Every New Year brings with it new things. The same applies to the field of education as people come up with concepts, test them, and either prove them redundant, useful, or useless in the process of student learning. For instance, can doodling prove useful in enhancing learning? Not quite. Can attendance awards prove useful? Can girls and boys similarly process mathematics?
So what trends highlight the education sector in 2020?
Research Highlights in Education
- Draw something down to remember it. A study conducted in 2020 found out that learners remember concepts less when studying while doodling. The study also addressed a misconception where people lump together doodling and drawing in as much as they completely prove different. Doodling distracts the concentration of a student while drawing reinforces whatever concept you have focused on.
- Awards don’t enhance attendance but instructors do. The common occurrence of entails awarding students for their attendance. However, a study found these awards a recipe for absenteeism in school, especially when they backfire spectacularly. Further, the research details the role of teachers in ensuring student attendance in school when they make note of absences and reach out to make inquiries. A study in 2020 detailed its findings on how highly engaged instructors to decrease student absences by forty-nine percent.
- Math circuitry proves similar for both girls and boys. It became possible through the use of advanced imaging tech, such as fMRI on the brain activity of kids. The study analyzed the brain activity of a hundred and four kids aged three to ten as they observed math questions getting solved. The study revealed that parietal neural activity linked with cognition when it comes to numerical aspects remained near identical for both genders. As such, the difference between performances in math between genders arises from social constructs.
- The study of “Summer Slide” cannot get replicated. The concept has widespread acceptance and influence, though the bulk of what we understand about it centers on a study conducted in the 1980s. It concluded that kids who played all summer instead of studying fell further behind compared to their counterparts. Further, when the study got attempted again, it failed miserably as the initial testing methods biased the score difference between students. Additionally, the modern scoring technique when applied to the original data shows a shrinking of the gap as learners advanced in age. The notion that the gap widens during the summer based on activity also proves exaggerated.
- Abandon the arts programs at your detriment. In most jurisdictions, art programs face a continued assault in terms of budget cuts. But, studies show it can prove a massive mistake. Arts offer academic, cognitive, social, and behavioral benefits that transcend learning things like music or acting in plays. Further, a study conducted by Rice University found that an expansion of a school’s art program enhanced writing scores for students. The study involved ten thousand students from third grade up to the eighth grade. Additionally, a recent study showed artistic commitment to enhancing function skills such as working memory and focus. Such skills can prove useful in ensuring success both academically and in life.
Conclusion
The above-discussed research highlights in education only capture a few among many in this field. Further, such highlights can prove useful going forward, especially in modeling better teaching and learning methods.