I haven’t written many posts in 2025; here are the measly few I’ve managed to squeak out:

• Literacy Is Not Just for ELA: The Power of Content-Rich Teacher Tall
• More Productive Than an Hour of Instruction?: The Surprising Cognitive Science of a Walk in the Park
• AI, Mastery, and the Barbell of Cognitive Enhancement

While my bandwidth to peruse research has diminished this year (work has been busy, and I like spending time with my children) I have still encountered a fair number of compelling studies. In keeping with the tradition begun in 2023, and building on last year’s review, I am endeavoring to round up the research that has crossed my radar over the last 12 months.

This year presents a difficult juncture for research. Political aggression against academic institutions, the immigrants who power their PhD programs, and the federal contracts essential to their survival has disrupted research. Despite this, strong research continues to be published. Because research is a slow-moving endeavor, I suspect the full effects of these disruptions will manifest increasingly in future roundups; for now, the good work persists.

The research landscape of 2025 highlights a continued shift toward experience-dependent plasticity. This view treats the human mind as a dynamic ecosystem shaped by biological rhythms, cultural “software,” and technological catalysts. Learning is no longer seen as a linear accumulation of skills, but as a sophisticated orchestration of “statistical” internal models and external social and cultural and technological attunements.

Longtime readers will recognize this “ecosystem” view from my other blog on Schools as Ecosystems. It is validating to see the field increasingly adopting this ecological lens—viewing the learner not as an isolated machine, but as an organism deeply embedded in a biological and cultural context.

Our “big buckets” for this year have ended up mirroring the 2024 roundup, which means, methinks, that we have settled upon a perennial organizational structure:

• The Science of Reading and Writing
• Content Knowledge as an Anchor to Literacy
• Studies on Language Development
• Multilinguals and Multilingualism
• Rhythm, Attention, and Memory
• School, Social-Emotional, and Contextual Effects
• The Frontier of Artificial Intelligence and Neural Modeling
  

Let’s jump in!

2024 was another great year filled with fascinating research.

Over the course of this year, I’ve written a few posts about some of it:

• How to Externalize Internal Language
• Research Highlight 3: The Reading Profiles of English Learners
• Research Highlight 4: Structuring Classroom Learning for Student Success and Agency
• A speculative series (7 posts so far) on AI, LLMs, and Language!
• Research Highlight 5: Learning In a New Language Takes Effort

Last year, I began a tradition that seems worth maintaining: reviewing all the sundry research that has come across my radar over the course of 2024.

• Paper Citation: Philip Capin, Sharon Vaughn, Joseph E. Miller, Jeremy Miciak, Anna-Mari Fall, Greg Roberts, Eunsoo Cho, Amy E. Barth, Paul K. Steinle & Jack M. Fletcher (2023) Investigating the Reading Profiles of Middle School Emergent Bilinguals with Significant Reading Comprehension Difficulties, Scientific Studies of Reading, DOI: 10.1080/10888438.2023.2254871

A few months ago, a study crossed my radar that caused me to stop, print it out, mark it up, and then begin digging into related studies, which is what I do when a study grabs my attention.

Getting into research is akin to getting into Miles Davis—if you like a given song or album, you may start checking out the other musicians he plays with, and they'll lead you into a new and ever expanding fractal universe, because Davis had a knack for collaborating with musicians who were geniuses in their own right. A few examples: John Coltrane, Tony Williams, Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, John McLaughlin, Wayne Shorter, Jack DeJohnette, the list goes on and on.

This has been a great year for education research. I thought it could be fun to review some of what has come across my own limited radar over the course of 2023.

The method I used to create this wrap-up was to go back through my Twitter timeline starting in January, and pull all research related tweets into a doc. I then began sorting those by theme and ended up with several high-level buckets, with further sub-themes within and across those buckets. Note that I didn’t also go through my Mastodon nor Bluesky feeds, as this was time-consuming enough!

The rough big ticket research items I ended up with were:

• Multilinguals and multilingualism
• Reading
• Morphology
• The influence of physical or cultural environment
• The content of teaching and learning
• The precedence of academic skills over soft skills
• Brain research and Artificial Neural Networks

I'm going to try out a new type of post here, in which I'll share one interesting research item I've happened across in greater depth. In the past, I've simply tweeted them out, but then I forget about them. I'm hoping this will be a better way of retaining them in memory and deepening my understanding — and of course, sharing them with you!

Individual differences in L2 listening proficiency revisited: Roles of form, meaning, and use aspects of phonological vocabulary knowledge

• Citation: Saito, K., Uchihara, T., Takizawa, K., & Suzukida, Y. (2023). Individual differences in L2 listening proficiency revisited: Roles of form, meaning, and use aspects of phonological vocabulary knowledge. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1-27. doi:10.1017/S027226312300044X

This paper explores how various aspects of phonological vocabulary knowledge affect second language (L2) listening proficiency. The study involved 126 Japanese learners of English.

Back in 1978, Bloom & Lahey presented a simple and useful model of language: form, meaning, and use.

In my last post, we landed on the idea of a nascent scaffold that we are born with in our brains, which is developed through our daily interactions with one another – and then further accelerated through the reinforcement and extension of written language use.

Before we venture into the wilds of the possible relations between language and thought, I wanted to build on this idea of how our inner scaffolds are most fully realized through speaking, listening, reading, and writing by geeking out about the beauty and wonder of multilingualism.

There is a concept termed diglossia worth exploring in relation to dialects of African American English used in the United States.

What is diglossia?

Diglossia can be defined as “the coexistence of two varieties of the same language throughout a speech community. Often, one form is the literary or prestige dialect, and the other is a common dialect spoken by most of the population.”

Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. diglossia. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/diglossia

Gaining a clear picture of a student’s language and literacy abilities in both English and their home language is critically important in two scenarios:

• the student has just entered your school and speaks another language at home (whether because he is entering the school system in kindergarten or is newly arrived from another country and entering in a later grade)
• the student is in a bilingual program

Gaining information in both languages for bilingual students in these situations can portray a completely different spectrum of profiles than when assessing in English only.

In my last post, we reviewed a round up of some research on phonology, with clarifications around what we know and what we do not yet know regarding the relation of advanced phonemic awareness training and phonemic proficiency to outcomes for struggling readers.

One piece I briefly mentioned in that post and which I’d like to dig further into is from David Share, “Is the Science of Reading Just the Science of Reading English?“

This is an important question to ask, because while research into how children who speak English learn to read in English has become quite substantive (even if still mostly unknown in too many classrooms), there is still quite a bit we don’t know about learning to read in English if you don’t speak English as your first language, and there’s even more we don’t yet know about learning to read in languages other than English.