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In the COVID-19 crisis, the science of learning has two different responsibilities: first, to offer guidance about how best to deal with the impact of the current situation, including lockdown and home-schooling; and second, to consider bigger questions about what this large-scale educational experiment might mean for the future. The first part of this Viewpoint summarises advice for parents on mental health, and on becoming stand-in-teachers. The second part, taking the longer view, considers the potential negative impact of the COVID-19 crisis in increasing inequality in education; but also the potential positive impact of driving innovations in technology use for educating children.

Student ratings of teaching play a significant role in career outcomes for higher education instructors. Although instructor gender has been shown to play an important role in influencing student ratings, the extent and nature of that role remains contested. While difficult to separate gender from teaching practices in person, it is possible to disguise an instructor’s gender identity online. In our experiment, assistant instructors in an online class each operated under two different gender identities. Students rated the male identity significantly higher than the female identity, regardless of the instructor’s actual gender, demonstrating gender bias. Given the vital role that student ratings play in academic career trajectories, this finding warrants considerable attention.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore philosophies of progressive education circulating in Australia in the period immediately following the expansion of secondary schools in the 1960s. It examines the rise of the alternative and community school movement of the 1970s, focusing on initiatives within the Victorian government school sector. It aims to better understand the realisation of progressive education in the design and spatial arrangements of schools, with specific reference to the re-making of school and community relations and new norms of the student-subject of alternative schooling. Design/methodology/approach – It combines historical analysis of educational ideas and reforms, focusing largely on the ideas of practitioners and networks of educators, and is guided by an interest in the importance of school space and place in mediating educational change and aspirations. It draws on published writings and reports from teachers and commentators in the 1970s, publications from the Victorian Department of Education, media discussions, internal and published documentation on specific schools and oral history interviews with former teachers and principals who worked at alternative schools. Findings – It shows the different realisation of radical aims in the set up of two schools, against a backdrop of wider innovations in state education, looking specifically at the imagined effects of re-arranging the physical and symbolic space of schooling. Originality/value – Its value lies in offering the beginnings of a history of 1970s educational progressivism. It brings forward a focus on the spatial dimensions of radical schooling, and moves from characterisation of a mood of change to illuminate the complexities of these ideas in the contrasting ambitions and design of two signature community schools.

BackgroundThis study focuses on probing preservice technology teachers’ cognitive structures and how they construct engineering design in technology-learning activities and explores the effects of infusing an engineering design process into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) project-based learning to develop preservice technology teachers’ cognitive structures for engineering design thinking.ResultsThe study employed a quasi-experimental design, and twenty-eight preservice technology teachers participated in the teaching experiment. The flow-map method and metalistening technique were utilized to enable preservice technology teachers to create flow maps of engineering design, and a chi-square test was employed to analyze the data. The results suggest that (1) applying the engineering design process to STEM project-based learning is beneficial for developing preservice technology teachers’ schema of design thinking, especially with respect to clarifying the problem, generating ideas, modeling, and feasibility analysis, and (2) it is important to encourage teachers to further explore the systematic concepts of engineering design thinking and expand their abilities by merging the engineering design process into STEM project-based learning.ConclusionsThe findings of this study provide initial evidence on the effects of infusing the engineering design process into STEM project-based learning to develop preservice technology teachers’ engineering design thinking. However, further work should focus on exploring how to overcome the weaknesses of preservice technology teachers’ engineering design thinking by adding a few elements of engineering design thinking pedagogy, e.g., designing learning activities that are relevant to real life.

Teacher scaffolding, in which teachers support students adaptively or contingently, is assumed to be effective. Yet, hardly any evidence from classroom studies exists. With the current experimental classroom study we investigated whether scaffolding affects students' achievement, task effort, and appreciation of teacher support, when students work in small groups. We investigated both the effects of support quality (i.e., contingency) and the duration of the independent working time of the groups. Thirty social studies teachers of pre-vocational education and 768 students (age 12-15) participated. All teachers taught a five-lesson project on the European Union and the teachers in the scaffolding condition additionally took part in a scaffolding intervention. Low contingent support was more effective in promoting students' achievement and task effort than high contingent support in situations where independent working time was low (i.e. help was frequent). In situations where independent working time was high (i.e., help was less frequent), high contingent support was more effective than low contingent support in fostering students' achievement (when correcting for students' task effort). In addition, higher levels of contingent support resulted in a higher appreciation of support. Scaffolding, thus, is not unequivocally effective; its effectiveness depends, among other things, on the independent working time of the groups and students' task effort. The present study is one of the first experimental study on scaffolding in an authentic classroom context, including factors that appear to matter in such an authentic context.

In recent years, many researchers have been engaged in the development of educational computer games; however, previous studies have indicated that, without supportive models that take individual students’ learning needs or difficulties into consideration, students might only show temporary interest during the learning process, and their learning performance is often not as good as expected. Learning styles have been recognized as being an important human factor affecting students’ learning performance. Previous studies have shown that, by taking learning styles into account, learning systems can be of greater benefit to students owing to the provision of personalized learning content presentation that matches the information perceiving and processing styles of individuals. In this paper, a personalized game-based learning approach is proposed based on the sequential/global dimension of the learning style proposed by Felder and Silverman. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a role-playing game has been implemented based on the approach; moreover, an experiment has been conducted on an elementary school natural science course. From the experimental results, it is found that the personalized educational computer game not only promotes learning motivation, but also improves the learning achievements of the students.

Research in fields other than education has found that studies with small sample sizes tend to have larger effect sizes than those with large samples. This article examines the relationship between sample size and effect size in education. It analyzes data from 185 studies of elementary and secondary mathematics programs that met the standards of the Best Evidence Encyclopedia. As predicted, there was a significant negative correlation between sample size and effect size. The differences in effect sizes between small and large experiments were much greater than those between randomized and matched experiments. Explanations for the effects of sample size on effect size are discussed.

A nap soon after encoding leads to better learning in infancy. However, whether napping plays the same role in preschoolers' learning is unclear. In Experiment 1 (N = 39), 3-year-old habitual and nonhabitual nappers learned novel verbs before a nap or a period of wakefulness and received a generalization test examining word extension to novel actors after 24 hr. Only habitual and nonhabitual nappers who napped after learning generalized 24 hr later. In Experiment 2 (N = 40), children learned the same verbs but were tested within 2-3 min of training. Here, habitual and nonhabitual nappers retained the mappings but did not generalize. The results suggest that naps consolidate weak learning that habitual and nonhabitual nappers would otherwise forget over periods of wakefulness.

This paper explores the challenge of achieving consistent effectiveness in integrating Mathematics Education Technology (MET) in K-12 classrooms, focusing on factors such as technology type, timing, and instructional strategies. It highlights the difficulties novice teachers face in optimizing MET compared to experienced educators, emphasizing the need to better understand the ideal duration and application of MET in various teaching settings. This study proposes using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to predict and optimize MET effectiveness, aiming to enhance student achievement. However, a key challenge is the lack of comprehensive MET databases, prompting the exploration of novel data collection methods and meta-analysis for educational data mining. An AI-based predictive model is developed for MET, analyzing 423 publications on its effectiveness in Chinese K-12 mathematics education. Nine AI-driven predictive models were created, with the best-performing predictive model being eXtreme Gradient Boosting, enhanced with L2 Regularization, Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique–augmented Regression (SMOTER), and Active Learning. The proposed model was further refined using Particle Swarm Optimization for hyperparameter tuning and analyzed with Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) values to assess feature importance. Numerical results indicated that the duration of MET usage is a critical factor for optimization. A controlled experiment in a Mainland China middle school validated the model’s efficacy, showing that model-guided MET significantly outperformed traditional methods. These findings offer valuable insights for bridging gaps between novice and experienced teachers, promoting educational equity, and providing practical recommendations for improving MET integration in Mathematics education.

This study conceptually replicates Cepeda, Coburn, Rohrer, Wixted, Mozer, & Pashler’s (2009, Experiment 1) study on the effects of distributed practice on second language (L2) vocabulary learning to examine its generalizability to a new context and population sample. The secondary focus of the paper is to examine the challenges and affordances of online data collection and participant recruitment sites. Both the original and our study examined the effects of distributed practice on two study sessions to learn L2 vocabulary assessed on a 10-day delayed posttest. Our results showed that the spaced conditions significantly outperformed the massed condition, mirroring the original study’s findings. However, Cepeda et al.’s (2009) participants outscored our participants by 10–20% (in each experimental group) on the posttest. While these findings highlight the benefits of spacing towards learning and memory, they also underscore the challenges researchers may face when conducting experimental research in online environments.