What We Learned from Research in 2024

Stacks of papers

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:

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.

The method I used to create this wrap-up was to go back through my X/Twitter and Bluesky timelines 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.

The rough big ticket items I ended up with were:

The Science of Reading and Writing

There were some insightful, confirming, and surprising studies adding to the body of what we know about reading and writing development.

Dyslexia

There was a focus on revisiting the definition of dyslexia and considerations for both streamlining and expanding it.

Speaking of moving past assumptions solely based on the English orthography, another study in this issue focused on how dyslexia manifested similarly and differently in children in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Taipei.

Want to improve phonemic awareness in pre-readers at risk for dyslexia? Have them play Space Invaders Extreme 2!

Phonological and Morphological Awareness

When it comes to polysyllabic word reading (words like “dinosaur” or “construction”), this study found that kids in grade 3-5 who already knew a word were more likely to read it correctly. While this study doesn’t provide implications for students learning English, clearly ensuring that they can connect the meaning of words to the forms of words is important – more on this below in the section on multilingual learners. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

And indeed, knowing more about the forms of words – and not only their sounds – “is an important longitudinal predictor of spelling development.” Journal of Research in Reading

When learning new words, the distinctiveness of those words helps them to be remembered.

And let’s not forget the importance of morphological awareness!

While there are large differences within and between studies, morphology instruction appears to be effective for improving reading and spelling outcomes, and spelling effects can transfer to untrained words. Educational Psychology Review

Morphological systems are dynamic – balancing regularity and irregularity of forms.

Orthographic Processing

As we read, our eyes fixate briefly on the words in print. But we are not simply fixating on the center of words – we are also using what we know of the statistical structure of language to target the position in a word that minimizes uncertainty and maximizes our reading efficiency.

The presence of nearby words can interfere with the brain's ability to process a fixated word, suggesting that skilled reading involves a constant balancing act.

Beyond Word Reading

After all, acquiring reading fluency is not only about recognizing words in isolation but also about efficiently processing them in sequence.

Language regions in the left hemisphere light up when reading uncommon sentences, while straightforward sentences elicit little response.

When it comes to reading fluency, however, we need to be cautious in interpreting oral reading fluency rates as it relates to reading comprehension. ORF measures are widely used as a proxy for reading comprehension.

Why might this be? Many widely used tests of reading fluency may use simplified texts, which most students can comprehend more easily, thus inflating the correlation between fluency and comprehension. Journal of School Psychology

Gaining fluency in writing also leads to higher quality writing.

Improving Reading and Writing

There is a lot of improvement still needed in classroom instruction for reading comprehension, as this follow-up from a 50 year old observation study found. While research-based practices have increased, teachers continue to spend time mainly engaging in IRE styles of discourse (initiation-response-evaluation) rather than engaging students in extensive discussion of text or teaching practices and knowledge that more deeply support reading comprehension.

While we know that kindergarten reading intervention can be critical for students at risk, providing the right level of fidelity and dosage requires supporting teachers with implementation.

To further the point that teachers need systems-level support: aligning Tier 2 interventions with Tier 1 instruction leads to improved content knowledge, vocabulary, and content reading comprehension for kids who need it the most in fourth grade.

In a new report, “The Opportunity Makers,” TNTP similarly stressed the importance of instructional coherence and consistency in schools that were making a difference in students’ learning outcomes.

One thing is for sure: simply adding more independent reading time to a school schedule is no guarantee of improved reading comprehension.

Integrating reading with explicit writing instruction “can improve primary grade students’ writing, discourse knowledge, planning, oral language, and spelling skills.” Scientific Studies of Reading

Writing is a technology that has further differentiated humans from other animals.

Writing by hand is critical to not only developing literacy – but for adults for deeper thinking and learning.

Screen Time and Literacy

Most screen time can be detrimental to language and reading development, and to deeper comprehension of what we read. And yet digital technology is increasingly ubiquitous in classrooms and in our lives.

All of that said, there is evidence that enhancing the interactivity of a PBS KIDS science show with conversational agents enhances their science learning. Journal of Educational Psychology

Content Knowledge as an Anchor to Literacy

Speaking of reading comprehension and science, ever since E.D. Hirsch, Jr. first proposed the concept of “core knowledge,” there has been increasing research demonstrating the importance of content knowledge to reading comprehension and literacy development – and vice versa.

Background Knowledge, Reading Comprehension, and the Novice-Expert Continuum

Hugh Catts and Alan Kamhi wrote a great piece on the importance of background knowledge to reading comprehension, stressing the understanding of reading comprehension as a constellation of skills rather than a singular component.

As with reading, it’s important for writers to remember the novice vs. expert continuum, especially in terms of their audience. This study found that journalists write mostly at the level that makes most sense to them – but their readers would far prefer reading texts that were simpler.

After all, expertise and experience is a precondition for flow, as brain scans of Philly jazz musicians reveals. The Conversation

Building Interdisciplinary Knowledge

Disciplinary read-alouds can build interdisciplinary student knowledge and reading comprehension through the use of “structured supplements” that promotes transfer and connections between schema and vocabulary. In this study, students connected social studies and science content and texts.

“This experimental study illustrates how sustaining and spiraling science schemas (background knowledge) and vocabulary from Grades 1 to 3 can improve students’ ability to comprehend passages in science, English language arts, and mathematics. Furthermore, findings suggest that systematically building background and vocabulary knowledge can sustain positive gains in elementary-grade students’ reading comprehension ability through the end of Grade 4, 14 months after the conclusion of the intervention activities.” Developmental Psychology; also see Neena Saha’s great Reading Research Recap on this study

Boosting knowledge of science vocabulary improves science knowledge.

Another study demonstrated that a classroom-based content literacy intervention significantly improved argumentative writing skills for both English learners (ELs) and their English-proficient (EP) peers in grades 1 and 2. The intervention consisted of thematic units in social studies and science designed to build students’ content and vocabulary knowledge through informational texts and concept mapping and to transfer their schema to argumentative writing and research collaboration. Journal of Educational Psychology

If we want more literacy instruction integrated into secondary content area classrooms, then we had better consider “ease of use” for teachers to incorporate those practices successfully. Reading Psychology

Math, Language, and Literacy

Content knowledge and literacy and language development aren’t only about social studies and science, by the way. Math and reading fluency are connected!

In fact, language is fundamental to math.

An analysis of 1,657 4th/5th grade lessons in 317 classrooms in 4 districts finds “students’ exposure to mathematical language varies substantially across lessons” and students make more progress in classrooms where teachers use more mathematical language. EdWorkingPapers

Furthermore, “Students learn more math skills when their teacher devotes more class time to individual practice and assessment. In contrast, students learn more language skills when their teacher devotes more class time to discussion and work in groups of students” Harvard GSE Ed Magazine

When it comes to supporting students at various levels of proficiency in the language of instruction (in this study’s case, German), language supports should be provided only to those at lower levels of proficiency.

Another study highlighted the interconnected nature of reading and content knowledge, showing that early reading skills boost initial growth in science and math. Furthermore, as children progress through elementary school, the mutually reinforcing relationship between reading proficiency and knowledge in science and math becomes increasingly strong, with each skill continually enhancing the other.

Studies on Language Development

We’ll dig far deeper into multilingualism and its relation to overall language and literacy development in our next section. Before we do, however, let’s look at some of the studies related to language development at large.

The Foundations of Language and Literacy

The acoustic environment that one is born into is important for all species.

Animals may lack language (and other human-distinctive behavioural traits) because they perform badly at remembering sequences of stimuli.

For humans, “Language learning begins in the womb, and it begins with prosody. Exposure to speech in the womb leads to lasting changes in the brain, increasing the newborns’ sensitivity to previously heard languages.”

Not only that, but how the brains of newborns respond to speech is predictive of their later literacy development.

Furthermore, the connectivity of the infant brain–specifically in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) strongly predicts future reading abilities. The strength of these early neural connections in infancy forecasts phonological skills at kindergarten, which in turn mediate the relationship between the infant brain's organization and school-age reading proficiency.

Sensitivity to the sounds of speech is not only important in infants. For adults, too, “”individual differences in sensitivity to phonetic categories mediates speech perception in challenging listening situations.”
The Journal of the Acoustic Society of America

The Patterns of Language

People learn patterns better when they are simple and consistent. This includes languages, but also visual, auditory, and even tactile information. This shapes not only how we learn languages but also how languages evolve over time.

Our brains are more aligned with AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) than we may think.

This paper shows our brains can effortlessly detect patterns at both fast and slow timescales (prioritizing quick changes). Remarkably, this dual-level learning process can be modeled by simple neural networks, suggesting a unified mechanism for processing complex temporal information. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

The sounds and rhythm of language, also known as prosody, were found to play a role in how we process syntax.

And the brain processes phonemes in parallel, meaning multiple sounds can be processed simultaneously without interference. What’s also crazy is that our brains actually retain a speech sound briefly as other sounds are coming in, so there is elapsed processing time. Also fascinatingly, the first phoneme of a word appears to be processed differently from subsequent phonemes. The neural representation of the first phoneme can be decoded earlier, and its information is maintained for a longer duration.

The Role of Linguistic Input

You’ve no doubt heard of the infamous “30 million word gap.” Yet one of the key themes of more recent research – including this year’s – is that the quality of input that children receive is far more important than quantity alone.

A study introduced a novel term—“burstiness”—to describe irregular, “spiky” bursts of speech which were found to be more beneficial for vocabulary growth than a consistent stream of language. The researchers used child-centered audio recorders to track the language environments of 292 children aged 2-7 years, over 555 days.

“Together these findings highlight the fact that quality of input per se matters more than child age, grade, or language of instruction.” Psychological Bulletin

Gestures

Linguistic input is not merely confined to speech. When referents are not physically present, caregivers use multimodal cues, particularly iconic cues. Iconic cues are communicative forms, such as words, signs, or gestures, that have a resemblance to the sensory-motor or conceptual properties of their referents.

In fact, gestures provide a critically important source of input.

Speaking of gestures – the stereotype that Italians gesture more effusively than others certainly bears out when you compare them to Swedes (my heritage).

Shared Reading

Of course, we also know that one of the richest sources of linguistic input, especially early in life, is via shared reading.

Shared reading is a great source of rarer or more “academic” words. Preschoolers who use more rare vocabulary words have higher vocabulary scores on norm-referenced vocabulary measures. ASHA American Journal of Speech Pathology

Brains, Bodies, and Language

But what about “everyday language”? How is that developed? Across languages, verbs are acquired in the following order: 1) vision, 2) touch, then 3) hearing. Vision verbs (see, look) are acquired earliest and produced most frequently by children of all ages. Taste and smell verbs were produced less frequently than other perception verbs across the board. Cognitive Science

Speaking of verbs and language related to physical experience: linking language with physical or imagined movement can make it easier for children to grasp what they hear. In other words, children can be taught to improve their listening comprehension skills, as this study shows. Four and five years olds were provided with a listening comprehension intervention that taught them “to align visual and motor processing with language comprehension.”

We’ve looked at some of the research on the surprising–and fascinating–separation of language and cognition in the human brain here on this blog before in Language and Cognition and Thinking Inside and Outside of Language. But clearly, there is a link to some degree between cognition and language.

In a study of people with aphasia (difficulty with language after a brain injury), they found that executive function was related to language ability, with verbal executive function and fluency more strongly linked to micro-linguistic narrative language such as grammar and word choice, while nonverbal executive function plays a more prominent role in macro-level discourse skills like coherence and organization. ASHA American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology

When children with developmental language disorder (DLD) received both cognitive and linguistic training, they improved their verbal short-term memory and verbal working memory. They also demonstrated far transfer effects of the training (far-transfer refers to the impact of an intervention on abilities that were not directly targeted by the training).

“The findings of the current study indicate that the coexistence of ADHD in children with DLD does not exacerbate language and reading difficulties.” CPP Advances

Another study aimed to determine the extent to which oral language development is related to reading speed and accuracy in Spanish-speaking children with DLD. The children with DLD were indeed less accurate and slower in reading than “typically developing” (TD) children. The findings also show that the use of strategies during reading are different between the DLD and TD groups.

Speaking of the relationships between oral language and reading: oral language skills are both promotive and protective factors for children with lower reading fluency skills in grade 1.

Poverty impacts a child’s developing brain – and this longitudinal study demonstrates this has a long-term impact on language ability. The findings indicate that the chronic stress of poverty alters the trajectory of neural pathways associated with language in adults. Even when adults from backgrounds of poverty had average language skills, their brains show differences in activation and connectivity patterns compared to adults from middle-income backgrounds. These differences suggest the use of compensatory mechanisms.

There’s something interesting about inner speech as a compensatory adaptive mechanism, by the way. Not everyone has an “inner voice” or experiences inner speech in the same way – there is quite a bit of variation. In a study, those with less inner speech have poorer performance on a verbal working memory task and lower accuracy in rhyme judgment tasks. Yet when study participants reported talking out loud, the performance differences between groups disappeared! This suggests that both covert (inner) and overt speech can be used as compensatory mechanisms to support cognitive performance.

Immigration, Multilinguals, and Multilingualism

Now let’s tackle a hot button topic: immigration.

Like so much of our national and political discourse, the topic of immigration is so heightened by emotion that facts and evidence are far removed from policy and perception.

Unfortunately, one source notes that “the contemporary opposition to immigration, and the tendency for it to be stronger among less educated people, are not a reflection of something specific to today, but continue a long-standing pattern.” Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

If you really want to cut through the noise, I highly recommend reading a book released this year by Zeke Hernandez, The Truth About Immigration, to ground your understanding of immigrants and immigration in empirical evidence, rather than bias and sensationalism.

I first came across Zeke’s trenchant insights when I listened to a Freakonomics series on immigration (also recommended), “The True Story of America’s Supremely Messed-Up Immigration System.” I decided to check out his book, and am very glad I did. Whatever your priors on immigration may be, you will find something to learn that will surprise you, and educate you, in his book.

Now let’s turn to some more facts and evidence about immigration.

Immigrant children can benefit the learning of others

Newly arrived immigrant children who are English learners have “positive spillover effects” on the test scores of existing students, particularly in reading – even in a “new destination state” such as Delaware, which has seen a sevenfold increase in its EL student population over the past two decades. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis

Immigration boosts the economy

While we’re at it, we should note that immigration does not increase crime levels in the communities where immigrants settle. And obtaining legal status decreases immigrants' involvement in criminal activities. Journal of Economic Perspectives

Cultural and linguistic distances can impact immigrant mental health and learning

Immigrants tend to move to places where climates better match what they are accustomed to.

In Ontario, the greater the linguistic distance between an immigrant’s first language and English, the more elevated their risk of being diagnosed with a psychotic disorder. Journal of Psychological Medicine

Relatedly, cultural factors can influence how symptoms of psychosis are experienced and expressed.

A common assumption made about more recent immigrants is that “acculturation”—becoming oriented towards mainstream culture–necessarily leads to a decline in heritage language skills. Yet this study found that mothers who maintain a balance of enculturation–or orientation towards their heritage culture–and acculturation in the United States also maintained greater bilingualism in their children.

Moving between cultural frames more frequently, in fact, may support executive functioning.

“According to research that confirms past studies, the concern that immigrants and their children do not learn English is misplaced.” Forbes

Children with more diverse social networks also develop more flexible and nuanced speech categorization patterns, adapting to the variability of their linguistic environments. Importantly, whether their adaptive speech processing is perceived as a deficit or an asset depends on how it is measured and analyzed. PsyArXiv preprints

Yet “despite higher exposure to one language, children sometimes identified more with the language and culture they were exposed to less.”

But let’s go back to that concept of “linguistic distance.” Globally, the greater the “discordance” between the language of home and the language of school, the lower the basic literacy rates.

Providing an early oral language intervention in students’ home language when that language is more discordant with school language can improve learning.

“The findings indicate that school-based oral language interventions can enhance heritage language proficiency and facilitate skill transfer to specific domains of a second language.” EdArXiv Preprints

For low SES immigrant families in Paris, a shared book reading intervention significantly enhanced children's language skills and the effects persisted in a six month follow-up. For $5 dollars a kid, not a bad deal. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness

A note that we’ve examined the concept of “linguistic distance” on this blog previously, suggesting that when there is a greater distance between the forms of a language that are spoken at home and written in school, this may make it more challenging and complex for young learners to acquire literacy. This applies also to spoken dialects of a written language, such as African American or Black English, Cantonese, or Moroccan Arabic.

The Benefits of Multilingualism

A study in the UK found that although multilingual learners initially face challenges in Key Stage 2, particularly in English and Science, they achieve comparable results with–and often excel over–their monolingual peers by Key Stage 4.

A longitudinal study in Chicago Public Schools demonstrates the importance in disaggregation of English learner data, as there are ELLs who go on to outpace their monolingual peers. For students who have achieved English language proficiency, “They had higher-than-district-average outcomes: cumulative GPAs and SAT scores; high school graduation rate; two-year college enrollment rate; and two-year college persistence rate (among all college enrollees).” University of Chicago Consortium on School Research

Learning a new language may even make you better at learning math! Adolescents who received formal instruction in a foreign language were about three times more likely to achieve higher grades in math tests than those who did not. (Note that this does not establish causation.) Bilingualism: Language and Cognition

The conversation about bilingual education programs often focuses on the benefits for students who are learning English. Yet it’s good for English proficient students, too!

Bilingual education isn’t only about spoken languages! In a study of an ASL bilingual program, kids at risk of language deprivation (due to having caregivers who don’t know sign language) who entered the program young achieved the same academic performance as kids who were not at risk (due to having caregivers who use sign language).

Yet despite the potential benefits of multilingualism and of bilingual education programs, the United States remains far beyond the rest of the world.

Cognition and Multilingualism

Working Memory

When solving word problems in math, multilingual learners with a home language of Spanish draw on their working memory systems, which operate across both languages.

Importantly, the structure of working memory was found to be similar in both monolingual and bilingual children. This now allows for more valid comparisons, generalizable interventions, and can strengthen our theoretical understanding of working memory in both populations. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition

In one study, they taught bilingual children (Spanish-English) who were 4 and 5 years old new words paired to objects. In one condition, they taught the label with only English-like words, and in the other, they taught them both Spanish- and English-like words for different objects. They found that the bilingual children learned the words best in the single language condition, suggesting that competition between languages might be a factor affecting learning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

This fascinating study finds that better performance of older bilinguals in L2 than L1 on paired associate learning tasks “cannot be accounted for by cognitive decline, but follows straightforwardly from basic principles of learning.” Dimensions of Diffusion and Diversity

Cognitive Flexibility and Task Switching

Learning a second language in adulthood can strengthen neural connections.

That said, there have been conflicting findings about whether learning multiple languages enhances executive function or not. This research article compares studies of the “bilingual advantage” with cognitive training studies and finds them both to be null. The authors argue that if cognitive training does not result in far transfer, then it is unlikely that bilingualism would, unless there was a special status for bilingual language control. International Journal of Bilingualism

Meanwhile, another study replicated a previous finding that bilingualism enhances cognitive flexibility in task switching, specifically by reducing the global switch cost.

Yet this study cautions that bilingual advantages in cognitive flexibility are not straightforward and can be influenced by both language-related factors and psychological stress.

It may be that intentional code switching may be associated with greater cognitive flexibility, while unintentional switching may be negatively associated with cognitive flexibility.

Or, it may be that switching between languages while reading can be more or less cognitively costly depending on whether the words are more concrete (with lots of interconnections conceptually between the languages) or abstract (with fewer connections between languages).

Neural Connections and Brain Structure

The conflicting accounts of the impact of multilingualism on the brain may be due to the fact that positive effects are more localized.

In another study, they found that bilingual children, unlike bilingual adults, show lower FA values in language-related white matter pathways compared to monolingual children, suggesting a slower maturation of these pathways during childhood. Human Brain Mapping

While there may not necessarily be direct cognitive advantages to multilingualism, evidence does show that learning a new language imposes a cognitive burden. I wrote about this research more in depth in my post, Research Highlight 5: Learning In a New Language Takes Effort.

Semantic Representation and Conceptual Change

Learning a new language may also change concepts in your first language. Psychological Science

Another study found that semantic brain representations are largely shared across languages but modulated by each language. These results show that between the two languages, semantic representations are not fully the same, but they’re also not separate: there is a shared semantic system that is modulated by each language! bioRxiv preprint

Multilingual Phonology and Orthography

Phonological Awareness and Speech Perception

As we noted previously, the quality, rather than mere quantity, of linguistic input is what is important. This applies equally when learning a new language. One study suggests that when teaching reading in an L2, focusing on developing clear and specific phonological representations is essential.

That said, phonological awareness as a skill seems to be more of a language-general construct, rather than only a language-specific one.

So it’s not surprising then that treating bilingual children with speech-sound disorders in their home language of Spanish facilitates progress of similar sounds in English. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics

Though it also may be that bilingual children develop two distinct phonological systems that interact with each other, and the specific patterns of acquisition in each language are influenced by the frequency of phonological features in the input. International Journal of Bilingualism

“our findings support the idea that phonological transfer might be possible even between languages with very different phonological structures.” Reading and Writing

Sound Discrimination and Learning

Yet how we discriminate sounds between languages can be based on how we learn them.

It’s possible that the multilingual brain processes word similarities from a new language to their first language at different speeds. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Speaking of learning something new: articulating a new word out loud for children facilitates learning of that word more than if you just passively receive it.

Word Learning and Spelling

Similarly, word learning in a new language is further facilitated (just as it is in your first language) by pairing the sounds to the words in print.

In terms of spelling, one study found that cross-linguistic influence of spelling errors was mostly unidirectional. Children typically made errors in one language due to influence from the other but did not make similar errors in both languages.

Multilingual Learning and Instruction

Building on Home Languages

Translanguaging has become a ubiquitous term in the field. Yet it’s not always clear exactly what the term means in practice, nor in terms of its evidence base.

Yet what we do know–as research in other sections has already pointed out–is that supporting an English learner’s skills and knowledge in their home language supports their language and literacy development in English.

A study shows that for Korean-speaking adolescents, morphological awareness in Korean boosts reading comprehension in both Korean and English. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

“Notably, oral language and reading skills in both MLs’ first language and in English were essential components of the SOR for MLs.” Educational Psychology Review

English Learner Reading Profiles

For students who are learning English in English only environments, the task of learning then becomes more challenging. The Simple View of Reading was used in one study to distinguish English learner reading profiles with a home language of Spanish from English proficient reading profiles.

Linguistic Proficiency and Reading Intervention

Speaking of intervention, a critically important study of 6th and 7th grade multilingual learners with reading difficulties found that providing intensive intervention in English reading was only effective when students had “relatively strong English proficiency.”

Conversations and Incidental Learning

For early childhood programs, “the findings suggest the importance of improving opportunities and providing more support for emergent bilinguals to engage in conversational turn-taking with their teachers and peers.” Early Childhood Education Journal

One review of corpora, both student talk and lessons, in English classes at a university in Vietnam found that student talk is an excellent source for the incidental learning of high-frequency word families and a good source for learning core formulaic sequences, as well as provides opportunities for both spaced repetition and varied repetition, which are crucial for vocabulary learning. They found that knowledge of the most frequent 1000-word families is needed for reasonable comprehension of student talk. The Language Learning Journa

“. . . overall, interaction is a key source of L2 receptive vocabulary development.” International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching

Balancing Explicit and Implicit Learning

A study of Japanese students learning English highlights the need for pedagogy to assist second language learners in achieving both declarative (explicit, conscious understanding) and automatized phonological vocabulary knowledge.

Finding the right balance between explicit and implicit learning requires that we more precisely identify the highest leverage items that must be taught explicitly. For Spanish speakers in third grade, explicitly teaching novel suffixes was far more effective than mere exposure.

In a study with university students learning a new language, they found a reciprocal relationship between explicit and implicit knowledge.

One method to support incidental vocabulary learning is through the addition of captions to videos. This benefits “intermediate-level” learners the most, suggesting that additional scaffolds would be needed for lower proficiency learners.

Speaking of implicit learning: you’re never too old to implicitly learn a new language!

Though it might help your learning of the new language if you deplete your cognitive resources first!

All of that said, a reminder that explicit instruction is a powerful means to direct learning and can act as a shortcut to achieving the same neural representation that would have been formed through implicit learning. Nature

And learning a new language is also aided by . . . sleep.

A note that I’ve discussed the balance between explicit and implicit learning more in-depth in relation to AI in my post, LLMs, Statistical Learning, and Explicit Teaching.

Assessing and Diagnosing Language Skills with Multilingual Learners

Gathering and analyzing the language samples of children can be a really useful way to learn more about their language use.

They can help you to better understand dialectal differences.

And they can help you to better distinguish between developmental language disorder and typical language development in multilingual learners.

Gaining greater diagnostic accuracy with multilingual learners is important, because how they perform on a vocabulary and listening comprehension test may be due more to the specific test items, rather than differences between the children themselves!

Multilingual learners in preschool who are identified with DLD may be less likely to be dominant in their home language in comparison to MLs without DLD.

Rhythm, Attention, and Memory

In this section, we’ll continue to examine some research related to multilingualism, but there was an interesting few additional themes and other studies that came up around music, synchrony, and the role of attention and memory in learning.

We Learn Through Rhythm

The Synchrony of Learning

There are patterns of different oscillations and rhythms across the layers of the brain.

Interbrain synchrony is linked with better learning.

Music

That heightened activation in the motor context suggests that gesture, movement, and music can support the learning of languages.

And yet, music may not be “derivative of speech—it serves its own purpose.” Scientific American

Playing music may help keep your brain young. PLOS One

Movement and Rhythm

When it comes to rhythm, there’s a goldilocks equation: moderate syncopation makes people want to dance, while too much or too little does not. Scientific American; Science Advances

If you’ve ever thought there is a rhythm to writing, this study on how children learn to write backs you up – and shows that there is even “an internal representation of the rhythm of handwriting [that] is available before the age in which handwriting is performed automatically.” Nature

And when it comes to movement, the cerebellum–once thought to only control body movement–connects to so much more!

Attention and Memory

“Our work suggests that sustained attention acts like a gatekeeper, controlling what “gets in” to children’s long-term memory—and the gate to memory remains shut more often in children. These novel findings raise the possibility that differences in sustained attention may explain broad differences in cognitive performance and that to boost children’s learning we must first help them to effectively sustain attention.” Well, yeah. That's the hard part. Psychological Science

We certainly don’t help children focus with all the clutter we put on our walls in classrooms. Classroom decorations can overwhelm students’ working memory and attention. Learning and the Brain

The good news is that purely visual distractions are easy to get rid of, and researchers have found that children's working memory is not significantly more affected by multisensory distractions (visual and auditory) than by purely visual distractions.

Spacing and Interleaving Learning

One of the most robust findings in the body of science of learning is that of the “testing effect” on learning. The testing effect

There were a number of studies this year further examining retrieval, spacing, and interleaving practice.

Students most typically try to cram all their studying for tests the night before. This is termed “massed practice.” While it might be fine for one-off learning, cramming won’t get you far in medical school, where you need to be able to retain and build upon that learning – and ultimately, be able to apply it in medical practice. This more distant application to novel experiences is termed “far transfer.” But is “blocking” the practice, or “interleaving” the practice more effective for far transfer?

Retrieval practice (i.e. flashcards) isn’t so bad with easy stuff. But when it gets more difficult, students tend to avoid it. This study shows that if you explain the benefits of retrieval practice for both easy and difficult items in the long run, students are more likely to do retrieval practice even with difficult items. Educational Psychology Review

“both spacing and variability can benefit memory, depending on what aspect of an experience you are trying to remember.” Scientific American

There is great potential for spaced retrieval to support vocabulary development for students with DLD, but there is still quite a bit to figure out to make it most effective.

Individual differences play a role with testing effects. It all has to do with how much working memory is available – some of us have more WM than others.

In a study with mice, they found that rest periods after learning helps to integrate new memories with older ones. Nature

Researchers examined how mathematical procedural complexity interacts with spacing retrieval practice.

Testing can even be beneficial before you’ve learned something! This is called “pretesting.”

School, Social-Emotional, and Contextual Effects

School Effects

OK, I know these books by Karin Chenoweth weren’t published in 2024, but I happened to finally come around to reading them in 2024, and I highly recommend them, as well as the podcast: Schools That Succeed, Districts That Succeed.

Why do I recommend these? Because Chenoweth reminds us that schools can serve the most vulnerable students and communities and make a tremendous impact as evidenced by the hard data – and that the means to do so are not mystical: A culture of high expectations and belief in kids, transparent data-based inquiry, committed and sustained leadership, and coherent school organization and scheduling.

Illustrative quotes:

But do school reforms have long-term effects?

Well, getting a college degree still matters.

And early childhood programs have multifaceted positive effects, despite the critiques around “fade-out” effects.

How we measure teacher effects is important. For a long time, we have been focused on test-based effects. But according to this study, test-based measures are more aligned with high-achieving students and outcome-based measures like SAT scores and AP test performance, while non-test measures better predict outcomes related to college enrollment and high school graduation, and may be especially important for students who are at risk of not enrolling in college or not graduating from high school.

If we want to decrease achievement gaps, we need to focus less on “homework help” or enrichment programs, and more on classroom management, challenging content with a high degree of support, heterogenous grouping, and tutoring. Studies in Educational Evaluation

Social-Emotional Effects

Social-emotional neglect has serious consequences for child development.

“Being bullied as a child worsens well-being and labour market performance up to half a century later. It lowers the probability of having a job throughout adulthood and raises the probability of premature death.” Social Science & Medicine

For students with ADHD in Switzerland, targeting social-emotional skills through the Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (PATHS) program had persistent positive effects lasting over a decade. Treated children were more likely to complete academic high school and enroll in university. The Review of Economic Studies

Yet “ boosting social-emotional skills, like boosting cognitive skills, does not appear to be a silver-bullet solution to changing children's developmental trajectories.”

When physical education teachers and students took an “autonomy-supportive” workshop, the effects of autonomy-supportive teacher moved into reports of more autonomy-supportive parenting.

Contextual Effects

“after a boost in library capital investment, reading test scores steadily increased.” American Economic Association

An RCT in Germany gave 11-12 year olds e-book readers with free access to digital books. Their reading increased, which led to improved academic performance in reading and math, and enhanced well-being. IZA Institute of Labor Economics

On the importance of being outside

Where You Live Matters

“Growing up in a thriving community — where the adults are employed, in good health, etc. — dramatically improves children’s outcomes, even holding fixed their own family’s situation.” NBER

“we find that neighborhood human capital at the community level has the greatest impact on mobility, followed by the street, district, county, and province levels, respectively.” Social Indicators Research

“By equalizing average neighborhood quality for Black and White families, we estimate that the Army’s quasi-random assignment reduces Black-white earnings gaps among the children of Army personnel by 23%.” NBER

“For Black students, these relationships imply that they would receive more beneficial services in a school that was more racially integrated than in one that was fully segregated, highlighting another potential negative consequence of racial segregation.” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis

NYC “middle school students exposed to more diverse peers apply to and enroll in high schools that are also more diverse. These effects particularly benefit Black and Hispanic students who, as a result, enroll in higher value-added high schools.” NBER

“20 years after exposure, Whites who had more Black peers of the same gender in their grade go on to live in census tracts with more Black residents...the effect on residential choice appears to come from a change in preferences among Whites.” Journal of Public Economics

Contrary to misconceptions of public housing, this paper examines the impact of growing up in public housing for NYC and finds improved economic outcomes, reduced reliance on safety nets, and a cost effective public investment.

Gun violence is hyperlocal.

If you’ve stayed with me this far, you are a true research nerd! Wishing you a very happy new year of more learning and inquiry.

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