first given some explicit instructions. When children were taught how to recognize that certain letters represented certain sounds, and taught how to segment words to identify those individual letters and sounds, they had much greater success on the original transfer test. Neuroscience research has since confirmed and helped explain these findings. When learning how to read new words in an unfamiliar made-up language, participants had more long-term success if they were first taught which symbols correspond to which sounds, than if they tried to remember words as wholes. Brain imaging of these readers finds that the two teaching strategies tap into different neural pathways in the brain. Readers taught to connect print to meaning directly could recall words initially more quickly, but less accurately; readers taught to connect print to sound and then to meaning read aloud more quickly and correctly, better recalled the correct meanings of words, and transferred their knowledge to new words.

Decades of research has shown that explicit phonics instruction benefits early readers, but particularly those who struggle to read.

That’s because small strengths or deficits at the start of reading compound over time. It’s what reading expert Keith Stanovich in 1986 dubbed(10) the “Matthew Effect in Reading,”(11) after the Bible verse in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer: “The combination of deficient decoding skills, lack of practice, and difficult materials results in unrewarding early reading experiences that lead to less involvement in reading-related activities,” Stanovich wrote. “Lack of exposure and practice on the part of the less-skilled reader delays the development of automaticity and speed at the word recognition level. Slow, capacity-draining word-recognition processes require cognitive resources that should be allocated to comprehension. Thus, reading for meaning is hindered; unrewarding reading experiences multiply; and practice is avoided or merely tolerated without real cognitive involvement.”

My reading curriculum includes letter-sound instruction. Am I providing enough phonics?

Not all phonics instruction is created equal.

The most effective phonics programs are those that are systematic. The National Reading Panel found this in 2000(12), and since then, further research reviews have confirmed that this type of instruction leads to the greatest gains in reading accuracy for young students(13).

A systematic phonics program teaches an ordered progression of letter-sound correspondences. Teachers don’t only address the letter-sound connections that students stumble over. Instead, they address all of the combinations methodically, in a sequence, moving on to the next once students demonstrate mastery. Teachers explicitly tell students what sounds correspond to what letter patterns, rather than asking students to figure it out on their own or make guesses.

In one series of experiments(14), Stanford University neuroscientist Bruce McCandliss(15) and his colleagues made up a new written language and taught three-letter words to students either by asking them to focus on letter sounds or on whole words. Later, the students took a reading test of both the words they were taught and new words in the made-up language, while an electroencephalograph monitored their brain activity. Those who had focused on letter sounds had more neural activity on the left side of the brain, which includes visual and language regions and is associated with more skilled reading. Those who had been taught to focus on whole words had more activity on the right side of the brain, which has been characteristically associated with adults and children who struggle with reading. Moreover, those who had learned letter sounds were better able to identify unfamiliar words.

Early readers benefit from systematic phonics instruction. Among students in grades K-1, phonics instruction led to improvements in decoding ability and reading comprehension across the board, according to the National Reading Panel(16). Children at risk of developing future reading problems, children with disabilities, and children from all socio-economic backgrounds all benefited. Later research reviews have confirmed that systematic phonics instruction is effective for students with disabilities, and shown that it also works for English-language learners(17).

Most studies of phonics instruction test its immediate effectiveness—after the intervention, are children better readers? Among students in older grades, the results are less clear. A recent meta-analysis of the long-term effects of reading interventions(18) looked at phonics and phonemic awareness training, mostly in studies with children in grades K-1. Both phonics and phonemic awareness interventions improved reading comprehension at an immediate post-test. But while the benefits of phonemic awareness interventions persisted in a follow-up test, the benefits of phonics interventions faded much more over time. The average length of all interventions included in the study was about 40 hours, and the follow-up assessments were conducted about a year after the interventions were complete, on average.

Some of my students didn’t need phonics instruction to learn to read. Why are you saying that all kids benefit?

Depending on the estimate(19), anywhere from 1 percent to 7 percent of children figure out how to decode words on their own, without explicit instruction. They may spot the patterns in books read to them or print they see in their environment, and then they apply these patterns. These include children with a neurotypical form of “hyperlexia”(20)—a condition in which children may begin decoding as early as 3—but this is more frequently associated with children who have autism-spectrum disorders and often have separate problems with reading comprehension.

It may seem like these children are reading words as whole units, or using guessing strategies to figure out what comes next in the story. But they are attending to all of the words’ individual letters—they’re just doing it very quickly(21).

A systematic phonics program can still benefit these students, who may have gaps in their knowledge of spelling patterns or words that they haven’t encountered yet. Of course, phonics instruction—like all teaching—can and should be differentiated to meet the needs of individual students where they are. If a student can demonstrate mastery of a sound, there’s no need to continue practicing that sound—he or she should move on to the next one.

There’s another answer to this question: Students may look like they’re decoding when they’re actually not. For example, a child may see an illustration of an apple falling from a tree, and correctly guess that the sentence below the picture describes an apple falling from a tree. This isn’t reading, and it doesn’t give the teacher useful information about how a student will tackle a book without pictures.

Can cueing strategies help students to read?

Many early reading classrooms teach students strategies to identify a word by guessing with the help of context cues. Ken and Yetta Goodman of the University of Arizona(22) developed a “three-cueing system,” based on analysis of common errors (or “miscues”) when students read aloud. Ken Goodman famously called reading development a “psycholinguistic guessing game,”(23) and cueing systems teach students to guess at a new word based on:

• Meaning/Semantics, or background knowledge and context, such as vocabulary a student has already learned;
• Structure/Syntax, or how the word fits in common grammar rules, such as whether the word’s position in a sentence suggests it is a noun, verb, or adjective; and
• Visual/Graphophonics, or what a word looks like, such as how upper- and lowercase letters are used (suggesting a proper noun, for example) or common spelling patterns.

Cueing systems are a common strategy in whole-language programs, and also are used in many “balanced literacy” programs that incorporate phonics instruction. Cueing systems were designed by analyzing errors(24) rather than practices of proficient readers, and have not shown benefits in controlled experiments(25).

Moreover, cognitive and neuroscience studies have found that guessing is a much less efficient way to identify a new word, and a mark of beginning or struggling readers, not proficient readers. Skilled readers instead sound out new words to decode them.

Balanced literacy programs often include both phonics and cueing, but studies suggest cueing instruction can make it more difficult for children to develop phonics skills because it takes their attention away from the letter sounds.

I know phonics instruction is supposed to be explicit and systematic. But beyond that, how should I teach it? Does the research say anything about what content I need to cover, and how should it be sequenced?

There is a general path that most children follow as they become skilled decoders. Research can tell us how children usually progress along this path, and which skills specifically predict better reading performance.

Before starting kindergarten, children generally develop some early phonological awareness—an understanding of the sounds that make up spoken language. They can rhyme, break down multi-syllable words, and recognize alliteration(26).

A next step in the process is understanding that graphemes—combinations of one or more letters—represent phonemes, the smallest units of spoken language. It’s easier for students to learn these letter-sound correspondences(27) if they already have early phonological skills like rhyming and alliteration, along with knowledge of the names of the letters of the alphabet.

And while vocabulary is important for reading comprehension, research has also found that it’s a component in decoding ability. One study found that when children know a word’s meaning, they can more quickly learn how to recognize it automatically(28), because the visual letters, corresponding sounds, and meaning all map together when a reader recognizes a word.

There are other early skills that relate to later reading and writing ability as well(29), regardless of IQ or socio-economic status. Among these are writing letters, remembering spoken information for a short time, rapidly naming sequences of random letters, numbers, or pictures, and other phonological skills—like the ability to segment words into phonemes.

To decode words, students need to be taught to blend together the phonemes that graphemes represent on the page. For example, a young reader must learn to recognize that /r/, /o/, /d/ are three sounds that together form the word “rod,” but also that the word “rock” also contains three sounds, /r/, /o/, /k/ This is a process that builds on itself rapidly. Though there are some 15,000 syllables in English(30), after a child has learned the 44 most common sound and letter combinations(31), they will begin to sound out words as they read. These include both the basic letter and vowel sounds, but also common combinations such as “th,” “sh,” and “-ing.” There are two main ways to demonstrate to children that words are made up of sound-letter correspondences. In one method, students learn the sounds of the letters first and then blend these phonemes together to sound out words. That’s synthetic phonics—they’re synthesizing phonemes into greater whole words. The other method, analytic phonics, takes an inverted approach: Students identify—or analyze—the phonemes within words, and then use that knowledge to read other words.

Take the word “bat.” In synthetic phonics, students would first learn the /b/ sound, then the /a/ sound, then the /t/ sound and blend them together to sound out “bat.” In analytic phonics, students would learn the word “bat” alongside words like “cat,” “mat,” and “hat,” and would be taught that all these words end in the “at” sound pattern.

So there’s synthetic phonics and analytic phonics—is one way better than the other?

A few studies have found synthetic phonics to be more effective than analytic phonics. Most notably, a seven-year longitudinal study from Scotland found that synthetic phonics taught in 1st grade gave students an advantage in reading and spelling over analytic phonics(32). Still, when examined as a whole, the larger body of reading research doesn’t surface a conclusive winner. Two landmark research reviews(33) haven’t found a significant difference in the effectiveness of the two methods. Other more recent research is still inconclusive(34).

Do these strategies apply to words that don’t follow traditional sound-spelling patterns? What about words like “one” and “friend”—can those words still be taught with phonics?

Yes, but not alone; spelling and semantic rules go hand-in-hand with teaching letter sounds. Words like “lime” and “dime,” have similar spelling and pronunciation. But some words with similar spelling have different pronunciations, like “pint” and “mint.” And others have different spellings and similar pronunciations, like “jazz” and “has.” Brain imaging studies(35) find that when readers see word pairs that are inconsistent, they show greater activity in the areas of the brain associated with processing both visual spelling and spoken words. This shows that young readers use systems of understanding of both printed shapes and sounds when they see any written word. When those two systems conflict, the reader may call on additional rules, such as understanding that words at the end of lines of a rhyming poem (such as “has” and “jazz”) likely rhyme even if their spelling would not suggest it.

Some research has found that teaching common irregular words, like “one” and “friend,” as sight words can be effective(36). Still, in these studies, children were also taught phonics along with sight words—and that’s important. Understanding phonics gives students the foundation to read these irregular words. Take “friend.” While the “ie” doesn’t produce the same sound it normally does, the other letters in the word do. Research has suggested(37) that children use the “fr” and the “nd” as a framework when they remember how to read the irregular word “friend.”

When should children start to learn how to sound out words? Is there a “too early”?

Even very young children can benefit from instruction designed to develop phonological awareness. The National Early Literacy Panel Report (2009)(38), a meta-analysis of early literacy studies, found that teaching preschoolers and kindergartners how to distinguish the sounds in words, whether orally or in relationship to print, improved their reading and writing ability. The children in these studies were generally between the ages of 3 and 5.

Studies suggest progress in phonics is less closely linked to a child’s age than to the size and complexity of his spoken vocabulary, and to his opportunities to practice and apply new phonics rules. There is some evidence(39) that “decodable” books(40), designed to help students practice specific letter-sound combinations, can benefit the earliest readers. But it is mixed, and students very quickly progress enough to get more benefit from texts that provide more complex and irregular words—and often texts that students find more interesting.

How much time should teachers spend on teaching about letters and sounds in class?

There isn’t yet a definitive “best” amount of time to spend on phonics instruction. In several meta-analyses, researchers haven’t found a direct link between program length and effectiveness(41).

The National Reading Panel report found that programs focusing on phonemic awareness, the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the smallest units of speech sounds, that lasted less than 20 hours total had the greatest effect on reading skills. Across the studies that the researchers looked at, individual sessions lasted 25 minutes on average.

But the authors of the NRP are quick to point out that these patterns are descriptive, not prescriptive. The studies they looked at weren’t specifically testing the effectiveness of different time lengths, and it may be that time wasn’t the relevant factor in these shorter programs performing better.

Eventually, a skilled reader doesn’t need to sound out every word that she reads. She sees the word and recognizes it immediately. Through reading the word again and again over time, her brain has linked this particular sequence to this word, through a process called orthographic mapping(42).

But neuroscience research has shown that even if it feels like she’s recognizing the word as a whole, she’s still attending to the sequence of individual letters in the word for an incredibly short period of time. That’s how skilled readers can tell the difference between the words “accent” and “ascent.”

What else—aside from phonics—is part of a research-based early reading program?

Phonics is essential to a research-based reading program. If students can’t decode words, they can’t derive any meaning from them. But understanding the alphabetic code doesn’t automatically make students good readers. There are five essential components of reading(43): phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

The National Reading Panel addressed all five of these components. The researchers found that having students read out loud with guidance and feedback improved reading fluency. Vocabulary instruction, both explicit and implicit, led to better reading comprehension—and it was most effective when students had multiple opportunities to see and use new words in context. They also found that teaching comprehension strategies can also lead to gains in reading achievement, though most of these studies were done with students older than 2nd grade.

For younger students, oral language skills; understanding syntax, grammar, vocabulary, and idioms; and having general and topic-specific background knowledge are also essential for reading comprehension.

This is one of the premises of the Simple View of Reading(44), a framework to understand reading first proposed by researchers Philip B. Gough and William E. Tunmer in 1986(45). In the simple view, reading comprehension is the product of decoding ability and language comprehension. If a student can’t decode, it doesn’t matter how much background knowledge and vocabulary(46) he understands—he won’t be able to understand what’s on the page. But the opposite is also true: If a student can decode but doesn’t have a deep enough understanding of oral language, he won’t be able to understand the words he can say out loud. Since Gough and Tunmer first proposed this framework, many studies have confirmed its basic structure—that comprehension and decoding are separate processes(47). One meta-analysis of reading intervention studies finds that phonics-focused interventions were most effective through grade 1; in older grades—when most students will have mastered phonics—interventions that targeted comprehension or a mix of reading skills showed bigger effects(48) on students’ reading skills.

For young students, early oral-language interventions can help set them up for success even before they start formal school.

The National Early Literacy Panel found that both reading books to young children and engaging in activities aimed at improving their language development improved their oral language skills(49).

If children don’t learn to read naturally from being exposed to reading, why are parents and teachers encouraged to read to infants and preschoolers?

The amount of time adults read with preschoolers and young children(50) does predict their reading skills in elementary school. One of the most important predictors of how well a child will learn to read is the size and quality of his spoken language and vocabulary, and children are more likely to be exposed to new words and their meanings or pick up grammar rules from reading aloud with adults.

In a series of studies in the late 1990s of 5-year-olds who had not yet learned to read, Victoria Purcell-Gates(51) found that after controlling for the income and education level of the children’s parents, children who had been read to regularly in the last two years used more “literary” language, longer phrases, and more sophisticated sentence structures. Moreover, an adult reading with a child is more likely to explain or expand on the meanings of words and concepts that the child does not already know, adding to their background knowledge.

Reading with trusted adults also helps children develop a love of reading. “The association between hearing written language and feeling loved provides the best foundation for this long process [of emergent literacy], and no cognitive scientist or educational researcher could have designed a better one,” notes cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf(52).

What about independent choice reading?

In a choice reading period—also known as sustained silent reading or Drop Everything and Read—students get to pick a book to read independently in class for a set amount of time. The premise behind this activity is that children need time to practice reading skills on their own to improve.

There is a lot of correlational research that shows that children who read more are better readers(53). But many of these studies don’t quantify how much reading students are actually doing. While they may specify a time frame—15 minutes of sustained silent reading, for example—the studies don’t report whether kids spend this time reading. That makes it difficult to know how effective choice reading actually is.

More importantly, these studies don’t provide experimental evidence—it’s not clear whether reading more is what makes students better readers, or if better readers are likely to read more. The National Reading Panel found that there wasn’t evidence that choice reading improved students’ fluency.

Does it make a difference whether children learn to read using printed books or digital ones?

In the last decade or so, access to Internet-based text has continued to expand, and schools have increasingly used digitally based books(54), particularly to support students who do not have easy access to paper books at home. Yet some emerging evidence suggests children learn to read differently in print versus digitally(55), in ways that could hinder their later comprehension.

Researchers that study eye movements find that those reading digital text are more likely to skim or read nonlinearly, looking for key words to give the gist, jump to the end to find conclusions or takeaways, and only sometimes go back to find context in the rest of the text. In a separate series of studies since 2015(56), researchers led by Anne Mangen found that students who read short stories and especially longer texts in a print format were better able to remember the plot and sequence of events than those who read the same text on a screen.

It’s not yet clear how universal these changes are, but teachers may want to keep watch on how well their students reading electronically are developing deeper reading and comprehension skills.

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• Dealing With Dyslexia: ‘It’s Almost Like It’s a Naughty Word’
• Meet the Moms on the Front Lines of the Latest Reading Wars
• Battle Over Reading: Parents of Children With Dyslexia Wage Curriculum War
• Teachers Criticize Their Colleges of Ed. for Not Preparing Them to Teach Reading
• Opinion: We Have a National Reading Crisis

1. For one early argument, see “ Why Reading Is Not a Natural Process ”.

2. For more, read “ FAQ: Language Acquisition ”.

3. “ Key to Vocabulary Gap Is Quality of Conversation, Not Dearth of Words ”

4. In this video , cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham discusses the implications of the science of reading with Education Week assistant managing editor Liana Heitin Loewus. For Willingham’s book, click here .

5. “ Cross-Cultural Effect on the Brain, Revisited ”

6. One way to see the connection between sound recognition and reading is to look at the effects of one of the most common early childhood illnesses, middle-ear infections. Studies have found children who had repeated infections before age 3 had lower reading performance in grades 1 and 2 than children without ear infections. The infections were directly related to lower phonological awareness, alliteration, and rhyme, as well as expressive language, word reading and definitions. “ The Effects of an Early History of Otitis Media on Children’s Language and Literacy Skill Development ”

7. Scholars of historic language development suggest that one of the earliest writing systems, Sumerian cuneiform, evolved from a mostly logographic system to one that used characters to represent sounds in its spoken language. See: Proust and the Squid - Maryanne Wolf . You can also see Wolf discuss the evolution of spoken versus written language in this Nature interview .

8. Hear teachers’ perspectives on phonics instruction in this video interview .

9. For the full studies, see: “ Phonemic awareness and letter knowledge in the child’s acquisition of the alphabetic principle ” and “ Acquiring the alphabetic principle: A case for teaching recognition of phoneme identity ”.

10. Keith Stanovich discusses how early differences build over time in this video interview .

11. Stanovich adapted the concept from sociologists Robert Merton and Harriet Zuckerman. The “ Matthew Effect ” has been applied to areas from law to geopolitics as a way to describe how early advantage builds on itself.

12. Overall, systematic phonics programs produced a moderate and statistically significant effect size, d=0.44. The report concluded that these findings suggest systematic phonics programs have a greater positive effect than other programs that provide unsystematic phonics, or no phonics. See “ National Reading Panel, Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction, Reports of the Subgroups .”

13. This 2006 review found that systematic phonics instruction had a moderate and statistically significant effect on reading accuracy. The review didn’t find that phonics had a statistically significant effect on reading comprehension, but the authors note that this finding was based on weak evidence–only four randomized controlled trials that examined comprehension were included. “ A systematic review of the research literature on the use of phonics in the teaching of reading and spelling ”. This Australian review of reading research determined systematic phonics instruction to be an essential component of reading instruction, as part of a program that explicitly teaches phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

14. “ Hemispheric Specialization for Visual Words Is Shaped by Attention to Sublexical Units During Initial Learning .” For a broader discussion of the experiments, see: Brain wave study shows how different teaching methods affect reading development.

15. In a Stanford University lecture, Bruce McCandliss explained how different kinds of neural activity relate to reading .

16. “ National Reading Panel, Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction, Reports of the Subgroups ”

17. Effectiveness of Treatment Approaches for Children and Adolescents with Reading Disabilities: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials The review found that phonics instruction had a small but statistically significant effect on reading performance across the studies in children and adolescents. Studies in children with mild reading disabilities had a greater effect than studies in children with moderate and severe reading disabilities. Developing Literacy in Second-Language Learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth English-language learners need the well-rounded reading instruction that their native English speaking peers do–instruction that integrates phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Still, within phonemic awareness, it may be most effective to give students more work with phonemes that appear in English, but not in their native language. Oral language development in English is also especially important for ELLs.

18. A Meta-Analysis of the Long-Term Effects of Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, and Reading Comprehension Interventions .

19. “ Precocious Readers: Past, Present, and Future ,” “ Early Literacy Development and Instruction: An Overview ,” “ Precocious Readers: Case Studies of Spontaneous Learning, Self-Regulation and Social Support in the Early Years ”

20. “ Hyperlexia: Systematic Review, Neurocognitive Modelling, and Outcome .”

21. Research has shown that when young readers know words on sight, it’s because they recognize the sound-letter patterns in those words–not because they’ve stored the words in their visual memory. See: “ Phonological and semantic processes influence beginning readers’ ability to learn to read words ,” Phonological recoding and orthographic learning: A direct test of the self-teaching hypothesis.

22. Kenneth and Yetta Goodman Collection 1953-2015 Goodman, (Kenneth S., Yetta M.) Collection.

23. “ Reading: A Psycholinguistic Guessing Game ”.

24. “ What I Know About Reading, I’ve Learned From Children ”

25. This is laid out in several reports, including “ Phonics and Early Reading: An Overview for Headteachers, Literacy Leaders and Teachers in Schools, and Managers and Practitioners in Early Years Settings, ” “ Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert ,” and “ Meeting the Challenges of Early Literacy Phonics Instruction .“

26. “ Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties, David A. Kilpatrick ” (book).

27. “ Letter names and phonological awareness help children to learn letter–sound relations .” “ Acquisition of literacy: A longitudinal study of children in first and second grade. ” “ The contributions of phonological awareness and letter-name knowledge to letter-sound acquisition—a cross-classified multilevel model approach .”

28. The Role of Children’s Phonological and Semantic Knowledge in Learning to Read Words

29. “ Developing Early Literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel ”

30. Psycholinguistics expert Mark Seidenberg estimates the English language has as many as 15,000 syllables. See his book: “ Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, And What Can Be Done About It. ”

31. You can hear pronunciations of the most common English phonemes here .

32. For the Scotland study, see “ The Effects of Synthetic Phonics Teaching on Reading and Spelling Attainment: A Seven Year Longitudinal Study .” The British government also commissioned a review of the research in teaching early reading, published in 2006, that suggested synthetic phonics was more effective. This recommendation was made based on observations of classroom practice, though, not experimental research. For this review, see “ Independent review of the teaching of early reading .”

33. Both the National Reading Panel and a 2006 reading review didn’t find a significant difference between the two methods. “ A Systematic Review of the Research Literature on the Use of Phonics in the Teaching of Reading and Spelling ,” “ National Reading Panel, Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction, Reports of the Subgroups ”

34. “ Effective Word Reading Instruction: What Does the Evidence Tell Us? ” This 2017 review of recent research comparing analytic and synthetic phonics found that both methods were effective for teaching young and struggling readers.

35. “ The Interaction Between Orthographic and Phonological Information in Children: An fMRI Study ”

36. “ Differing Effects of Two Synthetic Phonics Programmes on Early Reading Development ” In this study, two groups of early elementary school students were taught with different programs: One was taught multiple letter-sound correspondences, and the other was taught the most consistent letter-sound patterns along with sight words. Overall, the two programs were equally effective, and for both groups of students, phonological awareness was significantly related to reading ability. But within the program that only taught letter-sound patterns, there was a closer link between phonological awareness and ability to read words that broke traditional phonemic rules. On the other hand, children who had less phonological awareness when they started school improved more in reading under the program that also taught sight words.

37. “ Learning to Read Words: Theory, Findings, and Issues ” In this 2005 paper, reading researcher Linnea Ehri theorized that this is how children remember irregular words. Research studies, conducted both before and after this paper was released, lend support to this framework. For example, see “ Phonology constrains the internal orthographic representation .” In these experiments, subjects were more likely to judge incorrectly spelled words as correct if they had been repeatedly exposed to the incorrect spellings. Other research has shown that young children who have not yet developed phonemic awareness can use letter names to make sense of words. For example, see “ Young Children’s Ability to Read and Spell Their Own and Classmates’ Names: The Role of Letter Knowledge ,” and “ Letter names help children to connect print and speech. ”

38. “ Developing Early Literacy: A Report of the National Early Literacy Panel. ”

39. “ A Comparison of Children Aged 4–5 Years Learning to Read Through Instructional Texts Containing Either a High or a Low Proportion of Phonically-Decodable Words .” For a discussion of research on decodable books, see: “ Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert. ”

40. For an interesting discussion of the pros and cons of decodable text, see: “ Should We Teach with Decodable Text? ”

41. “ Why What We Teach Depends on When: Grade and Reading Intervention Modality Moderate Effect Size ”, “ A Meta-Analysis of the Long-Term Effects of Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, and Reading Comprehension Interventions ”, “ National Reading Panel, Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction, Reports of the Subgroups ”

42. Orthographic mapping is why we can recognize words on sight. In this process, a reader anchors the written sequence of letters that make up a word to the pronunciation and definition that she knows for that word. Eventually, she doesn’t need to actively decode the word anymore–she automatically recognizes the letter-sound patterns and knows that they represent the word in her vocabulary. This happens over time, as the reader is exposed repeatedly to words that he or she can decode and comprehend. To do this, readers need a well-developed oral vocabulary and strong phonemic awareness skills. Empirical evidence for this process was first found by Linnea Ehri, an educational psychologist at Graduate Center of the City University of New York. See: “ Movement into Reading: Is the First Stage of Printed Word Learning Visual or Phonetic? ” For a review of the research, see: “ Orthographic Mapping Facilitates Sight Word Memory and Vocabulary Learning, in Reading Development and Difficulties. ”

43. Later, the National Early Literacy Panel added to this, noting six skills that predicted later reading skills even after accounting for a child’s IQ or other background information:

• alphabet knowledge, or understanding names and sounds associated with specific written letters;
• phonological awareness, the ability to understand auditory aspects of speech independent of its meaning, including distinguishing individual syllables or phonemes;
• rapid automatic naming (RAN) of a random series of numbers or letters;
• RAN of a series of pictures of colors or objects;
• Naming, the ability to write individual spoken letters or to write one’s name; and
• Phonological memory, or the ability to recall spoken information after a brief period of time.

“ Developing Early Literacy: A Report of the National Early Literacy Panel ”

44. “ The Simple View of Reading ”

45. Decoding, Reading, and Reading Disability - Philip B. Gough, William E. Tunmer, 1986 — SAGE Journals

46. Vocabulary does not complicate the simple view of reading

47. “ Language deficits in poor comprehenders: a case for the simple view of reading "; “ Should the Simple View of Reading Include a Fluency Component? "; “ Vocabulary Does Not Complicate the Simple View of Reading ”. Other research suggests that there are additional factors that influence students’ reading comprehension abilities, such as their ability to pay attention to specific tasks. See: Attentional control and the Simple View of reading

48. Why what we teach depends on when: grade and reading intervention modality moderate effect size.

49. “Developing Early Literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel,”

50. Based on a meta-analysis of interventions the National Early Literacy Panel found shared reading significantly improved young children’s spoken language skills and print knowledge. To put the effects in context, the panel noted that if average children who were not read to would have scored a 100 on a test of oral language, the children who were read to would have performed 11 points higher. “ Developing Early Literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel ”

51. “Parents as Literacy Brokers” in “The Routledge International Handbook of Early Literacy Education”

52. Proust and the Squid - Maryanne Wolf

53. “ Growth in Reading and How Children Spend Their Time Outside of School. ” Teaching for Literacy Engagement - John T. Guthrie, 2004 For a review, see “ Independent Reading and School Achievement. ” Some other correlational research has suggested that guided independent reading, with some intervention or direction from the teacher, has a positive effect on comprehension. See “ Does Practice Make Perfect? Independent Reading Quantity, Quality and Student Achievement. ”

54. The effects of digital storybooks seem to depend on specific aspects. One analysis of 43 studies found that multimedia elements such as animated pictures or sound effects improved comprehension. Yet interactive elements, such as built-in games or pop-ups for dictionaries or additional information, distracted students and hurt comprehension. “ Benefits and Pitfalls of Multimedia and Interactive Features in Technology-Enhanced Storybooks: A Meta-Analysis ”

55. Reader, Come Home - Maryanne Wolf

56. “ The evolution of reading in the age of digitisation: an integrative framework for reading research ” “ The Digitization of Literary Reading — Wiley Online Library ” “ Comparing Comprehension of a Long Text Read in Print Book and on Kindle: Where in the Text and When in the Story? ”

Further Reading Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert Learning to Read: What We Know and What We Need to Understand Better Development of Sight Word Reading: Phases and Findings Developing Early Literacy Skills: A Meta-Analysis of Alphabet Learning and Instruction Discovering the Literacy Gap: A Systematic Review of Reading and Writing Theories in Research What Reading Does for the Mind What Research Tells Us About Reading Instruction Neuroscience, Learning, and Educational Practice: Challenges, Promises, and Applications Does Dyslexia Exist? Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade

How to Cite This Article Schwartz, Sarah and Sparks, Sarah D. (2019, October 2). How Do Kids Learn to Read? What the Science Says. Education Week. Retrieved Month Day, Year from https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/how-do-kids-learn-to-read-what-the-science-says/2019/10

An alternative version of this article was published in the December 4, 2019 edition of Education Week. A version of this article appeared in the December 04, 2019 edition of Education Week as How Do Kids Learn to Read?

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Remarkably Simple Ways to Teach Students to Read

Home » Subject Areas » ELA/ ELL Teachers » Remarkably Simple Ways to Teach Students to Read

• By Vicki Davis
• September 2, 2024
• Subscribe to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast

Listen to Pam Allyn, a renowned literacy expert and author of influential books such as Every Child a Super Reader, shares her unique insights on how teachers can foster a love of reading in their students. She not only defines the Science of Reading movement but also addresses concerns from critics who fear it might diminish the role of skilled teachers.

Pam discusses common mistakes in how many students are taught reading and shares practical strategies for teachers to improve reading instructional methods. Whether you're a veteran educator, parent, or new to teaching, this episode is packed with practical advice and strategies to help you inspire your students to become lifelong readers.

Questions Answered in this Episode

• What is the science of reading movement, and how does it benefit students?
• How can teachers balance phonics instruction and fostering a love of reading?
• What common mistakes do schools make when teaching reading, and how can they be avoided?
• How can teachers integrate writing into their reading instruction to enhance literacy?
• What practical strategies can teachers implement to make phonics and fluency instruction more engaging for students?

• Stream by clicking here .

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This week's guest.

Pam Allyn, literacy expert and author

Pam Allyn is the founder and CEO of Dewey , a pioneering learning platform built to fuel the wellbeing of families and their caregivers at the powerful intersections of home, work and learning.

She is a leading literacy expert, author, activist and advocate for children, and a motivational speaker. She founded LitLife to bring quality professional learning to teachers across the United States. She created LitWorld , a groundbreaking global literacy movement serving children across the United States and in more than 60 countries, and led her team to create the widely scaled LitCamp and World Read Aloud Day programs. Her pioneering idea to partner with women-led grassroots organizations working on behalf of their community's children was the foundation of LitWorld and has also been widely replicated. Pam has served as the Senior Vice President for Innovation and Development at Scholastic Education , and continues to contribute as a senior advisor across the company.

Pam is the author of 26 books for educators, leaders and families on reading, writing, and learning. Her most recent book is Every Child a Super Reader, co-authored with Dr. Ernest Morrell. Books for parents and caregivers include Your Child’s Writing Life, Mom's Choice Gold Award Winner; What To Read When; and Pam Allyn’s Best Books for Boys.

Pam has received many honors for her educational leadership achievements including The Children's Village Legacy of Service Award and the Kent Williamson Exemplary Leadership Award. She was a finalist for the Brock Prize in Education Innovation. Pam is a Kellogg Foundation Fellow Alumni in Racial Equity and Healing and a Bush Foundation Fellow for Women's Leadership. Pam received the Teachers College Columbia University Distinguished Alumni Award in 2017.

She has keynoted many conferences and led workshops, seminars and trainings across the country and around the world on subjects including social emotional learning, educational equity, literacy, the power of reading, children's own stories, learning standards, motivational strategies to reach all children, and more. A proud mother to her own two daughters, Pam is continuously inspired by them and by all the many children and young adults she meets and works with around the world.

🎙️ Show Notes

• How to Help Struggling Readers in Grades 6-12 with Pam Allyn – Episode 787
• Learn more about Pam Allyn’s work and her book Every Child a Super Reader.
• Discover the impact of illiteracy from the World Literacy Foundation's report .
• Access free, interactive digital lessons aligned with state standards at EVERFI's website .
• Explore Pam Allyn’s literacy initiatives at LitWorld and Dewey Lit Life .

Topics and Time Stamps

00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:05 EVERFI – Show Sponsor 00:00:54 Guest Introduction: Pam Allen 00:01:08 Pam Allen on the Joy of Teaching Reading 00:02:07 Importance of Literacy in Society 00:02:52 Defining the Science of Reading Movement 00:05:24 Critics of the Science of Reading Movement 00:07:00 The Role of Teachers in Reading Instruction 00:09:31 Common Mistakes in Teaching Reading 00:12:06 The Interrelation of Reading and Writing 00:13:38 Practical Tips for Teachers: Phonics, Fluency, and Vocabulary 00:16:06 Closing Remarks and Resources

📝 Transcript

I used AI  in Adobe Premiere Pro to transcribe this episode and proofread it. If you see mistakes, just contact me and let me know. YouTube auto transcripts are not previewed. Thank you!

00:00:00:00 – 00:00:05:15 Vicki Davis Remarkably simple ways to teach students to read, episode 861.

00:00:05:19 – 00:00:09:06 John, Producer This is the Ten Minute Teacher podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

00:00:09:07 – 00:00:54:18 Vicki Davis Thank you EVERFI for sponsoring today's episode. Learn about these free resources that will give your students a head start and will save you valuable planning time. I'll tell you more at the end of the show, or you can go to everythi.com/coolcat to learn more.

Our guest today is Pam Allen. She's a leading advocate for children's literacy and author of many books, including Every Child A Super Reader for episode 757 about how to help struggling readers who are a little bit older, is one of our most popular episodes of all time, so we have brought her back to talk about insights on teaching reading.

00:00:54:18 – 00:01:08:13 Vicki Davis The goal of this interview that Pam and I have is to equip you with practical strategies to improve your reading instruction methods. So first, Pam, what do you love about teaching reading? Because it is obvious that you love.

00:01:08:13 – 00:01:27:23 Pam Allyn Teaching, and that's the best question of all time. My favorite, favorite thing about teaching reading is that any question I'm giving something to that child they're going to take with them for the rest of their lives. It's no question to me, no matter what happens in terms of the evolving technologies that we have or anything that comes next.

00:01:27:23 – 00:01:49:03 Pam Allyn Reading is something that just evolves along a humankinds greatest innovation kind of thing. So I know that no matter what happens, I'm giving them something great. The second thing is I love about it is it's a way for me to see within that child. It is a way for me to instantly understand and the sort of spirit that they're bringing with them to the classroom.

00:01:49:05 – 00:02:07:04 Pam Allyn Some funny aspects of their personalities, the ways they interact with the world, their worries and concerns and fears. Reading with them, reading to them, helping them to manage their own reading experience just brings themselves out into the classroom. And those are the things I most love about teaching reading.

00:02:07:07 – 00:02:29:23 Vicki Davis Well, if you look at the statistics, the World Literacy Foundation, in a September 2015 report, shared the cost of illiteracy and reported that most people who are illiterate are trapped in poverty. They have limited opportunities for employment, higher chances of poor health, a higher chance of turning to crime, and a higher chance of dependent on social welfare. So this is a strategic issue.

00:02:29:23 – 00:02:52:14 Vicki Davis And with artificial intelligence, if you look at how it works, we use text to generate text to generate music to generate all these things like literacy, reading literacy and writing. Literacy unlocks everything. So, Pam, you are in the science of reading movement. Could you define the movement for us?

00:02:52:14 – 00:03:21:10 Pam Allyn Please feel like the word science is powerful for us because we can see that learning to read, learning literacy is actually something cognitively that's happening to you. So the science of reading movement is really embracing that and saying, let's look at what's happening cognitively also psychologically. But a lot of really interesting things happening. So we want to make sure that we touch base on all of those things, whether it's phonological awareness, phonics itself, fluency, vocabulary comprehension.

00:03:21:11 – 00:03:40:04 Pam Allyn That's the kind of overall definition of the science of reading. It's not one of those things, but it's how all of those things are interacting with the human brain, especially in the child's brain as the child is growing. That ring actually needs that literacy food. And the way I see the science of reading movement is we're feeding children.

00:03:40:04 – 00:04:02:19 Pam Allyn We're feeding them all the resources of literacy they need. So yes, they are making that sound to letter correspondence, but also in that scientific look at the human brain, we're seeing how fluency plays a part, how children are learning to read smoothly, efficiently, quickly, even, and then comprehension. What are they understanding? How is meaning taking root in the child's understanding of things?

00:04:02:19 – 00:04:36:07 Pam Allyn Background knowledge is really important, but also foreground knowledge is really important to that idea that we're going to provide them with new knowledge, that's going to help them understand and give a context to what they're reading. So the science of reading movement is one thing, is, yes, about bringing back really good decoding work around phonics. That really muscular work that we're really attaching sounds to letters to corresponding meaning that those sounds are bringing to us, and the look of those letters on the page or the screen, but also that we're embedding all that sound letter work in real understanding, real meaning work.

00:04:36:07 – 00:04:59:16 Pam Allyn I'm excited because the work I'm doing now with my team is in building up a really great opportunity for children to learn phonological and phonemic work that they're doing embedded in meaning. So it's not just random sounds and letters, it's actually let's really create stories and make stories and read stories that are full and rich with meaning and playful, imaginative universes.

00:04:59:16 – 00:05:24:08 Pam Allyn I'm writing a series of books right now called Palace Town, and those books are a science of reading oriented. But what I'm trying to do and to say to teachers is, let's actually give children meaning. These stories, we don't need to throw meaning out with phonics. Phonics should go alongside meaning, and I think that's really the intention of the science of reading movement is to make it a joyful world for children, of which they have every tool they need.

00:05:24:09 – 00:05:43:18 Vicki Davis How do you respond to the critics of the Science of reading movement? I mean, there's some information out there. I'm sure you've read it to say that this movement could lead to an overreliance on scripted programs and computer based instruction instead of the talented, skilled teachers who are so good at teaching reading. Do you feel like that has merit?

00:05:43:20 – 00:06:13:06 Pam Allyn I would be devastated if that were to happen. I think more than ever before. We need two things. We need great teachers who really know what they're doing and are highly skilled and trained as teachers of reading and writing. I think that professional development is more important than ever before, not just a rote professional development, really. Having teachers do inquiry around this work and become confident in terms of what the aspects of the science of reading at work is.

00:06:13:09 – 00:06:36:20 Pam Allyn But then the second thing is, I think that, you know, children more than ever, we saw this during the Covid era. They were on screens way too much. We saw that when they came back into school. They there are lots of rising incidences of of anxiety and school phobia and children not showing up at school. The sheer importance of relationship building that teachers do is it's just profound.

00:06:36:20 – 00:07:00:23 Pam Allyn And I think especially around literacy, I think that the idea that we're going to lose read aloud or we're going to lose that opportunity for a teacher to sit side by side with a child and to be the first to introduce them to the magic of unlocking text. And what that means when you first realize that a page of words in the screen of words has meaning, and you're doing that alongside a caring, mentoring adult, we cannot lose that.

00:07:00:23 – 00:07:22:14 Pam Allyn That's so important not to lose that. You spoke about some of the statistics. My most concerning statistic right now is the rising rate of chronic absenteeism across the country, across all socioeconomic groups. I think that's because we have to recommit to children that we're not just about screens in school. Otherwise children think they go to school and they're they could do that at home.

00:07:22:14 – 00:07:45:00 Pam Allyn Why do they need to go to school? Why they come to school. They love their teacher. They love their friends. They want to be in a social environment around learning to read and write. There's a great story. I read yesterday about a teacher who had promised his students that if he were still around 50 years from now, he wanted them to come back and and be part of the solar eclipse with them.

00:07:45:00 – 00:08:07:09 Pam Allyn So he put out a call. All these years later, you've long retired, and his students all came back for that solar eclipse, and with him in person, in person, they came back over a hundred of them. But that that is a great example of why the human interaction with literacy, a human, the human soul of of literacy is absolutely vital in this technology era.

00:08:07:09 – 00:08:14:15 Pam Allyn And we cannot ever believe that screens are going to replace that relational work that we do with our students.

00:08:14:17 – 00:08:43:09 Vicki Davis And as someone who was taught phonics back, and I'm dating myself back in the 70s, our curriculum was heavily phonics. I love reading. I read a book a week now, still. I would, rather than anything else. I have my memories of Miss Temples helping us sound out all of the letters and all of the attention she gave me as an individual human being, and snuggling up with mom and dad and reading those books.

00:08:43:09 – 00:08:53:00 Vicki Davis And I can't imagine it's so personal that teachers would be more needed than ever. Great teachers, are really something that can't be replaced.

00:08:53:01 – 00:09:11:14 Pam Allyn I love that you said that. Whether we're stretching the sounds of words on a or we're just admiring the beauty of an elegant sentence, everybody who remembers something about literacy in their childhood remembers doing it with somebody. And then you can go on and be independent. But what you're saying is very profound.

00:09:11:16 – 00:09:31:08 Vicki Davis Well, and falling in love with language, you know, when you see a sentence and you just like, oh, you know, I want my students to have that, even though I teach computers, science, beautiful words are are majestic and they make the world a better place. So we could talk about this forever, but we need to talk about the common mistakes schools make when teaching reading.

00:09:31:08 – 00:09:45:03 Vicki Davis So I want you to think back, and I want you to tell me about the day that you realized some mistakes were being made when teaching reading to scribe that moment, and what were the mistakes that you observed?

00:09:45:05 – 00:10:06:07 Pam Allyn Well, I think maybe, you know, one of the most common mistakes, which, I hope everyone will take into account, right, in these changing times, if there is no such thing as the teaching of reading, that's just about phonics. That's just about comprehension. It's actually both of those things that have to go hand in hand, I think, where we make the mistake.

00:10:06:07 – 00:10:26:02 Pam Allyn But when we're looking at out into that sea of our students and we say all of them today need this help on this, just this one thing, if I can just do this one thing today, all will be well. And I realized this too. In my first year, I was teaching deaf students in Brooklyn at Saint Francis Israel School for the deaf, still an amazing school.

00:10:26:02 – 00:10:43:06 Pam Allyn And I looked out to my students and I thought, I'm going to do it all this way. And then, you know, they taught me differently that they each need something different. And there are some best practices. I'm going to teach them the best practices of the teaching of reading. But each and every day I've got to sit down with each of them one at a time.

00:10:43:11 – 00:11:05:03 Pam Allyn I've got to be able to see each of them as their own self, as their own independent reader. So I think it's both not seeing reading as one narrow path and also seeing our students as not one vast group, but they are each so individual, and something is going to ignite their love for reading by us, sitting beside them and saying, what's something you're passionate about?

00:11:05:03 – 00:11:26:00 Pam Allyn A little grandson right now he's really into dinosaurs, so we're just taking out every single book at the library on dinosaurs. There is. But I need to be vigilant because in another few months you might develop some other new interests. And I think that's what we need to do as teachers, too. I think we we make the mistake sometimes of thinking one size fits all, and that's never, ever going to be fully the case.

00:11:26:00 – 00:11:43:10 Pam Allyn I think there are some best practices we can teach our students how to use phonics to drive their understanding and, turn that key into the world of reading can help them use comprehension. It can help them use fluency. How to read smoothly. But at the end of the day, I think we want to know who they are to.

00:11:43:10 – 00:12:06:10 Pam Allyn And then there's one last thing I'll say about mistakes we make. And that is when we see reading instruction as only reading as breathing in, we only have want them to take in what we're giving them. There's also writing. Writing is part of that too. I'm a big fan of the teaching of writing. In my new program, Palestine, I'm talking a lot about the teaching of writing because students become very passive if all they're doing is reading.

00:12:06:12 – 00:12:25:12 Pam Allyn The other component of literacy is writing. So to ask and invite teachers to wonder, where does writing fit in to my reading program? That's a big mistake. I think we have all made in the past is to ignore writing, or to marginalize it, or to put it to the side. But reading is breathing in. Writing is breathing out.

00:12:25:14 – 00:12:38:20 Vicki Davis Love it. And they're so interrelated. Let's talk practical idea is and you've already given some very practical things, but what can teachers do right now in their classrooms relating to the teaching of instruction, looking.

00:12:38:20 – 00:13:09:10 Pam Allyn At phonological, phonemic, and phonics in that kind of context is to remember to be joyful and playful with that, because we do get a little over done with the kind of, you know, procedural work of the teaching of reading. But all of that is such fun work. It's very sound based. It's playful and joyful at its essence. So remembering that singing, game playing, the work of stretching sounds to make meaning on the page.

00:13:09:10 – 00:13:38:17 Pam Allyn Children love doing those things. They love rhyming. They love singing, they love chanting, they love writing and drawing. And all of that is phonics work. I'm talking about older students to older, struggling students that you and I have talked about these students before. They can't miss that. So if they're if you're a middle school teacher listening today, please be playful and joyful with the work of phonics instruction because it is really playful and joyful.

00:13:38:17 – 00:13:58:23 Pam Allyn So that's that's one. The second thing is when we talk about fluency and that idea of reading smoothly and reading quickly, don't be afraid to actually talk about those things with your students. I do talk with my students about speed reading. There's nothing wrong with actually being a little competitive about that, and actually having an opportunity for your students to see that.

00:13:59:03 – 00:14:25:14 Pam Allyn Just like practicing sports, you know, you you we go out and we for playing soccer basketball. We want to be speedy. We want to be fast. So that too, I think we're talking about fluency is giving students text to practice with, in which they can practice reading steadily with expression is actually really fun. And that's another thing. Another piece of advice that I would give around vocabulary, which is a big part of the science of reading, is how we absorb vocab.

00:14:25:14 – 00:15:00:02 Pam Allyn Woolery is for teachers to use authentic text to actually call out words that students are observing and seeing in the magic of writers who know what they're doing, whether it's E.B. White or Langston Hughes or or Sharon Creech or or just any Carmen Audra Didi, these writers are amazing, amazing. They're like vocabulary geniuses. So really call out those words, have students keep index cards by their side and say, you know, when you're in your independent reading today and you come upon a word that's just magnificent to you, you might not even know what it means yet.

00:15:00:03 – 00:15:21:04 Pam Allyn Let's hang those up. Or let's keep Google drives of those amazing words. But again, making vocabulary, not just something that they have to memorize and practice, but also that they see in their own authentic, independent reading. And then finally, this is the heart of the science of reading. Pedagogy is phonemic awareness. Phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and then finally comprehension.

00:15:21:10 – 00:15:42:02 Pam Allyn A tip that I have for comprehension is when we're really looking at to think about what we understand as readers, there's I would invite teachers to put back curiosity into your comprehension work, because if everything is just us telling students what they ought to comprehend, that does, by the way, get very boring after a while for our students.

00:15:42:07 – 00:15:43:22 Pam Allyn So bring back curiosity.

00:15:43:22 – 00:16:06:05 Vicki Davis Well, readers are leaders, and leaders are readers, and it's an essential part of of excellence and being successful in the world. Follow Pam Allen. She is author, founder of Dewy Lit Life and Lit World. She has many, many books and is such a great resource to help all of us help all of our students home. Better readers, thanks for coming on the show, Pam.

00:16:06:10 – 00:16:38:10 Vicki Davis Do you want to equip your students for success in their careers and person lives, but you just don't know where to start? I'm going to tell you today about an awesome free opportunity. You have to do just that for all grades K through 12. Everybody has your go to solution. It aligns with state standards in his earn the prestigious Estee Seal ever devised digital lessons are crafted to empower your students to excel in our dynamic world.

00:16:38:10 – 00:17:15:15 Vicki Davis The lessons are interactive, self-paced, and designed by content experts. They have courses such as Financial Literacy, Workforce readiness, character building, mental Health and Prevention education for all grade levels. And thanks to everybody's generous partners, these research based resources come at no cost to all K-12 schools, districts and students. So visit phi.com/cool cat. That's ev e rfi.com/cool cat. And get started today on these amazing lessons for free.

00:17:15:17 – 00:17:28:04 John, Producer You've been listening to the ten Minute Teacher podcast. If you want more content from Vicki Davis, you can find her on Facebook, X-Com TikTok threads, Instagram Blue Sky and YouTube at coolcat. Teacher, thank you for listening.

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Vicki Davis

Vicki Davis is a full-time classroom teacher and IT Director in Georgia, USA. She is Mom of three, wife of one, and loves talking about the wise, transformational use of technology for teaching and doing good in the world. She hosts the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast which interviews teachers around the world about remarkable classroom practices to inspire and help teachers. Vicki focuses on what unites us -- a quest for truly remarkable life-changing teaching and learning. The goal of her work is to provide actionable, encouraging, relevant ideas for teachers that are grounded in the truth and shared with love. Vicki has been teaching since 2002 and blogging since 2005. Vicki has spoken around the world to inspire and help teachers reach their students. She is passionate about helping every child find purpose, passion, and meaning in life with a lifelong commitment to the joy and responsibility of learning. If you talk to Vicki for very long, she will encourage you to "Relate to Educate" or "innovate like a turtle" or to be "a remarkable teacher." She loves to talk to teachers who love their students and are trying to do their best. Twitter is her favorite place to share and she loves to make homemade sourdough bread and cinnamon rolls and enjoys running half marathons with her sisters. You can usually find her laughing with her students or digging into a book.

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• CAREER GUIDE
• 04 September 2024

Guide, don’t hide: reprogramming learning in the wake of AI

• Monique Brouillette 0

Monique Brouillette is a science journalist in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Christiane Reves, who lectures in German, helped to develop an AI program called Language Buddy that simulates human conversation. Credit: Meghan Finnerty, Arizona State University

In the early days of generative artificial intelligence (AI), Ethan Mollick told his students to use it freely as long as they disclosed it. According to Mollick, a specialist in innovation and entrepreneurship at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, “it worked great when ChatGPT-3.5 was the best model out there”. The program was good, but did not replace students’ input and they still had to edit and tweak its responses to earn a high grade in Mollick’s course. Things changed with the release of ChatGPT-4, the latest version of the chatbot developed by the US tech firm OpenAI. The new AI was noticeably smarter, and it became much harder to distinguish its output from that of a person’s. Suddenly, the program was outperforming students in Mollick’s classes and he knew he had to rethink his approach.

Nature Career Guide: Faculty

Today, academia faces a dilemma as AI reshapes the world beyond the campus walls: embrace the technology or risk being left in the dust. However, as versions of the software become more robust, so does the risk of cheating. According to a 2023 -survey, roughly 50% of students over the age of 18 have admitted to using ChatGPT for an at-home test or quiz or to write an essay (see go.nature.com/4fpwrtv ).

Educators today have two options, says Mollick. The first is to treat AI as cheating and intensify conventional measures such as in-class writing assignments, essays and hands-on work to demonstrate students’ mastery of the material. “We solved this problem in math in the 1970s with calculators,” he says. “If cheating is the thing you are worried about, we can just double down on what’s always worked.” The second option, which he terms “transformation”, involves actively using AI as an educational tool.

Lesson logics

The transformative approach is gaining traction on campuses. Innovative educators in various fields, including computer science, literature, business and the arts, are now exploring how AI can enhance learning experiences and prepare students for a technology-driven future. One area in which AI tools have shown particular promise is languages.

“One of the main things you need to learn languages is communication,” says Christiane Reves, who teaches German at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe. “‘You need to talk to people and have actual interactions.”

In 2024, Reves decided to build an AI tool to meet this need. Through a collaboration between ASU and OpenAI, she developed an AI program called Language Buddy that simulates human conversation. Students interact with the AI just as they would with a real partner — using it to practise everyday interactions, such as ordering a meal at a restaurant, in spoken German.

If the conversation is too advanced, the student can adjust its complexity. Reves offers the tool for her beginner-level German course. She says it helps students to sidestep the natural anxiety that comes with trying to talk in a foreign language, which is a barrier to people getting the practice they need. Overall, she has been pleased with its performance. “It’s not robotic; it doesn’t just repeat sentences, and it creates a conversation. So you never really know what the next sentence is, which is the natural way,” she says.

The arrival of ChatGPT-4 has made it harder to separate the tool’s output from a real person’s. Credit: Stanislav Kogiku/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty

Suguru Ishizaki, an English specialist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, uses AI tools to teach new ways of writing. He has spent his career studying the challenges of becoming an effective writer and has now developed a tool to aid the process. Ishizaki says the problem is that inexperienced writers spend too long trying to craft nicely written sentences, which slows the process of getting their ideas onto the page. By contrast, expert writers and authors spend most of their time thinking, planning and preparing their ideas before hammering out prose on the keyboard. The “cognitive load of sentence craft” creates a hindrance to novice writers, which is where AI can help.

David Kaufer, a colleague of Ishizaki’s at Carnegie Mellon, agrees: “In the early writing process, you shouldn’t be worried about polishing. You should be worried about prototyping your ideas. What you need is a quick scribe to get these things down.”

In 2024, Ishizaki and Kaufer released myProse , an AI-powered tool that helps students to focus on their big ideas while AI handles the mechanics, transforming a student’s notes into grammatically correct, smoothly written sentences. They added ‘guardrails’ to ensure that the only information used by the tool used to create prose is generated from students’ notes, and not from its training data, which is taken from the Internet.

Kaufer says that he doesn’t want AI getting in the way of student creativity. AI should be “an attention tool that simply allows the student to attend to the most important things”, he says — namely, the ideas. By letting myProse finesse the sentence structure and produce drafts “efficiently and professionally”, students have more room to nurture their ideas.

He adds that the course is offered to upper-level undergraduates who already have an understanding of sentence crafting and grammar. It is not meant to be a replacement for learning how to write or practising creative writing, and it will be geared towards technical and professional writing. “Our goal is to preserve English departments and writing instruction,” says Kaufer. “AI cannot get in the way of that, but at the same time it is here to stay.”

Changing minds

Despite the exuberance among early adopters of AI, there is still much resistance among faculty members and students. Lecturers need to stay up to date with AI’s new capabilities and adopt it in an iterative way to encourage familiarity with the technology while maintaining the educational experience.

In his classroom, Mollick focuses on assigning projects to challenge students beyond the current capabilities of AI. In one example, he asked students to do things that AI struggles to do, such as building and testing a board game. He also asks students to reflect on how they’ve used ChatGPT, and what they’ve learnt from it, to gauge their thinking process. In another class, he created a tool that simulates job-interview scenarios for his students to get practice. He requires them to turn in the transcript and write a reflection on the exercise. He also assigns oral presentations with question-and-answer sessions designed to assess students’ knowledge and communication skills.

David Malan gave his AI tool ‘guardrails’ to guide students without giving away too much. Credit: Leroy Zhang/CS50

The challenge, according to Mollick, is that the technology advances and adds new capabilities rapidly, and students are adopting it quickly. Educators cannot simply use AI as an add-on to their courses, he says. Instead, they will have to overhaul their curriculum regularly to keep up with the technology. “We will have to do what we do terribly as academics, which is coordinate and move quickly in teaching,” he says. He urges teachers to share and collaborate with each other to maintain up-to-date teaching tools.

David Malan, a computer scientist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, recognizes AI’s immense potential to boost productivity, but thinks it is too powerful for the university setting. In his introductory-level coding course that he uses at Harvard, Malan prohibits the use of general AI tools until the end of the course. Instead, he developed his own tool, which offers a more nuanced approach to AI integration in education.

“We set out to make ChatGPT less useful for students, in the sense of providing them with a specific chat tool that still answers their questions but does not provide them with outright answers to problems, or solutions to homework assignments,” says Malan.

To achieve this balance, Malan and his team applied what he calls “pedagogical guardrails” to the AI, designing his tool to nudge students towards the correct solutions without actually providing them. The tool acts like a tutor that is available 24 hours a day, he says, offering help when students get stuck. It allows students to highlight one or more lines of code and get explanations of its function. It also disables autocorrect and autoformat, but it advises students to improve their coding style in the manner of a grammar-correction function, flagging text that needs improvement. His favourite feature is that the AI answers students’ questions any time of day, any day of the week.

Future visions

For Vishal Rana, a business-management -specialist at the University of Doha for -Science and Technology in Qatar, the biggest challenge is the cheating mindset. Students are wary of AI tools because of concerns about academic misconduct. But Rana stresses that once students enter the workforce, prompting AI is a skill that the job market requires. He thinks that using the technology does not constitute plagiarism, and that the final product should be credited to the person who is prompting and knowing how to ask the right questions. “As an employer, I would rather hire somebody who could ask the right questions and increase productivity in a short time span,” he says.

Vishal Rana says all students will need to know how to prompt AI once they join a workplace. Credit: Vishal Rana

Last year, Rana had a vision of transforming the business-education classroom from a conventional lecture-based environment to one in which students and lecturers worked alongside AI as partners in hands-on projects. Students were required to tap into generative AI programs, such as ChatGPT and Claude (from tech firm Anthropic in San Francisco, California), for many aspects of product development; these included brainstorming, e-mail writing and pitching to investors. The AI created ideas in seconds that allowed students to step into the role of editor, sifting through possible options and finding a feasible one. “Our goal was to create a more dynamic and interactive learning experience that prepares students for the AI-driven future of work,” he says.

In a product-development course, Rana instructed his students to put their real-world skills to the test and conduct in-person interviews with potential clients and stakeholders. The students used AI to write e-mails and generate interview questions, but they were the ones who had to go out and talk to people face to face, which bolstered their social skills. He said that in this case, the AI was working “as a co-pilot in this experiential learning”.

Rana suggests that educators will have to adapt their assignments for use with AI and experiential learning in future. “We suggest to all our academic colleagues [that they] now bring an element of experiential learning into their assessments,” he says. “This will replace old-school report writing and essay writing.”

Malan is optimistic that AI will eventually become a one-to-one teaching assistant — perhaps especially for students who aren’t financially able to go to university. “As much as we are focused on the on-campus students, for us, what’s been especially exciting about AI is the potential impact on self-taught students who aren’t as resourced or as fortunate to live in a part of the world where there are educational resources and institutions,” he says.

“There are quite a few students, young and old, around the world who don’t have a friend, a family member or a sibling who knows more about the subject than they do. But, with AI, they will now have a virtual subject-matter expert by their side,” Malan says.

Nature 633 , S1-S3 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02837-0

This article is part of Nature Career Guide: Faculty , an editorially independent supplement. Advertisers have no influence over the content.

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A postdoctoral position is available to study molecular mechanisms, neural circuits and neurophysiology of learning and memory.

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Schools try new approach to teach students to read

Educational apps for children: What parents and educators should look for and ignore

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Educators and parents buy educational apps (EduApps) to help children learn, bringing in billions of dollars for the mobile app industry, a significant portion of which goes into the pockets of leading app stores.

But when people visit app stores, they are overwhelmed with hundreds of thousands of options . Children can learn from well-designed EduApps , but choosing bad apps wastes schools’ and families’ time and money.

When choosing EduApps, our research from the Technology Learning and Cognition lab at McGill University’s Faculty of Education shows educators and parents rely heavily on others’ judgements, like star ratings.

But app stores are not designed to showcase the information consumers need to judge an app’s educational quality. For example, Apple says it offers “a highly curated App Store where every app is reviewed by experts and an editorial team helps users discover new apps every day,” yet guidelines do not include educational quality standards.

What to ignore

We advise educators and parents to ignore information unrelated to educational quality, like:

1. User ratings & reviews:

Popular EduApps in Apple’s and Google’s app stores typically have very positive ratings (above four stars).

Yet, experts still raise concerns about their quality and expert-approved apps do not necessarily receive the highest star ratings .

Written reviews are rarely more informative. Research shows most reviews simply praise apps rather than explaining specific features.

Even if reviews mention educational aspects, few reviewers have the background to make informed judgements of quality. Anyone can review an app — even children, who like apps that allow them to have fun while they learn but may not know what learning features are necessary to help them learn best.

2. Apple or Google rankings

Educators and parents may visit an app store’s “top charts” lists to find EduApps. Yet, how Apple’s and Google’s algorithms determine which apps “top the charts” is unclear.

Plus, rankings are not related to educational quality , making them unreliable for choosing high-quality apps.

3. Recommendations from app review websites

Educators and parents might look to external app review websites like Common Sense Media for recommendations. But research shows many of the apps recommended by these websites still need substantial improvement — and only a fraction of apps get reviewed. Avoid relying only on recommendations from these websites.

What to look for

We propose looking for five educational benchmarks of quality that can be found in an app’s written description, where developers describe the app and its features.

1. Curriculum: What apps teach

At the bare minimum, EduApps must include content that is covered in an established learning program. Yet, many EduApps are what researchers call “educational misfits” because they are only weakly related to education, if at all. Look for apps that clearly state which curriculum their content is based on (for example, a particular provincial curriculum, a supplemental curriculum for learning an Indigenous language) or detail the content (suitable for grades 1–3 math). Don’t bother with an app that doesn’t tell you what it covers.

2. Learning theory: How apps teach

An app developer’s ideas about learning — their learning theory — impacts what tasks children are asked to do and what kinds of learning can happen. An app that uses repetition to help children memorize facts promotes different learning outcomes and meets different needs than an app that encourages experimentation and discovery. Look for apps that describe how they teach. Choose ones using approaches that align with your needs .

If an app doesn’t tell you how it helps children learn, it’s not worth your time.

3. Scaffolding: How apps support learning

EduApps should include supports that help children build their understanding and accomplish learning goals. These supports (called scaffolding) can include hints or instructions when children get stuck and breaking down complex tasks into smaller chunks or adapting difficulty to match children’s abilities. Look for apps with supports that help guide and structure children’s learning.

4. Feedback: How apps correct learning

If we want children to learn from their mistakes, feedback is essential. Look for apps that give children informative feedback so they know where they went wrong and why.

5. Educational expertise: Who made the app

Many app developers are not education experts, and their priorities may not align with those of educators and parents . Look for apps that consult educational experts like teachers or researchers so they are designed with children’s learning needs and abilities in mind.

Other considerations

Our five educational benchmarks focus on the potential educational value of apps. However, other considerations related to children’s safety are also important, like how apps manage children’s privacy and data and how children are exposed to advertising .

Read more: Why freemium software has no place in our classrooms

Working together to choose better apps

The current state of app stores makes finding a good EduApp like searching for a drop in the ocean. To aid their search, educators and parents can look for educational benchmarks, and watch our video on YouTube, “How to find an educational app.”

We conducted research that showed this helped parents identify quality educational apps via the benchmarks discussed above.

Finding a good EduApp shouldn’t be so hard. These profitable app stores have a duty to help ensure families’ and schools’ resources are not wasted on bad apps. We call on Apple and Google to redesign their app stores to bring educational benchmarks to the surface.

Such a redesign would make it easier to find good apps among a sea of possibilities.

With so many apps available, app store owners, researchers, educators and parents must work together to get the best EduApps into kids’ hands.

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The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2022

In our annual ritual, we pored over hundreds of educational studies and pulled out the most impactful—from a new study on the sneaky power of sketchnotes to research that linked relationships and rigor.

This past year didn’t feel normal, exactly, but compared with the last few trips around the sun, well—it sufficed. In 2021, when we sat down to write our annual edition of the research highlights, we were in the throes of postpandemic recovery and wrote about the impact of a grueling year in which burnout and issues of mental and physical health affected educators everywhere.

This year, we crossed our fingers and turned to best practices once again, reviewing hundreds of studies to identify the most impactful and insightful educational strategies we could find.

What turned up?

We found evidence that sheds new light on the misunderstood power of brain breaks, took a close look at research that finds a surprising—even counterintuitive—rationale for teachers to focus on relationships, and located both the humor and the merit in asking kids to slither like a snake as they learn about the “sss” sound of the letter S .

All that, and a lot more too, in our once-a-year roundup that follows.

1. There’s No Conflict Between Relationships and Rigor

Observers sometimes assume that teachers who radiate empathy, kindness, and openness are “soft” and can be taken advantage of by students. But new research shows that when you signal that you care about kids, they’re willing to go the extra mile, giving you the flexibility to assign more challenging school work.

That’s the main takeaway from a 2022 study that examined teaching practices in 285 districts, comparing relationship-building strategies with the flexibility that teachers had in assigning challenging and complex work. The researchers found that the most effective teachers build their classrooms by getting to know their students, being approachable, and showing that they enjoy the work—and then deftly translate emotional capital into academic capital.

“When students feel teachers care about them, they work harder, engage in more challenging academic activities, behave more appropriately for the school environment, are genuinely happy to see their teacher, and meet or exceed their teacher’s expectations,” the researchers conclude.

2. Highlighting Isn’t Very Effective Until Teachers Step In

Students often highlight the wrong information and may rely on their deficient highlighting skills as a primary study strategy, leading to poor learning outcomes, a new analysis of 36 studies suggests. As little as two hours of tutoring, however, can dramatically improve their capabilities.

The researchers determined that “learner-generated highlighting” tended to improve retention of material, but not comprehension. When students were taught proper highlighting techniques by teachers, however—for example, how to distinguish main ideas from supporting ideas—they dramatically improved their academic performance. Crucially, “when highlighting is used in conjunction with another learning strategy” like “graphic organizers or post-questions,” its effectiveness soars, the researchers said.

The need for explicit teaching may be linked to changing reading habits as students graduate from stories and fables to expository texts, which require them to navigate unfamiliar text formats, the researchers note. To bring kids up to speed, show them “examples of appropriate and inappropriate highlighting,” teach them to “highlight content relatively sparingly,” and provide examples of follow-on tactics like summarizing their insights to drive deeper comprehension.

3. A Landmark Study Strikes a Resounding Note for Inclusion

When the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act called for greater inclusion—mandating that students with disabilities receive support in the “least restrictive environment”—one goal was to ensure that educational accommodations didn’t interfere with the students’ social and emotional development in classrooms full of their peers. The law also confronted age-old prejudices and established a binding legal obligation in favor of inclusion.

But thus far, rigorous evidence of the academic benefits has been thin.

Now a new large-scale study appears to put the matter beyond dispute. When researchers tracked nearly 24,000 adolescents who qualified for special education, they discovered that spending a majority of the day—at least 80 percent—in general education classes improved reading scores by a whopping 24 points and math scores by 18 points, compared with scores of their more isolated peers with similar disabilities.

“Treat the general education classroom as the default classroom,” the researchers firmly state, and push for separate accommodations only when all other options have been exhausted.

4. Sketchnotes and Concept Maps Work—Even Better Than You Might Think

Simple concept maps, sketchnotes, and other annotated jottings—akin to doodling with a purpose—can facilitate deeper comprehension of materials than more polished drawings, a new study finds.

Representational drawings, such as a simple diagram of a cell, may help students remember factual information, the researchers explain, but they “lack features to make generalizations or inferences based on that information.” Organizational drawings that link concepts with arrows, annotations, and other relational markings give students a clearer sense of the big picture, allow them to visualize how ideas are connected, and provide a method for spotting obvious gaps in their understanding. On tests of higher-order thinking, fifth graders who made organizational drawings outperformed their peers who tried representational drawings by 300 percent.

To reap the benefits in class, have students start with simple diagrams to help remember the material, and then move them up to sketchnotes and concept maps as they tease out connections to prior knowledge.

5. Brain Breaks Are Misunderstood (and Underutilized)

Conventional wisdom holds that the development of a skill comes from active, repeated practice: It’s the act of dribbling a basketball that ultimately teaches the basketball star.

But recent studies reveal that the intervals between practice sessions are at least as crucial. In 2021, researchers used brain scans to observe neural networks as young adults learned how to type. During breaks, the brains of the participants appeared to head back to the keyboards, unconsciously replaying the typing sequences over and over again at high rates of speed as they flipped the material between processing and memory centers dozens of times in the span of 10 seconds. The researchers concluded that brain breaks play “just as important a role as practice in learning a new skill.”

In 2022, we learned that the kinds of breaks make a difference, too. One study compared in-classroom breaks like drawing or building puzzles with outdoor breaks like running or playing in sandboxes. In a nod to the power of movement—and free time—it was the kids playing outside who returned to class ready to learn, probably because indoor games, like indoor voices, required children to engage in more self-regulation, the researchers speculated. Meanwhile, an analysis examining “green breaks” —brief strolls in a park or visits to a school garden—concluded that students who partook in the activities performed better on tests of attention and working memory.

Depriving kids of regular breaks, it turns out, is a threat to the whole proposition of learning. To commit lessons to memory, the brain demands its own time—which it sets aside to clean up and consolidate new material.

6. On Classroom Design, an Argument for Caution—and Common Sense

When it comes time to decorate their classrooms, teachers often find themselves on the horns of a dilemma: Should they aim for Pinterest-worthy interior design or opt for blank walls on the strength of research that emphasizes the risks of distracting students?

A study published in February this year argues for minimalism. Researchers tracked the on-task behavior of K–2 students and concluded that visually ”streamlined” classrooms produced more focused students than “decorated” ones. During short read-alouds about topics like rainbows and plate tectonics, for example, young kids in classrooms free of “charts, posters, and manipulatives” were paying attention at significantly higher rates.

But it might not be a simple question of more or less. A 2014 study confirmed that posters of women scientists or diverse historical figures, for example, can improve students’ sense of belonging. And a recent study that observed 3,766 children in 153 schools concluded that classrooms that occupied a visual middle ground—neither too cluttered nor too austere—produced the best academic outcomes. A 2022 study reached similar conclusions.

Classroom decoration can alter academic trajectories, the research suggests, but the task shouldn’t stress teachers out. The rules appear to be relatively straightforward: Hang academically relevant, supportive work on the walls, and avoid the extremes—working within the broad constraints suggested by common sense and moderation.

7. For Young Children, the Power of Play-Based Learning

Children aren’t miniature adults, but a bias toward adult perspectives of childhood, with its attendant schedules and routines, has gradually exerted a stranglehold on our educational system nonetheless, suggests the author and early childhood educator Erika Christakis.

How can we let little kids be little while meeting the academic expectations of typical schools? A new analysis of 39 studies spanning several decades plots a middle path for educators, highlighting the way that play gently guided by adults, often called play-based learning, can satisfy both objectives.

Teachers of young students can have a “learning goal” in mind, but true play-based learning should incorporate wonder and exploration, be child-led when possible, and give students “freedom and choice over their actions and play behavior,” the researchers assert. Interrupt the flow of learning only when necessary: gently nudge students who might find activities too hard or too easy, for example. The playful approach improved early math and task-switching skills, compared with more traditional tactics that emphasize the explicit acquisition of skills, researchers concluded.

To get the pedagogy right, focus on relationships and ask questions that prompt wonder. “Rich, open-ended conversation is critical,” Christakis told Edutopia in a 2019 interview —children need time "to converse with each other playfully, to tell a rambling story to an adult, to listen to high-quality literature and ask meaningful questions.”

8. A Better Way to Learn Your ABCs

Getting young kids to match a letter to its corresponding sound is a first-order reading skill. To help students grasp that the letter c makes the plosive “cuh” sound in car , teachers often use pictures as scaffolds or have children write the letter repeatedly while making its sound.

A new study suggests that sound-letter pairs are learned much more effectively when whole-body movements are integrated into lessons. Five- and 6-year-olds in the study spent eight weeks practicing movements for each letter of the alphabet, slithering like a snake as they hissed the sibilant “sss” sound, for example. The researchers found that whole-body movement improved students’ ability to recall letter-sound pairings and doubled their ability to recognize hard-to-learn sounds—such as the difference between the sounds that c makes in cat and sauce —when compared with students who simply wrote and spoke letter-sound pairings at their desks.

The approach can make a big difference in the acquisition of a life-changing skill. Educators should “incorporate movement-based teaching” into their curricula, giving special consideration to “whole-body movement,” the researchers conclude.

9. Why Learners Push the Pause Button

Some of the benefits of videotaped lessons are so self-evident that they hide in plain sight.

When teaching students foundational concepts, a video lesson equipped with a simple pause button, for example, may allow students to reset cognitively as they reach their attentional limits, a 2022 study concluded. Pause buttons, like rewind buttons, are also crucial for learners who encounter “complex learning materials,” have “low prior knowledge,” or exhibit “low working memory capacities.”

Increasingly, the intrinsic value of targeted video lessons is borne out in research. In a feature on Edutopia , we looked at research suggesting that video learning supported self-pacing and flexible, 24/7 access to lessons; that questions embedded in videos improved academic performance, increased note-taking, and reduced stress (see these 2015 and 2020 studies); and that video versions of lectures tended to “make content more coherent ” to students.

To modernize their classrooms, teachers might record their most important lessons and make them available to students as study aids so they can pause, rewind, and review to their hearts’ content.

10. An Authoritative Study of Two High-Impact Learning Strategies

Spacing and retrieval practices are two of the most effective ways to drive long-term retention, confirms an authoritative 2022 review spanning hundreds of studies on the topic—and students should know how and why the strategies are effective.

In the review, researchers explain that students who prefer techniques like reading and rereading material in intense cram sessions are bound to fail. Instead, students should think of learning as a kind of “fitness routine” during which they practice recalling the material from memory and space out their learning sessions over time. Teaching kids to self-quiz or summarize from memory—and then try it again—is the crucial first step in disabusing students of their “false beliefs about learning.”

The effect sizes are hard to ignore. In a 2015 study , for example, third-grade students who studied a lesson about the sun and then reread the same material scored 53 percent on a follow-up test, the equivalent of a failing grade, while their peers who studied it once and then answered practice questions breezed by with an 87 percent score. And in a 2021 study , middle school students who solved a dozen math problems spread out across three weeks scored 21 percentage points higher on a follow-up math test than students who solved all 12 problems on the same day.

Center for American Progress

Tracker: Student Loan Debt Relief Under the Biden-Harris Administration

The Biden-Harris administration has delivered historic levels of student debt relief by fixing broken programs and fulfilling promises to borrowers who had been left behind.

Building an Economy for All, College Affordability and Student Debt, Education, Higher Education +1 More

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Note: This feature will be updated periodically as new student debt relief actions are announced.

Since taking office, the Biden-Harris administration has delivered historic levels of student loan debt relief: almost $170 billion to 4.76 million borrowers. These discharges fulfill promises made by existing programs that frequently left borrowers in limbo.

Figure 1 highlights the progress this administration has made in delivering debt relief to student borrowers who, through no fault of their own, struggled to navigate these programs’ complexity and frequently waited years for relief.

For example, before President Joe Biden took office, only 50 borrowers out of an estimated 2 million who were eligible had had the remainder of their loans canceled after paying off their student debt for more than 20 years, as is promised by income-driven repayment plans .

Similarly, before the Biden-Harris administration introduced fixes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program , 99 percent of those who applied for cancellation were denied. Before President Biden took office, only a total of 7,000 public servants had received debt relief through PSLF. Many borrowers struggled to navigate the complex repayment system , enrolling in ineligible repayment plans, missing steps such as consolidation, or facing challenges recertifying their income on an annual basis.

These hurdles and other types of administrative and loan servicer errors frequently resulted in borrowers losing credit for years of payments, seeing their balances grow, and taking hits to their credit scores.

In addition, under the Trump administration Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, more than 130,000 borrowers who were defrauded by schools such as ITT Technical Institute and Corinthian Colleges were denied relief under the borrower defense to repayment program, even when the U.S. Department of Education or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had concluded that the institutions engaged in wrongdoing. The claims of defrauded borrowers languished for as long as six years before the Biden-Harris administration approved group discharges for the two schools in 2022.

This fall, the Department of Education is expected to release new, finalized regulations that will allow it to deliver debt relief to new categories of borrowers, including those who have seen their balances grow due to interest, those who have been in repayment for more than 20 years, and those who were eligible for existing debt relief programs but did not apply.

New Student Debt Relief Policies Fix Broken Promises and Benefit Borrowers Most in Need

Aug 7, 2024

Sara Partridge , Madison Weiss , Brendan Duke

These relief measures are essential to ensuring that those who were poorly served by the higher education and student loan repayment systems do not continue to suffer the financial consequences. They deliver on promises made to borrowers under existing programs and help ensure higher education remains an equitable pathway toward economic mobility.

The positions of American Progress, and our policy experts, are independent, and the findings and conclusions presented are those of American Progress alone. A full list of supporters is available here . American Progress would like to acknowledge the many generous supporters who make our work possible.

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Two students, two teachers killed in shooting at Georgia high school; 14-year-old charged as an adult

Two students and two teachers were killed and nine others wounded Wednesday in a school shooting an hour outside of Atlanta, authorities said.

One suspect, a 14-year-old student, was alive and taken into custody following the gunfire at Apalachee High School, Georgia Bureau of Investigation director Chris Hosey said at a news conference late Wednesday afternoon.

The suspect surrendered to law enforcement immediately after being confronted, Hosey said. He was cooperating with authorities and will be charged with murder and handled as an adult, according to Hosey and Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith.

“He gave up, got on the ground and the deputy took him into custody,” Smith said.

Follow along for live coverage

Smith lamented the "pure evil" and "hateful event" that occurred at the school. All nine who were taken to hospitals were injured by gunfire in some capacity, he said.

A motive was unclear. Smith said he was not aware whether the victims were targeted or whether there was a connection between the shooter and the victims.

"I don't know why it happened. I may not ever know. We may not ever know," Smith said.

Smith said it is also unclear whether there were any warning signs. Smith said authorities do not yet know how the shooter obtained the firearm and how he brought it into the school.

Earlier, he said it would take “multiple days” to determine what happened. “Every minute, it’s developing on what we’re finding,” he said. 

The first call reporting an “active shooter” came in around 10:30 a.m., Smith said. Hosey said law enforcement officers and two school resource officers responded to the scene within minutes of being alerted to the shooting.

All campuses of Barrow County Schools, based in Winder, Georgia, went into a "soft lockdown" with most of the activity centered around Apalachee H.S. where police cars, fire trucks and ambulances had all converged.

Students could be seen being directed to the school's football stadium.

Smith said authorities were working to reunite students with their parents.

“I have directed all available state resources to respond to the incident at Apalachee High School and urge all Georgians to join my family in praying for the safety of those in our classrooms, both in Barrow County and across the state,” Gov. Brian Kemp said in statement .

Eight people, including three with gunshot wounds, were taken to North Georgia Medical Center facilities in Barrow, Gainesville and Braselton, a hospital spokesperson said.

In addition to the patients with gunshot wounds, five people were hospitalized with panic attack symptoms, the spokesperson said.

Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta confirmed that it was treating one gunshot victim.

President Joe Biden said he was mourning those who were killed, as he pushed Congress to pass gun safety legislation.

“What should have been a joyous back-to-school season in Winder, Georgia, has now turned into another horrific reminder of how gun violence continues to tear our communities apart,” Biden said in a statement.

“Students across the country are learning how to duck and cover instead of how to read and write," he added. "We cannot continue to accept this as normal.”  

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said he was “devastated” for the affected families and said the Justice Department was ready to provide support. 

School has been in session at Apalachee H igh School since Aug. 1 . Schools will be closed for the rest of the week, Barrow County Schools Superintendent Dallas LeDuff said.

The school is Barrow County’s second high school, according to its website, and opened in 2000.

FBI agents from Atlanta were dispatched to the scene to assist local authorities, officials said .

Senior Breaking News Reporter

Tom Winter is a New York-based correspondent covering crime, courts, terrorism and financial fraud on the East Coast for the NBC News Investigative Unit.

Jonathan Dienst is chief justice contributor for NBC News and chief investigative reporter for WNBC-TV in New York.

Melissa Chan is a reporter for NBC News Digital with a focus on veterans’ issues, mental health in the military and gun violence.