Educators have long debated the best way to teach, especially the subjects of science and math. One side favors direct instruction, where teachers tell students what they need to know or students read it from textbooks. Some call it explicit or traditional instruction. The other side favors inquiry, where students conduct experiments and figure out the answers themselves like a scientist would. It’s also known as exploration, discovery learning or simply “scientific practices.”

The debate reignited among university professors during the pandemic with the 2021 online publication of a commentary in the journal Educational Psychology Review. Combatively titled “There is an Evidence Crisis in Science Educational Policy,” four experts in science education argued that the evidence for inquiry instruction is weak and that proponents of inquiry “exclude” or “mark as irrelevant” high-quality studies, particularly controlled trials, that “overwhelmingly show minimal support” for inquiry learning.  

One of the authors is the prominent Australian psychologist John Sweller, who formulated cognitive load theory, the widely accepted idea that our working memory can process only so much information at once. Other academics took notice. Traditionalists applauded it.

Sweller and his co-authors’ complaints date back to an influential 1996 report of the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academies of Sciences that shapes science education policy. The report encouraged science teachers to adopt an inquiry-based approach, and it was followed by similar calls from other policymakers. But the authors of the 2021 article said the council’s references for this policy change were “theoretical ideas packaged in conceptual articles rather than empirical evidence.”

The critics say that much of the positive evidence for inquiry comes from classroom studies where there are no control or comparison groups, making it impossible to know if inquiry is really better than alternatives. And they say that this research frequently lumps together inquiry instruction with other teaching practices and interventions, making it hard to disentangle how much the use of inquiry is making a difference. 

Soon after, another group of prominent education researchers issued a rebuttal. In March 2023, 13 scholars led by a Dutch researcher, Ton de Jong, took on the debate in the academic journal Educational Research Review. Titled “Let’s talk evidence – The case for combining inquiry-based and direct instruction,” their article acknowledged that the research is complicated and doesn’t unequivocally point to the superiority of inquiry-based learning. Some studies show inquiry is better. Some studies show direct instruction is better. Many show that students learn the same amount either way.  (As they walked through a series of meta-analyses that summarized hundreds of studies, they pointedly noted that inquiry critics also ignored or mischaracterized some of the research.) 

Their bottom line: “Inquiry-based instruction produces better overall results for acquiring conceptual knowledge than does direct instruction.” 

How could two groups of scholars look at the same body of research and come to opposite conclusions?

The first thing to notice is that the two groups of scholars are arguing about two different things. The inquiry critics pointed out that inquiry wasn’t great at helping students learn content and skills. The inquiry defenders emphasize that inquiry is better at helping students develop conceptual understandings. Different teaching methods may be better for different learning goals.

The second takeaway is that even this group of 13 inquiry defenders argue that teachers should use both approaches, inquiry and direct instruction. That’s because students also need to learn content and procedural skills, which are best taught through direct instruction, and in part because it would be boring to learn only one way all the time. 

Indeed, even the critics of inquiry instruction noted that inquiry lessons and exercises may be better at sparking a love of science. Students often say they enjoy science more or become more interested in the field after an inquiry lesson. Changing students’ attitudes about science is certainly not a compelling reason to teach this way all the time, as students need to learn content too, but even traditionalists admit there’s something to be gained from fun exploration. 

My third observation is that the inquiry defenders listed a bunch of caveats about when inquiry learning has proven to be most effective. Unstructured inquiry lessons where students groped in the dark weren’t successful in building any kind of understanding.

Caveat 1: Students need a strong foundation of knowledge and skills in order for inquiry learning to be successful. In other words, students need some facts and the ability to calculate things in different ways to take advantage of inquiry learning and arrive at deeper conceptual understandings. Complete mastery isn’t a prerequisite, but some familiarity is. The authors suggested, for example, that it can be beneficial to start with some direct instruction before launching into an inquiry lesson. 

Caveat 2: Inquiry learning is far more effective when students receive a lot of guidance and feedback from their teacher during an inquiry lesson. Sometimes the most appropriate guidance is a clear explanation, the authors said, which is the same as direct instruction. (My brain started to hurt, thinking about how direct instruction could be woven into inquiry-based learning. Is it really inquiry learning if you’re also telling students what they need to do or know? At some point, shouldn’t we be labeling it direct instruction with hands-on activities?) 

The 13 authors admitted that each student needs different amounts and types of guidance during an inquiry lesson. Low-achieving students appear to benefit more from guidance than middle- or high-achieving students. But low-achieving students also need more of it. And that can be tough, if not impossible for a single teacher to manage. I began to wonder if effective inquiry teaching is humanly possible.

Not only can inquiry include a lot of direct instruction, but sometimes direct instruction can resemble an inquiry classroom. While many people may imagine that direct instruction means that students are passively absorbing information through lectures or books, the inquiry defenders explained that students can and should be engaged in activities even when a teacher is practicing direct instruction. Students still solve problems, practice new things independently, build projects and conduct experiments. The core difference can be a subtle one and hinge upon whether the teacher explains the theory to the students first or shows examples before students try it themselves (direct), or if the teacher asks students to figure out the theories and the procedures themselves, but gives them explicit guidance along the way (inquiry).

Like all long-standing academic debates, this one is far from resolved. Some educators prefer inquiry; some prefer direct instruction.  Depending upon your biases, you’re likely to see a complicated, mixed body of research as glass half full or glass half empty.

In December 2023, Sweller and the inquiry critics wrote a response to the rebuttal in the same Educational Research Review journal.  Beyond the academic sniping and nitpicking, the two sides seem to have found some common ground.

“Our view… is that explicit instruction is essential for novices” but that as students gain knowledge, there should be “an increasing emphasis on independent problem-solving practice,” Sweller and his camp wrote.  “To the extent that De Jong et al. (2023) agree that explicit instruction can be important, we appear to have reached some level of agreement.”

The real test will be watching to see whether that consensus makes it to the classroom.

This story about teaching strategies was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

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Silence may be golden, but when it comes to learning with a tutor, talking is pure gold. It’s audible proof that a student is paying attention and not drifting off, research suggests. More importantly, the more a student articulates his or her reasoning, the easier it is for a tutor to correct misunderstandings or praise a breakthrough. Those are the moments when learning happens.

One India-based tutoring company, Cuemath, trains its tutors to encourage students to talk more. Its tutors are in India, but many of its clients are American families with elementary school children. The tutoring takes place at home via online video, like a Zoom meeting with a whiteboard, where both tutor and student can work on math problems together. 

The company wanted to see if it could boost student participation so it collaborated with researchers at Stanford University to develop a “talk meter,” sort of a Fitbit for the voice, for its tutoring site. Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, the researchers could separate the audio of the tutors from that of the students and calculate the ratio of tutor-to-student speech.

In initial pilot tests, the talk meter was posted on the tutor’s video screen for the entire one-hour tutoring session, but tutors found that too distracting. The study was revised so that the meter pops up every 20 minutes or three times during the session. When the student is talking less than 25 percent of the time, the meter goes red, indicating that improvement is needed. When the student is talking more than half the time, the meter turns green. In between, it’s yellow. 

More than 700 tutors and 1,200 of their students were randomly assigned to one of three groups: one where the tutors were shown the talk meter, another where both tutors and students were shown the talk meter, and a third “control” group which wasn’t shown the talk meter at all for comparison.

When just the tutors saw the talk meter, they tended to curtail their explanations and talk much less. But despite their efforts to prod their tutees to talk more, students increased their talking only by 7 percent. 

When students were also shown the talk meter, the dynamic changed. Students increased their talking by 18 percent. Introverts especially started speaking up, according to interviews with the tutors. 

The results show how teaching and learning is a two-way street. It’s not just about coaching teachers to be better at their craft. We also need to coach students to be better learners. 

“It’s not all the teacher’s responsibility to change student behavior,” said Dorottya Demszky, an assistant professor in education data science at Stanford University and lead author of the study. “I think it’s genuinely, super transformative to think of the student as part of it as well.”

The study hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal and is currently a draft paper, “Does Feedback on Talk Time Increase Student Engagement? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial on a Math Tutoring Platform,” so it may still be revised. It is slated to be presented at the March 2024 annual conference of the Society of Learning Analytics in Kyoto, Japan. 

In analyzing the sound files, Demszky noticed that students tended to work on their practice problems with the tutor more silently in both the control and tutor-only talk meter groups. But students started to verbalize their steps aloud once they saw the talk meter. Students were filling more of the silences.

In interviews with the researchers, students said the meter made the tutoring session feel like a game.  One student said, “It’s like a competition. So if you talk more, it’s like, I think you’re better at it.” Another noted:  “When I see that it’s red, I get a little bit sad and then I keep on talking, then I see it yellow, and then I keep on talking more. Then I see it green and then I’m super happy.” 

Some students found the meter distracting.  “It can get annoying because sometimes when I’m trying to look at a question, it just appears, and then sometimes I can’t get rid of it,” one said.

Tutors had mixed reactions, too. For many, the talk meter was a helpful reminder not to be long-winded in their explanations and to ask more probing, open-ended questions. Some tutors said they felt pressured to reach a 50-50 ratio and that they were unnaturally holding back from speaking. One tutor pointed out that it’s not always desirable for a student to talk so much. When you’re introducing a new concept or the student is really lost and struggling, it may be better for the teacher to speak more. 

Surprisingly, kids didn’t just fill the air with silly talk to move the gauge. Demszky’s team analyzed the transcripts in a subset of the tutoring sessions and found that students were genuinely talking about their math work and expressing their reasoning. The use of math terms increased by 42 percent.

Unfortunately, there are several drawbacks to the study design. We don’t know if students’ math achievement improved from the talk meter. The problem was that students of different ages were learning different things in different grades and different countries and there was no single, standardized test to give them all. 

Another confounding factor is that students who saw the talk meter were also given extra information sessions and worksheets about the benefits of talking more. So we can’t tell from this experiment if the talk meter made the difference or if the information on the value of talking aloud would have been enough to get them to talk more.

Demszky is working on developing a talk meter app that can be used in traditional classrooms to encourage more student participation. She hopes teachers will share talk meter results with their students. “I think you could involve the students a little more: ‘It seems like some of you weren’t participating. Or it seems like my questions were very closed ended? How can we work on this together?’”

But she said she’s treading carefully because she is aware that there can be unintended consequences with measurement apps. She wants to give feedback not only on how much students are talking but also on the quality of what they are talking about. And natural language processing still has trouble with English in foreign accents and background noise. Beyond the technological hurdles, there are psychological ones too.

 “Not everyone wants a Fitbit or a tool that gives them metrics and feedback,” Demszky acknowledges.

This story about student participation was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

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Many high school students struggle to figure out which of the nation’s 2,600 four-year colleges and universities should be on their lists of reach, target and safety schools. To help with that decision, schools across the country have paid many millions to private companies that display data on the fate of past students. But two recent studies have found that this information could discourage students who might have a shot at the most elite schools.

One of the most popular data displays in the college application process is a scattergram, which shows the grades and test scores of admitted and rejected students from a student’s own high school at each college. Scattergrams are a bit like looking at horse race results for each school except the names of former classmates aren’t displayed.

Academic researchers have been trying to find out how these scattergrams, which have been widely adopted by U.S. high schools over the past two decades, are influencing students. Two separate studies indicate that these information displays are discouraging some teens from applying to the most competitive schools, such as Harvard and Stanford. The researchers found that applications to these schools plummet after students see the scattergrams. At the same time, the researchers note that lower-achieving students tend to benefit from the scattergrams because the data encourages them to aim higher. 

The latest study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October 2023, tracked the college applications of 70,000 students at 220 public high schools over five application cycles, from 2014-15 to 2019-20. In the years immediately after a school purchased Naviance, the market leader in scattergrams, 17,000 high achieving students with test scores above 1310 on the SAT (out of 1600 points) or above 29 on the ACT (out of 36 points), were 50 percent less likely to apply to the most competitive universities and colleges. Consider 100 high-achieving students applying to college: 24 applied to the most competitive schools before the scattergrams, but only 16 of them did afterward.

Among high-achieving students, an unidentified college that had received the third-most applications dropped out of the top 10 after Naviance was introduced. High-achieving students became much more likely to apply to local colleges, which were relatively unpopular choices before Naviance.

Sabina Tomkins, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information and lead author of the study, doesn’t know exactly why students were deterred, but she said there are two likely explanations. One is that students are intimidated when they see that their scores are slightly below the average of previously admitted students. Some kids might want to avoid the risk of rejection altogether and play it safe, applying only to places where they’re more likely to be accepted. 

Another possibility is that the scattergrams have an unintended marketing or advertising effect. Students may feel more motivated to apply to the most popular schools where they see masses of green checks, showing that many previous peers have been admitted. Students can’t see the scattergrams for the least popular schools. To preserve student privacy, high schools commonly suppress scattergrams for schools to which fewer than five or 10 alumni have applied. Small or far-away elite schools can often fall into this suppressed category. “When the school doesn’t show up as a scattergram, it might not cross their mind in the same way it would have before,” said Tomkins. 

Tomkins only had application data and doesn’t know where students enrolled in college. But if students are applying to fewer elite schools, they’re likely getting into and matriculating at fewer of them too, Tomkins said.

An earlier study, published in 2021 in the Journal of Labor Economics, also found that Naviance’s scattergrams deterred students from applying to and enrolling in the most selective colleges. That study looked at only 8,000 students at one unidentified school district in the mid-Atlantic region. At the time that study was released, some critics questioned whether the unintended consequences of scattergrams were true nationwide. The larger 2023 study bolsters the evidence that more information isn’t always a good thing for all students.

Importantly, both studies also found that the scattergrams encouraged lower-achieving students. They were more likely to apply to four-year colleges after seeing that their grades and test scores were similar to those of previous students who had been accepted. Before their schools purchased Naviance, more of these students avoided four-year colleges and opted for two-year community colleges instead. A separate body of research has generally found that starting at a four-year college, while more expensive, increases the likelihood of earning a bachelor’s degree and higher wages after graduation. 

Whether we should care about students attending the most prestigious and elite colleges is a matter of debate. Authors of the 2023 study pointed me to Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s research, which has found that going to an Ivy League university or four other elite colleges, instead of a top flagship public college, increases the likelihood of becoming a CEO or a U.S. senator and substantially increases a graduate’s chances of earning in the top 1 percent. However, attending an Ivy instead of a top public flagship didn’t increase a graduate’s income on average. 

The scattergram studies looked only at high schools that had purchased Naviance’s product. The company was the first to market scattergrams to schools in 2002 and says its product reaches nine million of the nation’s 15 million high school students. According to GovSpend, which tracks government contracts, public high schools have spent well over $100 million on Naviance, which, in addition to scattergrams, also allows high school counselors to manage their students’ college applications and send transcripts to colleges. Competitors include Scoir, Ciaflo and MaiaLearning, which all offer similar scattergrams. 

PowerSchool, the company that owns Naviance, points out that analyzing small slices of its customer base, as the academic researchers have, can be misleading. According to the data PowerSchool shared with me, 38 percent of the six million college applications that flow through its platform each year were sent to “reach” schools, schools where it would be challenging for a student to gain acceptance based on their grades and test scores. A spokesperson said that applications to reach schools have been increasing annually, proof that its product “does not discourage students from applying to their reach or target schools.” 

The company also highlighted the benefits for lower-achieving students, asserting that the scattergrams “increase equity.”  Indeed, the earlier 2021 study found that Black, Hispanic and low-income students were especially more likely to apply to and enroll in four-year colleges after using Naviance.

I talked with a half dozen college counselors who work with high school students and they said they generally didn’t see high-achieving students getting discouraged after seeing scattergrams. “If anything, I see the opposite,” said Scott White, an independent college counselor in New Jersey and a former high school guidance counselor for over 30 years. “Students are over-applying, not under-applying. They throw in dream applications. If you look at the Naviance scattergrams, they are not in profile. ‘I know I’m not gonna get in there, but I’m gonna apply there anyway.’  That is incredibly common.” 

Amy Thompson, a college counselor at York High School outside of Chicago, told me that the scattergrams are a “big hit” with high school students and get students engaged in the college process because clicking on the data can be fun and even addicting. 

Only one counselor told me he had seen a case where a student was discouraged after seeing scattergrams, but he said it was an unusual experience. That doesn’t mean the researchers’ data analysis is wrong. It’s common for data to point out things that we’re not aware of or that we cannot readily see. 

The biggest drawback to scattergrams, according to veteran college counselors, is that the information is incomplete and can give students the false sense that admissions decisions at elite schools are primarily based on grades and test scores. The scattergrams don’t show whether a student was an athlete, a musician or from a wealthy family with many generations of alumni. Students might see a green check with a low test score and not appreciate that the student had other factors weighing in his or her favor. 

Counselors told me the scattergrams are most useful and accurate for large state schools, where there is a lot of data and the academic range of past admittees helps students identify safety and target schools. The more competitive the college, and the more the college looks at factors other than grades and test scores, the less useful the scattergrams. 

And just like the stock market, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Schools fall in and out of favor. What was a safety school one year can unexpectedly rise in selectivity. A school that was once hard to get into can lower its standards in an effort to fill seats.

I don’t know that I care so much about kids not applying to enough Ivy League schools. But it’s fascinating how the information age changes our behavior for better and for worse, and how kids are influenced by spending hours and hours clicking on websites and absorbing masses of data.

This story about scattergrams was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

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Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Future of Learning newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Wednesday with trends and top stories about education innovation. Subscribe today!

Cardi B, the brash and bold New York hip-hop artist, has a rainbow collection of Hermès Birkin handbags that fills a wall in her house — estimated value, half a million dollars.

Would you call that extravagant?

For educators at Clayton County Public Schools in suburban Atlanta, the question is a crafty way to entice middle schoolers — many Cardi B and hip-hop fans among them — into a math lesson about ratios and proportions.

For example, $500,000 in handbags is less than 1 percent of Cardi B’s estimated $80 million net worth. So, how much do students think they need to earn to be comfortable collecting just one six-figure handbag? How could they determine that, mathematically? How would the calculations change if they wanted to buy a $45,000 “iced-out” Rolex? Or, in a more down-to-earth daydream, what salary would be needed to comfortably afford a $7,500 trip to Walt Disney World for a family of four?

Tonya Clarke, the coordinator of secondary mathematics for Clayton County schools, and her colleagues shared the Cardi B lesson at a math convention earlier this fall as an example of a culturally relevant lesson that can lure students into thinking about math in a way that is engaging and exciting.*

“The initial idea draws them in,” Clarke said. “They’re not just calculating finding a ratio for no reason.” Then, after whetting their appetites, she said, “we may hone in on those skills a little closer.”

The Cardi B lesson is still in the development phase at the district, Clarke said; before sharing it with teachers, her staff will add more detailed notes and guidance on how to incorporate it into instruction.

Clayton County educators spoke about their approach to math instruction at the annual National Council of Teachers of Mathematics convention, at a time when the field is deeply concerned about math attainment, particular for students who are Black, Hispanic, or who come from low-income backgrounds. About 70 percent of the district’s students are Black and 13 percent are Hispanic. Twenty percent are from families who live below the poverty line. In 2022-23, 17 percent of the district’s third through eighth graders, on average, scored proficient or above on the state’s math tests, an increase of about 3 percentage points from the year before.

Bringing a “culturally responsive” framework to math instruction was a major focus of the educators’ convention. Such efforts are meant to “position students as owners of their learning” and create a culture of belonging within the classroom, said Shakiyya Bland, math educator in residence at the nonprofit Just Equations, which advocates for educational equity in math instruction.

“At its core, it needs to really help students critically think and accelerate learning. That’s what I look at when I look at lessons. Do the word problems pose questions that help students think critically about themselves or the data that they’re using?” said Bland, who recently published an article on the brain science behind culturally responsive teaching.

The Clayton district’s efforts to develop more engaging and relatable lessons for math instruction began in 2017, Clarke said. Students have used data on New York’s stop-and-frisk policy and the spread of Covid-19 as foundations for project-based math lessons that are part of the “I’m W.O.K.E. Project” Clarke developed. (The acronym stands for Widens Options through Knowledge and Empowerment.)*

The district’s efforts are  in harmony with Georgia’s 2021 revision of its math standards. In those standards, state officials said that students at every grade level should be engaged in “mathematical modeling” — using math to explore the world around them.

Catherine Lawrence, an instructional support teacher in math and science for the district, said middle school students often come into math classes afraid. It’s the “fear of being wrong, fear of not getting in the first time around, fear of not being able to communicate to the teacher that it doesn’t make sense,” she said.

Culturally relevant teaching, along with other teaching tools and techniques the district uses such as manipulatives — objects like counting blocks or fraction tiles — can help break through that apprehension, she said.

But it does take work, and ongoing training, to make sure that teachers can assist students to bridge that gap between something concrete and tangible — the price of a handbag, or data about arrests — to more abstract math knowledge.

“During collaborative planning we talk about implementation,” Lawrence said. “How do we make sure we get the meat and potatoes, and we don’t get stuck in the dessert.”

For Clarke, the Cardi B lesson helps demonstrate to teachers that infusing cultural relevance in math classes is achievable, with the right support system in place.

“We’re still struggling through the process of getting teachers to fully buy into it, because we’re still trying to get teachers to understand math is not just about the numbers — math is about the problem solving,” Clarke said. While some teachers find the lessons time-consuming and difficult, she said, overall, teachers are trying the new methods.

“The process is implementable. It’s not as heavy a lift as a lot of them think that it is,” she said.

*Correction: This story has been updated to correct Clarke’s title and to note that she is the developer of the I’m W.O.K.E. Project.

This story about culturally responsive math education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Numbers don’t lie, right? But they also don’t always tell the whole story. That’s the case with the most recent results from a key global education test, the Program for International Student Assessment or PISA. 

In the past, PISA results have often spurred anguished discussion about why U.S. students are so far behind other countries like Finland, Korea and Poland. But the most recent rankings, released in December 2023, indicated that U.S. 15-year olds moved up in the international rankings for all three subjects –  math, reading and science. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona credited the largest federal investment in education in history – roughly $200 billion – for keeping the United States “in the game” during the pandemic. (The tests were administered in 2022.)

But that rosy spin hides a much grimmer picture. Rankings may have risen, but test scores did not. The only reason the U.S. rose is because academic performance in once higher ranking countries, such as Iceland and the Slovak Republic, fell by even more since the previous testing round in 2018. Neither India nor China, which topped the rankings in 2018, participated in the 2022 PISA. In math, the U.S. rose from 29th place to 28th place, still in the bottom half of economically advanced nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an international organization of 38 member countries that oversees the PISA exam.

The deterioration in math was particularly devastating. American students scored 13 points lower than in 2018, equivalent to losing two-thirds of a year of education in the subject. These were the lowest U.S. math scores recorded in the history of the PISA math test, which began in 2003. More than a third of U.S. 15-year-olds (mostly 10th graders) are considered to be low performers, unable to compare distances between two routes or convert prices into a different currency. Over the past decade, the share of U.S. students in this lowest level has swelled; back in 2012, a little over a quarter of U.S. students were considered to be low performers.

Only seven percent of American students can do math at advanced levels. The United States has more students in the bottom group and fewer students in the top group than most other industrialized countries that are part of the OECD. (Click here to see an international ranking of low and top performers in each country.)

The results also confirmed the widespread inequalities in U.S. education. Black and Hispanic students, on average, scored far below Asian and white students. Those from low-income backgrounds scored lower than their more affluent peers.

Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD, emphasized that the inequities in the U.S. are often misunderstood to be primarily problem of weak schools in poor neighborhoods. His analysis indicates that low math performance is common throughout U.S. schools. Some students are performing much worse than others within the same school, and that range between low and advanced students within U.S. schools is much greater than the range in scores between schools. 

This new PISA test is the first major international education indicator since the Covid pandemic closed schools and disrupted education. Test scores declined all around the world, but the OECD found there was only a small relationship between how long schools were closed and their students’ performance on the PISA test. School closures explained only 11 percent of the variation in countries’ test scores; nearly 90 percent is attributable to other, unclear reasons. However, the OECD looked at the absolute level of test scores and not how much test scores fell or rose. More analysis is needed to see if there’s a stronger link between school closures and test score changes. 

Even if school closures eventually prove to be a more important factor, the pandemic isn’t the only reason students are struggling. Global scores have generally been declining for the past two decades. One hypothesis is that technology is distracting teenagers. Students were asked about technology distraction for the first time on the 2022 PISA. Forty-five percent of students said they feel anxious if their phones are not near them. Sixty-five percent report being distracted by digital devices during math lessons. Up to an hour a day of computer time for leisure was associated with higher performance. But heavy users, those who spent five to seven hours on computers for fun, had lower academic performance, even after adjusting for family and school socioeconomic profiles. 

Another factor could be the rise in migration across the world. Perhaps declining test scores reflect the challenge of educating new immigrants. However, the OECD didn’t find a statistically significant correlation between immigration and academic performance on average. In the United States, immigrants outscored students with native-born parents in math after adjusting for socio-economic status. There was no difference between immigrants and non-immigrants in reading.

Japan was one of the few countries to defy the trends. Both its math and reading scores rose considerably between 2018 and 2022. Akihiko Takahashi, professor emeritus of mathematics and mathematics education at Chicago’s DePaul University, said schools were closed for a shorter period of time in Japan and that helped, but he also credits the collective spirit among Japanese teachers. In his conversations with Japanese teachers, Takahashi learned how teachers covered for each other during school closures to make sure no students in their schools fell behind. Some went house to house, correcting student homework.  

It’s tempting to look at the terrible PISA math scores and say they are evidence that the U.S. needs to change how it teaches math. But the PISA results don’t offer clear recommendations on which math approaches are most effective. Even Japan, one of the top performing nations, has a mixed approach. Takahashi says that students are taught with a more progressive approach in elementary school, often asking students to solve problems on their own without step-by-step instructions and to develop their own mathematical reasoning. But by high school, when this PISA exam is taken, direct, explicit instruction is more the norm.

The new results also highlighted the continued decline of a former star. For years, Finland was a role model for excellent academic performance. Education officials visited from around the world to learn about its progressive approaches. But the country has dropped 60 points over the past few testing cycles – equivalent to losing three full school years of education. I suspect we won’t be hearing calls to teach the Finnish way anymore. “You have to be careful because the leaders of today can be the laggards of tomorrow,” said Tom Loveless, an independent researcher who studies international assessments.

There was one bright spot for American students. Fifteen-year-olds scored comparatively well on the PISA reading test, with their scores dropping by just one point while other countries experienced much steeper declines. But that good news is also tempered by the most recent scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) test, often called the Nation’s Report Card. Reading scores of fourth and eighth graders deteriorated over the last two testing cycles in 2019 and 2022.

Overall, the PISA results provide additional confirmation that U.S. students are in trouble, especially in math, and we can’t put all the blame on the pandemic.

This story about the 2022 PISA results was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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In 2017, public interest lawyers sued California because they claimed that too many low-income Black and Hispanic children weren’t learning to read at school. Filed on behalf of families and teachers at three schools with pitiful reading test scores, the suit was an effort to establish a constitutional right to read. However, before the courts resolved that legal question, the litigants settled the case in 2020. 

The settlement itself was noteworthy. The state agreed to give an extra $50 million to 75 elementary schools with the worst reading scores in the state to improve how they were teaching reading. Targeted at children who were just learning to read in kindergarten through third grade, the settlement amounted to a little more than $1,000 extra per student. Teachers were trained in evidence-based ways of teaching reading, including an emphasis on phonics and vocabulary. (A few of the 75 original schools didn’t participate or closed down.)

A pair of Stanford University education researchers studied whether the settlement made a difference, and their conclusion was that yes, it did. Third graders’ reading scores in 2022 and 2023 rose relative to their peers at comparable schools that weren’t eligible for the settlement payments. Researchers equated the gains to an extra 25 percent of a year of learning.

This right-to-read settlement took place during the pandemic when school closures led to learning losses; reading scores had declined sharply statewide and nationwide. However, test scores were strikingly stable at the schools that benefited from the settlement. More than 30 percent of the third graders at these lowest performing schools continued to reach Level 2 or higher on the California state reading tests, about the same as in 2019. Third grade reading scores slid at comparison schools between 2019 and 2022 and only began to recover in 2023. (Level 2 equates to slightly below grade-level proficiency with “standard nearly met” but is above the lowest Level 1 “standard not met.”) State testing of all students doesn’t begin until third grade and so there was no standard measure for younger kindergarten, first and second graders.

The settlement’s benefits can seem small. The majority of children in these schools still cannot read well. Even with these reading improvements, more than 65 percent of the students still scored at the lowest of the four levels on the state’s reading test.  But their reading gains are meaningful in the context of a real-life classroom experience for more than 7,000 third graders over two years, not merely a laboratory experiment or a small pilot program. The researchers characterized the reading improvements as larger than those seen in 90 percent of large-scale classroom interventions, according to a 2023 study. They also conducted a cost-benefit analysis and determined that the $50 million literacy program created by the settlement was 13 times more effective than a typical dollar spent at schools. 

“I wouldn’t call the results super large. I would call them cost effective,” said Jennifer Jennings, a sociologist at Princeton University who was not involved in the study, but attended a presentation of the working paper in November. 

The working paper, “The Achievement Effects of Scaling Early Literacy Reforms,” was posted to the website of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University on Dec. 4, 2023. It has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and may still be revised.

Thomas Dee, an economist at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education who conducted the analysis with doctoral student Sarah Novicoff, says that the reading improvements at the weakest schools in California bolster the evidence for the so-called “science of reading” approach, which has become associated with phonics instruction, but also includes pre-phonics sound awareness, reading fluency, vocabulary building and comprehension skills. Thus far, the best real-world evidence for the science of reading comes from Mississippi, where reading scores dramatically improved after schools changed how they taught reading. But there’s also been a debate over whether the state’s policy to hold weak readers back in third grade has been a bigger driver of the test score gains than the instructional changes. 

The structure of the right-to-read settlement offers a possible blueprint for how to bring evidence-based teaching practices into more classrooms, says Stanford’s Dee. School administrators and teachers both received training in the science of reading approach, but then schools were given the freedom to create their own plans and spend their share of the settlement funds as they saw fit within certain guidelines. The Sacramento County Office of Education served as an outside administrator, approving plans and overseeing them.

“How to drive research to inform practice within schools and within classrooms is the central problem we face in education policy,” said Dee. “When I look at this program, it’s an interesting push and pull of how to do that. Schools were encouraged to do their own planning and tailor what they were doing to their own circumstances. But they also had oversight from a state-designated agency that made sure the money was getting where it was supposed to, that they were doing things in a well-conceived way.”  

Some schools hired reading coaches to work with teachers on a regular basis. Others hired more aides to tutor children in small groups. Schools generally elected to spend most of the settlement money on salaries for new staff and extra compensation for current teachers to undergo retraining and less on new instructional materials, such as books or curriculums. By contrast, New York City’s current effort to reform reading instruction began with new curriculum requirements and teachers are complaining that they haven’t received the training to make the new curriculum work.

It’s unclear if this combination of retraining and money would be as effective in typical schools. The lowest performing schools that received the money tended to be staffed by many younger, rookie teachers who were still learning their craft. These new teachers may have been more open to adopting a new science of reading approach than veteran teachers who have years of experience teaching another way. 

That teacher retraining victory may foretell a short-lived success story for the students in these schools. The reason that there were so many new teachers is because teachers quickly burn out and quit high-poverty schools. The newly trained teachers in the science of reading may soon quit too. There’s a risk that all the investment in better teaching could soon evaporate. I’ll be curious to see their reading scores a few years from now.

This story about the right to read settlement was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Some kids appear to learn faster than others. A few years ago, a group of scientists at Carnegie Mellon University decided to study these rapid learners to see what they are doing differently and if their strategies could help the rest of us.

But as the scientists began their study, they stumbled upon a fundamental problem:  they could not find faster learners. After analyzing the learning rates of 7,000 children and adults using instructional software or playing educational games, the researchers could find no evidence that some students were progressing faster than others. All needed practice to learn something new, and they learned about the same amount from each practice attempt. On average, it was taking both high and low achievers about seven to eight practice exercises to learn a new concept, a rather tiny increment of learning that the researchers call a “knowledge component.”

“Students are starting in different places and ending in different places,” said Ken Koedinger, a cognitive psychologist and director of Carnegie Mellon’s LearnLab, where this research was conducted. “But they’re making progress at the same rates.” 

Koedinger and his team’s data analysis was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences, in March 2023. The study offers the hope that “anyone can learn anything they want” if they get well-designed practice exercises and put some effort into it.  Raw talent, like having a “knack for math” or a “gift for language,” isn’t required.

Koedinger and his colleagues wrote that they were initially “surprised” by the “astonishing amount of regularity in students’ learning rate.” The discovery contradicts our everyday experiences. Some students earn As in algebra, an example mentioned in the paper, and they appear to have learned faster than peers who get Cs.

But as the scientists confirmed their numerical results across 27 datasets, they began to understand that we commonly misinterpret prior knowledge for learning. Some kids already know a lot about a subject before a teacher begins a lesson. They may have already had exposure to fractions by making pancakes at home using measuring cups. The fact that they mastered a fractions unit faster than their peers doesn’t mean they learned faster; they had a head start. 

Like watching a marathon

Koedinger likens watching children learn to watching a marathon from the finish line. The first people to cross the finish line aren’t necessarily the fastest when there are staggered starts. A runner who finished sooner might have taken five hours, while another runner who finished later might have taken only four hours. You need to know each runner’s start time to measure the pace.

Koedinger and his colleagues measured each student’s baseline achievement and their incremental gains from that initial mark. This would be very difficult to measure in ordinary classrooms, but with educational software, researchers can sort practice exercises by the knowledge components required to do them, see how many problems students get right initially and track how their accuracy improves over time.  

In the LearnLab datasets, students typically used software after some initial instruction in their classrooms, such as a lesson by a teacher or a college reading assignment. The software guided students through practice problems and exercises. Initially, students in the same classrooms had wildly different accuracy rates on the same concepts. The top quarter of students were getting 75 percent of the questions correct, while the bottom quarter of students were getting only 55 percent correct. It’s a gigantic 20 percentage point difference in the starting lines. 

However, as students progressed through the computerized practice work, there was barely even one percentage point difference in learning rates. The fastest quarter of students improved their accuracy on each concept (or knowledge component) by about 2.6 percentage points after each practice attempt, while the slowest quarter of students improved by about 1.7 percentage points. It took seven to eight attempts for nearly all students to go from 65 percent accuracy, the average starting place, to 80 percent accuracy, which is what the researchers defined as mastery.

The advantage of a head start

The head start for the high achievers matters.  Above average students, who begin above 65 percent accuracy take fewer than four practice attempts to hit the 80 percent threshold. Below average students tend to require more than 13 attempts to hit the same 80 percent threshold. That difference – four versus 13 – can make it seem like students are learning at different paces. But they’re not. Each student, whether high or low, is learning about the same amount from each practice attempt. (The researchers didn’t study children with disabilities, and it’s unknown if their learning rates are different.)

The student data that Koedinger studied comes from educational software that is designed to be interactive and gives students multiple attempts to try things, make mistakes, get feedback and try again. Students learn by doing. Some of the feedback was very basic, like an answer key, alerting students if they got the problem right or wrong. But some of the feedback was sophisticated. Intelligent tutoring systems in math provided hints when students got stuck, offered complete explanations and displayed step-by-step examples. 

The conclusion that everyone’s learning rate is similar might apply only to well-designed versions of computerized learning. Koedinger thinks students probably learn at different paces in the analog world of paper and pencil, without the same guided practice and feedback. When students are learning more independently, he says, some might be better at checking their own work and seeking guidance.  

Struggling students might be getting fewer “opportunities” to learn in the analog world, Koedinger speculated. That doesn’t necessarily mean that schools and parents should be putting low-achieving students on computers more often. Many students quickly lose motivation to learn on screens and need more human interaction.

Memory ability varies

Learning rates were especially steady in math and science – the subjects that most of the educational software in this study focused on. But researchers noticed more divergence in learning rates in the six datasets that involved the teaching of English and other languages. One was a program that taught the use of the article “the,” which can be arbitrary. (Here’s an example: I’m swimming in the Atlantic Ocean today but in Lake Ontario tomorrow. There’s no “the” before lakes.) Another program taught Chinese vocabulary. Both relied on students’ memory and individual memory processing speeds differ. Memory is important in learning math and science too, but Koedinger said students might be able to compensate with other learning strategies, such as pattern recognition, deduction and induction. 

To understand that we all learn at a similar rate is one of the best arguments I’ve seen not to give up on ourselves when we’re failing and falling behind our peers. Koedinger hopes it will inspire teachers to change their attitudes about low achievers in their classrooms, and instead think of them as students who haven’t had the same number of practice opportunities and exposure to ideas that other kids have had. With the right exercises and feedback, and a bit of effort, they can learn too. Perhaps it’s time to revise the old saw about how to get to Carnegie Hall. Instead of practice, practice, practice, I’m going to start saying practice, listen to feedback and practice again (repeat seven times).

This story was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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The typical ambitious high school student takes advanced algebra, trigonometry, pre-calculus and calculus. None of that math may be necessary for the vast majority of undergraduates who don’t intend to major in science or another STEM field. 

But those same students don’t have many of the math skills that professors think they actually do need. In a survey, humanities, arts and social science professors say they really want their students to be able to analyze data, create charts and spreadsheets and reason mathematically – skills that high school math courses often skip or rush through.

“We still need the traditional algebra-to-calculus curriculum for students who are intending a STEM major,” said Gary Martin, a professor of mathematics education at Auburn University in Alabama who led the team that conducted this survey of college professors. “But that’s maybe 20 percent. The other 80 percent, what about them?” 

Martin said that the survey showed that high schools should stress “reasoning and critical thinking skills, decrease the emphasis on specific mathematical topics, and increase the focus on data analysis and statistics.”

This damning assessment of the content of high school math comes from a survey of about 300 Alabama college professors who oversee majors and undergraduate degree programs at both two-year and four-year public colleges in the humanities, arts, social sciences and some natural sciences. Majors that require calculus were excluded. 

The 2021 survey prompted Alabama’s public colleges and universities to allow more students to meet their math requirements by taking a statistics course instead of a traditional math class, such as college algebra or calculus. 

Martin and his colleagues later realized that the survey had implications for high school math too, and presented these results at an Oct. 26, 2023 session of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics annual conference in Washington D.C.  Full survey results are slated to be published in the winter 2024 issue of the MathAMATYC Educator, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges.

In the survey, professors were asked detailed questions about which mathematical concepts and skills students need in their programs. Many high school math topics were unimportant to college professors. For example, most professors said they wanted students to understand functions, particularly linear and exponential functions, which are used to model trends, population changes or compound interest. But Martin said that non-STEM students didn’t really need to learn trigonometric functions, which are used in satellite navigation or mechanical engineering. 

College professors were more keen on an assortment of what was described as mathematical “practices,” including the ability to “interpret quantitative information,” “strategically infer, evaluate and reason,” “apply the mathematics they know to solve everyday life, society and the workplace,” and to “look for patterns and relationships and make generalizations.”

“Teachers are so focused on covering all the topics that they don’t have time to do the practices when the practices are what really matters,” said Martin.

Understanding statistics was high on the list. An overwhelming majority of college professors said students in their programs needed to be familiar with statistics and data analysis, including concepts like correlation, causation and the importance of sample size. They wanted students to be able to “interpret displays of data and statistical analyses to understand the reasonableness of the claims being presented.” Professors say students need to be able to produce bar charts, histograms and line charts. Facility with spreadsheets, such as Excel, is useful too.

“Statistics is what you need,” said Martin. “Yet, in many K-12 classrooms, statistics is the proverbial end-of-the-year unit that you may or may not get to. And if you do, you rush through it, just to say you did it. But there’s not this sense of urgency to get through the statistics, as there is to get through the math topics.”

Though the survey took place only in Alabama and professors in other states might have different thoughts on the math that students need, Martin suspects that there are more similarities than differences.

The mismatch between what students learn in high school and what they need in college isn’t easy to fix. Teachers generally don’t have time for longer statistics units, or the ability to go deeper into math concepts so that students can develop their reasoning skills, because high school math courses have become bloated with too many topics. However, there is no consensus on which algebra topics to jettison.

Encouraging high school students to take statistics classes during their junior and senior years is also fraught. College admissions officers value calculus, almost as a proxy for intelligence. And college admissions tests tend to emphasize math skills that students will practice more on the algebra-to-calculus track. A diversion to data analysis risks putting students at a disadvantage. 

The thorniest problem is that revamping high school math could force students to make big choices in school before they know what they want to study in college. Students who want to enter STEM fields still need calculus and the country needs more people to pursue STEM careers. Taking more students off of the calculus track could close doors to many students and ultimately weaken the U.S. economy.

Martin said it’s also important to remember that vocational training is not the only purpose of math education.  “We don’t have students read Shakespeare because they need it to be effective in whatever they’re going to do later,” he said. “It adds something to your life. I felt that it really gave me breadth as a human being.”  He wants high school students to study some math concepts they will never need because there’s a beauty to them. “Appreciating mathematics is a really intriguing way of looking at the world,” he said.

Martin and his colleagues don’t have any definitive solutions, but their survey is a helpful data point in demonstrating how too few students are getting the mathematical foundations they need for the future. 

This story about high school math was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Much attention in the post-pandemic era has been on what students have lost – days of school, psychological health, knowledge and skills. But now we have evidence that they may also have gained something: schools that address more of their needs. A majority of public schools have begun providing services that are far afield from traditional academics, including healthcare, housing assistance, childcare and food aid. 

In a Department of Education survey released in October 2023 of more than 1,300 public schools, 60 percent said they were partnering with community organizations to provide non-educational services. That’s up from 45 percent a year earlier in 2022, the first time the department surveyed schools about their involvement in these services. They include access to medical, dental, and mental health providers as well as social workers. Adult education is also often part of the package; the extras are not just for kids. 

“It is a shift,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, where she tracks school spending. “We’ve seen partnering with the YMCA and with health groups for medical services and psychological evaluations.”

Deeper involvement in the community started as an emergency response to the coronavirus pandemic. As schools shuttered their classrooms, many became hubs where families obtained food or internet access. Months later, many schools opened their doors to become vaccine centers. 

New community alliances were further fueled by more than $200 billion in federal pandemic recovery funds that have flowed to schools. “Schools have a lot of money now and they’re trying to spend it down,” said Roza. Federal regulations encourage schools to spend recovery funds on nonprofit community services, and unspent funds will eventually be forfeited.

The term “community school” generally refers to schools that provide a cluster of wraparound services under one roof. The hope is that students living in poverty will learn more if their basic needs are met. Schools that provide only one or two services are likely among the 60 percent of schools that said they were using a community school or wraparound services model, but they aren’t necessarily full-fledged community schools, Department of Education officials said.

The wording of the question on the federal School Pulse Panel survey administered in August 2023 allowed for a broad interpretation of what it means to be a community school. The question posed to a sample of schools across all 50 states was this: “Does your school use a “community school” or “wraparound services” model? A community school or wraparound services model is when a school partners with other government agencies and/or local nonprofits to support and engage with the local community (e.g., providing mental and physical health care, nutrition, housing assistance, etc.).” 

The most common service provided was mental health (66 percent of schools) followed by food assistance (55 percent). Less common were medical clinics and adult education, but many more schools said they were providing these services than in the past.

The number of full-fledged community schools is also believed to be growing, according to education officials and researchers. Federal funding for community schools tripled during the pandemic to $75 million in 2021-22 from $25 million in 2019-20. According to the  education department, the federal community schools program now serves more than 700,000 students in about 250 school districts, but there are additional state and private funding sources too. 

Whether it’s a good idea for most schools to expand their mission and adopt aspects of the community school model depends on one’s view of the purpose of school. Some argue that schools are taking on too many functions and should not attempt to create outposts for outside services. Others argue that strong community engagement is an important aspect of education and can improve daily attendance and learning. Research studies conducted before the pandemic have found that academic benefits from full-fledged community schools can take several years to materialize. It’s a big investment without an instant payoff.

Meanwhile, it’s unclear whether schools will continue to embrace their expanded mission after federal pandemic funds expire in March 2026. That’s when the last payments to contractors and outside organizations for services rendered can be made. Contracts must be signed by September 2024.

Edunomics’s Roza thinks many of these community services will be the first to go as schools face future budget cuts. But she also predicts that some will endure as schools raise money from state governments and philanthropies to continue popular programs.

If that happens, it will be an example of another unexpected consequence of the pandemic. Even as pundits decry how the pandemic has eroded support for public education, it may have profoundly transformed the role of schools and made them even more vital.

This story about wraparound services was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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