Happy New Year! As we start 2025 with resolutions and commitments to goals, here are some of the top findings from research studies from the past year. The topics include:
- The impact of outdoor learning on cognitive and social-emotional growth
- The effectiveness of learning from errors in math
- The importance of keeping English learners with their peers
- The power of peer learning
- A modest turnaround in youth mental health
The Impact of Outdoor Learning on Cognitive and Social-Emotional Growth
Key Findings
- Outdoor activities are easily aligned to course standards in subjects such as art, science, social studies, and English.
- These types of activities can help with student's 'estrangement from nature'.
- Outdoor activities can build cognitive and processing skills, and those who participated reported less stress, closer connections to their own emotions, and improved self-esteem.
The Effectiveness of Learning from Errors in Math
Key Findings
- Teaching efficacy improved when time was focused on students' mathematical errors and engaged in collaborative discussions about common mistakes of logic or computation.
- Groups of students who spent time in teacher-led learning sessions devoted to answers students got wrong scored roughly the same as their peers; however the group in the 'learning from errors' group invested half the time.
- Embracing mistakes supports learning, alters the climate of the classroom, deepens relationships, and improves student motivation.
The Importance of Keeping English Learners with their Peers
Key Findings
- English learners participated with their proficient peers in a 10-week literacy program building around science and social studies.
- The focus was on interactive read-alouds, target vocabulary, peers discussions, and structured writing tasks.
- Those who remained in the classroom with their peers out-performed English learners who were removed for remediation in vocabulary and writing.
The Power of Peer Learning
Key Findings
- Students who taught a classmate reported elevated levels of anxiety and greater levels of brain activity across the social and cognitive processing of the brain.
- They also significantly out-performed the restudy group on tests of recall and transfer, monitored their learning more effectively, and included more elaborate examples in their explanations.
- Researchers hypothesized that the presence of classmates may have attuned students to 'up their game'
- It's best to mix direct instruction with group activities such as turn and talk, teaching classmates, gamifying quizzes, peer review, etc.
A Modest Turnaround in Youth Mental Health
Key Findings
- While student mental health has shown a decline in the last decade, the latest CDC data suggest we may finally reaching a turning point.
- There was a modest decrease in the percentage of students feeling persistently sad or hopeless.
- There is still much work ahead, but with schools providing more services for youth mental health, there is progress we can build on.
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