Youki Terada visited the show on episode 071 Extended Research w/ Youki Terada to discuss his round-up of the top 10 pieces of education research over the past year.
Michael Ralph (MR)- For our first segment, we read the 10 most significant education studies of 2022 written by Youki Terada and Steve Merrill at Edutopia and we are fortunate to be joined by Youki Terada. Youki, this is his second appearance and Youki Terada is Edutopia’s research editor. He has a background in education research and looks at how all the Edutopia content aligns with the research base. He first appeared in Episode 024. And he’s back with us now. Welcome, Youki, we’re so happy to have you back.
Youki Terada (YT) – Thank you for having me. It’s always a pleasure being here.
MR– Every year you do these round ups, where you’re looking at lots and lots of education studies, and summarizing some of the most applicable, some of the most insightful and being a research nerd, I really love reading it every year.
YT– Yeah, I love writing this article. This year with Steve and with other people in previous years. It’s one of the most fun articles to write largely, because it’s kind of the culmination of a years worth of looking at research. Because we don’t just, you know, sit down and write it and then publish it. But throughout the year, we’re covering research. So we’re looking at Leads, we’re looking at studies, we’re looking at research, the whole year, I’m writing about research, I’ve, you know, previous articles, and a lot of these highlights are based off of previous articles that I’ve written throughout the year. Yeah, it’s such a fun article to write. I love how they’re all short and snappy, but really tactical. You know, our main goal is to make it something that’s relevant for teachers, they can gain some kind of little insight that they can apply to their classroom.
Laurence Woodruff (LW) – It’s a lighter, lighter workload, because instead of actually me diving into an article, for four hours, you have done that work for me. So I get to enjoy all of your, you know, early lifting, so that I can just say, Hey, that looks great. That sounds great. I’m excited about how useful this is going to be. From your position as an education research editor at Edutopia, you’ve got to be reading hundreds of education research articles a year.
YT–Yeah, easily, easily hundreds, I mean, 52 weeks, 52 weeks, in a year, you know, I’m reading more than, you know, four or five, I’m probably reading, you know, a dozen every week. I’m probably looking at, you know, 50 to 100. Every week. So
LW– How do you create the criteria to whittle that down to the ten you’re going to use to represent the year 2022.
YT– So we have kind of a way of doing things. So there is very teacher centric. There’s very much looking at a study and not trying to just report on a study, but trying to figure out what the takeaways are for teachers. What can they do? How is this actionable? So kind of the first step is just look, casting a really big net and looking at as much research as we can, because we don’t want to focus too much on the specific topic. Because, as you know, teachers are a very big, diverse audience, and they have lots of different needs. Some teachers want to focus more on kind of the basics, what’s project based learning? What can I do in my classroom to help kids learn ? Some teachers would be more interested in things like what’s the latest advancements in cognitive science and neuroscience? Like what have I had not learned. What wasn’t available to us? 10 years ago, 20 years ago, when I was learning how to be a teacher, that I should know about now, because obviously, teaching and learning, it’s always advancing, we’re always learning new things, especially when it comes to how brains work, the science of learning what’s effective reading instruction look like we’re always learning new things. So we try to really appeal to as many different needs as possible. And boiling it down to 10 is very hard. If you look at the actual document that we work off of, it is well over 100 pages long. I narrowed down probably to 50 Studies at first. And then I talked to my team, and we figured out we start whittling things down.
LW–I loved the selection, I,I, I color coded, I highlighted, I sorted them as I was reading them into three categories. One that I thought was really valuable to me at a personal level. Five, that reinforced my confirmation bias, like I’m doing it right, you know, like, I really appreciate these, And then two, that are gonna be food for thought for changing my practice in the coming year. Like, I need to look into these. And I probably need to read the studies themselves and like, consider it. So it was nice, it was a nice array of articles, I really appreciated that.
MR–There, There are 10, there are 10, like pretty different studies. And even within some of those, those segments Youki, I saw that you and your co author were even referencing some other relevant articles like, these are a couple years old, or this is another one that’s relevant to this topic, he did a great job of contextualizing without being overwhelming. And so like we could jump around all across this list. One of them that I think I made the most notes about was it was number two in your list. And this was a study of highlighting. And it’s interesting that highlighting jumps out to me because it’s not a practice that particularly resonates with me. It’s something that I had some rich discussions with a co teacher at one point I’m late in my teaching career about like note taking and highlighting, like how do we facilitate students really getting the most out of annotating their reading? And this was a study that was looking at how, I mean, you tell me you tell me what the study was about, you know more about it than I do. What was the highlighting, study about?
YT– Alright, so there’s a big problem with highlighting. And the problem is that students often don’t know how to highlight content effectively and how to highlight material effectively. So typically, what you see is, the whole page is highlighted, because the student thinks that everything is important, they want to make sure that they retain 100% of the information. So they tend to highlight as much information as they can.
MR– Well, what stood out to me in the summary that you wrote, was that the article compared classrooms where instructors were explicitly directing or providing support for identifying the relevant highlighting material versus conditions where the students were making decisions, often novice decisions about what material was worthy of being highlighted, not just about how much but like which things are important to be highlighting, and then what the findings coming out of that show about how students can learn to highlight more effectively, and the considerable impact that we get out of helping them not just how much but also which things are relevant to be highlighting.
YT– Right? It’s not that highlighting itself is ineffective, it’s just a tool for marketing information. But it’s helpful. Once you get into that kind of that metacognitive space, it’s helpful to start giving students the tools to be able to identify what to highlight. And what that means is don’t highlight everything you’re trying to memorize. instead. Instead, look for the key ideas, the big concepts that you’re trying to learn about, and highlight those and use that as a way to identify information that you want to learn about. Because if the kid highlights,If the student highlights like an entire page, that’s not helpful, it’s very satisfying for the student. And it gives the student kind of like a sense of productivity, and a sense that they’ve now kind of more or less, you know, learned the material. But you know, you don’t learn material by memorizing it, you have to be able to, you know, reflect on it, you have to be able to explain it, you have to be able to apply it in different ways. And highlighting doesn’t do that, highlighting just identifies the material that you should be looking at. So when you pair highlighting with other strategies, like summarizing, or taking better notes, like using highlighting as starting point, and then going from there to using what you highlight, to write summaries about the content that you just highlighted, or using highlighting as a way to refresh your memory on what questions you might have. So you highlight a key term. And then later on, you do a pop quiz. And you ask yourself, What does this term mean, you know, what do these unfamiliar terms mean? What are these key ideas? What’s the point of these key ideas, when highlighting is used as a starting point for these deeper comprehensive comprehension strategies, then, highlighting is effective, but you need to get students to that point where they’re using highlighting effectively. And teachers are great for doing that. Because, you know, when you look at the difference between the teacher and the student, it’s the difference between an expert and a novice, and the novice learner won’t necessarily know what to highlight, you know, a teacher would, because the teacher understands the material. But if it’s your first time learning something, you don’t necessarily know what the key ideas are, you don’t necessarily know what to highlight. And what’s irrelevant, because you know, almost everything kind of looks irrelevant. It’s not until you develop a level of expertise, that you can begin to know what to highlight. So it’s helpful to get teachers and it’s actually not helpful, it’s crucial to get teachers in to give you an effective highlighting strategies, and pairing them up with all the other strategies that are effective.
LW– dare I say, to make highlighting effective, you could pair it with some of the findings of one of the other articles on the list. And that if you can teach kids to look at an informational article in a kind of a hierarchical way, what are the main topics? And then what are the sub topics and you can highlight those, you can go back through that list, make an outline with those, set it aside, come back two days later and say what are the details about the topics in this outline that I actually remember. And you will then be practicing not just effective highlighting, but the spacing and retrieval practice that was highlighted in the article. If I will, an authoritative study of two high impact learning strategies, which was one of the I have a classroom that is a highly leveraged retrieval practice as one of my primary instructional strategies. So that was one of those like, yeah, keep it up. You’re, you’re, that’s, that’s a good return on investment. And so that was exciting for me to see that on the list.
YT– Yeah, it’s really interesting, because in one of the so we’ve been talking about retrieval, practice and spacing, but this particular study that I’m referencing in the article is a meta analysis. So it’s looking at a broad range of studies. And it’s looking at kind of what the field looks like now in terms of what these effective learning strategies are. So we’re not just looking at single studies. But now we’re saying is there a kind of an authoritative statement that we can say, about retrieval, practice and spacing. And at this point, the evidence is pretty overwhelming, that retrieval, practice and spacing are effective ways for students to learn the material. Because from Cognitive science, we know that if you’re not repeatedly accessing memories, then you’re going to forget, whatever you’ve learned that if you expect the student to, you know, on week, one of the semester, to learn something, and still remember it, you know, months later, chances are, it’s going to be long forgotten, because you need students to repeatedly access those memories in order to strengthen those memories. And that makes a lot of sense, because there’s only so much information we can hold. If we don’t regularly use information, we’re going to forget whatever we’ve learned. So you need to not only have students learn the information, but repeatedly learn it to relearn it multiple times throughout the school year, if you want to really reinforce that learning. So retrieval practice and spacing are very effective strategies and, and one of the studies looking at your practice. Yeah, two groups of students. The first group of students study the material twice. The second group of study, study the material once and then spent an equal amount of time doing practice, and you have pretty significant differences. And how the second group of studies performed, they outperformed the first group of studies by a quite considerable amount, because they’re not just trying to learn and memorize the information. They’re expressing it, they’re, they’re using it in multiple ways.
LW– I’ve thought about this before, in our education system, what gets assessed is the expression or the application, and the opportunity to practice that is not always commensurate with the presentation or consumption of information. And so when you get that retrieval practice into the routine, you give them more opportunities to express which is ultimately what we assess. So it seems fair, from a student perspective to give them opportunities to practice the thing that you’re going to assess later.
MR– And well, and a piece of that is always navigating. It’s a balance, it’s not quite tension, but it’s a balancing act between being able to have assessments that mirror or faithfully represent the learning opportunities. You want authentic assessment, you want authentic authenticity in how it’s representing the way the skill you anticipate will be used, you know, after graduation, after, you know, in whatever the real world is, as they define it. But it also needs to mirror what they’re experiencing in the classroom, but you don’t want it to go too far the other way and start teaching to the test, so to speak, where everything you do is just rote repetition of what you’re going to ask them to do in the final version. And so finding the appropriate you know, middle ground, right find that middle way that Laurence you’re so fond of, to be able to have it overlap appropriately in the expression of skills and but also have some novelty to it as well. There we can strike a balance, many teachers are seeking that balance. Because we don’t want to be all the way one or all the way the other.
LW– As as education is a community endeavor. There are lots of stakeholders, and sometimes teachers, often often teachers are pressured to do things in their classroom that may not necessarily be consistent with their perception of the best learning opportunities for their kids. And one, that piece about the relationship that you mentioned in these top 10, that the teacher and the kids relationship is going to allow those kids to give themselves the permission to kind of like sink in and raise themselves to the teachers expectations is really important. But when decisions about what’s happening in that classroom are made at increasingly further distances from the classroom.I think it really does help to have these consumable connections to research that you’re providing, not just so that the teacher can feel good about their choices. And not just that the teacher can try to persuade some of those other stakeholders. But when there’s a conflict, the teacher can be reminded that the decisions that they’re making, even though other people do not see that they’re valuable, are actually valuable. And if you need to find some way to support those decisions in your classroom, when there’s external pressure, asking you to change, then that’s something worth digging your heels into. And I appreciate that you guys are working and providing those kinds of informational pieces.
YT– Yeah, I mean, oftentimes, there’s a contradiction in teaching where you want students to do well on tests, because that’s how learning is measured. But you also want to create students that are just good human beings, that know how to interact with each other, that know how to learn about the world around them. So these are kind of things that are measured in the long, you know, these are long scales of time, you know, like the impact of a teacher shouldn’t necessarily be narrowed down to, well, how much of an improvement do they make on a student’s test scores, like the impact of a teacher should be thought of, you know, other other much larger scale looking at our students graduating more, you know, at the end of high school, because they had a third grade teacher that really inspires them to learn more about insects, like, like, those are hard to measure, but they make a really big impact. And teachers are aware of this. The problem is that that kind of impact often isn’t measured in schools, and it’s not reflected in how we value teachers, especially from a, you know, top down perspective. Oftentimes, you know, we measure the value of a teacher by these very short term gains, but really, what a lot of the research that I look at and when we look at Edutopia more in general, is kind of just looking at what impact does a teacher have not just on the short term, but really what are the life changing impacts that a teacher can have on students. So looking at the study, you mentioned relationships and rigor, oftentimes, a new teacher is told, Don’t smile until Christmas. And there’s kind of like a grain of truth to that, where you don’t want to be every student’s best friend on day one, because they’ll walk all over you, you know, if you have no rules, if you let everything go free, and you have chaos, that’s probably not a good way to start the school year. But you don’t want to go the opposite direction. And you know, not smile a lot, not be friendly. Treat everything, as you know, a business. That is basically, you’re giving them information, their job is to learn it and memorize it and do well on the tests. Because that is now you’re going you know, on the opposite end, opposite end of the spectrum, what you want is a good balance, where, you know, you build relationship with relationships with students, you know, you don’t have to be their friend, but you have to show that you care for them. Because when you show that you care for them, and you show that you’re invested in their learning, they’ll be much more willing to invest in their own learning. And they’ll be much more willing to go the extra mile for you. If you have high expectations, but you don’t pair those high expectations with support, academic support, emotional support, psychological support, you’re basically setting them, setting them up for failure. So it’s very important to pair relationships with rigor. To me, it’s a false dichotomy. Basically, like, if you want rigor, you need to have a strong foundation of relationships, you need to show that you have a community of learners in your classroom, you really, you’re not just expecting them to learn something, because they’ll do well on a test. But you want them to learn something, because it’s useful, it’s valuable information to learn, you want them to be able to see the relevance and what they’re learning. And the only way to do that is to really just focus on building relationships and building relevance and some material.
MR– So that I want to jump in because your comments about being good humans to one another, resonates with me, for 100 different reasons. One of the things that I thought about and Laurence, one of the things that we bring up on the show pretty regularly, I think, is the idea of good pedagogy very often has impacts across like a wide constellation of outcomes, some of which are measurable, some of which are not measurable, which is some of what you were talking about, like we very often teachers get evaluated on this one piece here, even though they are professional interested in this wide range of outcomes for their students, some of which don’t actually manifest themselves for decades. And so we sometimes talk about doing good teaching. Because good teaching for this one non measurable priority will also have positive impacts on some of the measurable priorities. So it’s all going the same direction anyway, so like, make the good choice in the moment. And one of the other studies on your list, I’m going to tell you burdened me, like you mentioned at the beginning of this episode, Laurence, the different categories of studies, this is the one that by far was the most of like, I need to sit with that one because that that might change my practice. And it was number, and it was and it was number five, because I don’t think you could find a single student in any of my classes who would accuse me of giving too many breaks. That’s not the vibes of what I had in my classrooms. I was about to burn bright, like what these are our 90 minutes and we are going to the moon like and like I hope I strove to do that with humanity like we are in this together. This is a beautiful thing we are pursuing. But by God, we are not wasting one single minute that we have together like, Go isn’t that amazing? Right? Go run, start. Now let’s go. Like I don’t think I ever gave a single brain break in my entire career. I’m not sure that I’ve ever given a brain break in my life. It just didn’t resonate with me, it didn’t resonate with that whole idea of like, pick your priority and pursue it to the end of the earth. And I will tell you that this the study that you wrote about specifically those brain scans, where they talk about the tremendous amount of processing that’s going on during those brain breaks, where they’re resting, and they’re replaying, they’re replaying what was happening in the lesson and they’re going through it like really, really fast and their brain is really iterating on and reflecting on what’s going on for it and likely very much so at the subconscious level. And I was like that’s, that’s gonna sit heavy on me. Cuz I accept the value of that. And I accept that there are other benefits to breaks, and you know what that might be, what gets me to that? That’s gonna be tough. And I don’t know what I’m gonna do with that yet Youki because I’ve only been sitting with it for like two hours so far. But that was a really good example of, there are times where like, I feel really great about the way that I generally run most of my classes, I didn’t ever feel like students were exhausted. And I’m like, I don’t care. Like I don’t care about these problems. I didn’t feel like I had that issue. And so I wouldn’t have gone looking for research to tell me to do a brain break. But by being engaged with the material that you and your team is creating, and with the ongoing education literature, generally, I had the opportunity to encounter something that got in my way. And now like, you know what, maybe that needs to be complicated for me, like, maybe that’s something that needs to become an issue for me. And like, maybe I’m not noticing that students are tired, because I’m not looking for it. Or maybe I’m not reaping a benefit, because then I don’t even know it exists. And I need to be able to engage with that opportunity. So that one, thank you for making my life more complicated.
LW– I also highlighted that one because I instituted a major systemic shift to include brain brakes this year for the first time, and I do them when my kids asked for them, I say, Hey, someone suggested a brain break. How do we feel about that? Okay, you guys seem to want that. So okay, we’ll have a brain break now. And I said, What do you guys want to do for your brain to break. And all of my four classes chose different things. And what I have learned from this is that some of those choices are better than others, I got two of my classes, one chose to do a paper, rock scissors tournament, where they stand up, they find a partner, they go to other places in the room, they do that, then they move around, and they find another partner. And they do that. And they just have a good time going around the room. Doing that I’ve got another group of kids that wanted me to play Just Dance videos, which is a video game from YouTube. And, and they will dance to it as though it’s a video game in the room. So I said, I’ve only got to do this if more than half of you dance. And then I’ll get like 70% of my kids standing up and dancing during this brain break. And that I feel really good about that. But my other two classes, one of them wanted to play jail man, which is my anti execution version of hangman. And the other one had to do like five or six trivia questions. And what I learned from the research is that if we can get them off of concentration, where they’re just kind of enjoying themselves, they’re actually relaxed. Like, it’s not just a break from my content. It’s not just a break from my cognitive tasks that I’m asking them to engage in. It’s actually like, no, no, we’re just playing around now. So those two classes probably got the benefits of that brain break. And my other two classes that chose cognitive activities for the break, probably weren’t. So now I get to improve further by reconsidering or guiding or help scaffolding them to options that are consistent with these brain scan return of investments.
YT– So I love that particular article as well. Yeah, I mean, one of the things, and this is really amazing, because I’m thinking about how we’ve covered brain breaks or brain based learning over the course of a decade at Edutopia. Now remember, 10 years ago, I think I would like look at our coverage fan and, and feel a little uncomfortable, because back then we didn’t have a really good understanding of, you know, what brain breaks were, we didn’t have a really good understanding of kind of the, the neuroscience behind taking a break. And obviously, a lot of this is because of newer technology that we’ve been able to, you know, make use of like FM fMRI machines, like looking at brain activity, actual brain activity, looking at how the brain is highly active during a break, even if it’s not, you know, currently active actively learning something. And a lot of the reason for that is because the brain needs time to process information, like a student can’t just absorb information, and then understand that they need breaks to be able to process the information, to be able to reflect on the information. And also to kind of summarize the information and start categorizing, categorizing it and start creating a kind of a mental map, a schema of how that information fits into not just the lesson itself, but into what else they know. Because if a kid isn’t connecting what they’re currently learning to stuff they’ve learned in the past, then you know, they’re not going to be able to understand this well. They’re not going to be able to remember as well. So it’s very important to have these breaks. So kids can really just strengthen those connections and learn the material more deeply.
LW– Speaking of schemas, another paper that really heavily is sort of planting itself in my brain for changing the future, or adding future experiences is revisiting the value of concept mapping and sketch notes. And it’s interesting because what would happen is that in my early career, like I’m a first or second year teacher, I knew about the value of concept mapping. And then I learned about some other approaches, some other strategies I fell in love with, with retrieval practice, and I let that fade away, I let that old practice fade away. And then here, I get a reminder that Oh, but you know, it’s still awesome. And there are ways to incorporate this with what you already do, and you’re not doing that. So that was a nice, not quite an admonition, but just sort of like, hey, but what about this other good stuff you used to do? There’s space for that now. And so that’s, that’s another one that I’m really looking forward to critically reevaluating my current practice.
YT– Yeah, and it’s easy when you’re a teacher, you know, you have these concept maps in your head, because you’ve lived with the material, you know, you live and breathe it, you understand it at a very deep level. So you understand those hierarchies, you understand those different categories. But for students who are learning a topic for the first time, everything’s a mess. So it’s really helpful to explicitly start showing students what the relationships are between different ideas, to help them kind of map out the terrain of the material, and to show them that not every piece of information or not every concept exists kind of on a single plane linearly. Because, you know, when we learn something, we don’t just like, memorize, you know, from A to Z linearly, we start organizing, we start looking for patterns, we start trying to figure out how everything fits into what I know. And these are, you know, teachers, it’s easy to think that humans are kind of, as they’re learning the material, they’re doing all this work already. But it’s helpful to actually explicitly explicitly show them these categories, show them these relationships. Because otherwise see, this might have might create, you know, connections that are flat out wrong, they might think that something is connected, when it shouldn’t be, it’s really good to,you can have kids, you can have students kind of try to map out those, those connections, that it’s very helpful to then guide them towards, you know, the actual, correct way to, to learn something.
MR– Well, and that was one of the pieces that I felt like, was showing if I understood correctly, that was one of the things that I felt like was showing up in the study itself that you referenced in your, in your round up was the importance of organizational sketching, because novice students without the understanding of the content, or just doing what they call it represent representational sketching, whether it’s, I think of it as sort of in my head as flat structure without prioritizing or organizing in a hierarchical way, you know, big ideas, supporting ideas, examples, details, some of that sort of thing. It made me think of, when I was teaching AP Biology, I sort of mimicked another instructor’s practice that was basically doing a live version of sketchnoting. Throughout a lecture or discussion, depending on how good a job I was doing that day. And I was I was I didn’t realize I was doing some of this, and representing it to the students and how I was organizing, I was filling the whole whiteboard, man, I’ll tell you what, like 12 feet across, four feet up and down, the whole thing was full by the end of a, you know, a 90 minute period. And I just, I just, I just, that’s how I do my notes. So I would be showing them like big ideas and thick arrows and like, you know, little, little shiny lines to show this is a big deal. And there’s a little bit of detail, and I write it in a thinner line, and I write it in smaller words, and, and so when it was all said and done, it kind of had some of that hierarchy. But I don’t think that I ever explained to students why I was doing any of those things like it was coming out in the conversation. But it wasn’t like this is a big arrow, because this is a big idea. And this is a little bubble down here. Because this is just one of many examples. And it’s not nearly as important as understanding why this is one of many examples of this bigger thing over here. And I think if I understood the study correctly, that’s really the valuable piece of what we can do as teachers to support students in successfully sketch noting or doing concept mapping or any of these sorts of visual representations is we’ve got to help them sorts and in a hierarchical way information to construct that more nuanced sophisticated schema, because as novices in this in the subject, they don’t know how to do that spontaneously, like, necessarily, if they already knew it, we wouldn’t be teaching it. And so that’s a key piece of if we’re going to have them sketch and we should, because it’s great, we also need to help them organize that sort of a sketch, which we can do either through explicit instruction or feedback that we provide after the fact or support for iteration over multiple attempts, like whatever that looks like, they’ve got to be able to organize from representation or some sort of flat, just literal, verbatim what it is to organizational, which has structure that is key to be able to retain long term.
YT– Yeah, and that organizational mapping is also really key to understanding the material at a deeper level. And primarily because it helps students spot gaps and their learning. And let me give you a kind of a really simple example. So if I wanted you to memorize a phone number, right, and you start telling me a phone number, you know, you give me nine digits, right? Area code, three numbers, and then three numbers, like you just immediately know, that’s wrong, because you know, phone number is 10 digits, right. But if you don’t know, if you don’t have that kind of understanding of the larger structure with a phone number is, if you don’t know that the phone number is 10 digits, you might start reciting nine digits and think you’re right. But if you have, if you have that key piece of information, that phone numbers are 10 digits long, then you can immediately see that there’s a gap in your knowledge, there’s a gap right there. And that gap comes from understanding the kind of the interplay between the actual content versus the larger structural dimensions of that content. So it’s really important, not just or even something. Another simple thing would be like, you know, the planets, like if you know how many planets there are, and for whatever reason, you have one extra, and you kind of know, there’s something wrong. So it’s good to have that kind of structural mapping. And that’s something that’s, you know, that that teachers being experts often are aware of, but they don’t necessarily know that students need that kind of that larger sense of what the structure of the information looks like.
LW– Well, is there a particular article like that, on that 10? That is like, well, actually, this brings me to another question. Not only did you whittle it down to 10, you chose an order for those 10. Why? Like, what is the significance? Like, how did you fill in the slots one through 10.
YT– And we can talk about cognitive load here. We’re trying not to burden people, you know, our readers too much. We don’t want to push all the difficult stuff to the beginning, because they’re going to be exhausted. I mean, this is, you know, this is a long piece. And it’s much longer than our typical article, we don’t want people to be exhausted, two studies in, and we wanted to pace it so that we have something that’s, you know, pretty challenging might challenge some assumptions you might have, but we want to make sure that they’re engaged throughout the entire piece.
LW– Oh, speaking of cognitive load, don’t blast your classroom with irrelevant decorations. But instead, judiciously use your classroom decorations as supports and scaffolding for the instruction that you’re going to have. So you know, manage that cognitive load.
YT– Yeah, and we were speaking about classroom decorations, I think three years ago, one big difference was that those earlier studies were all laboratory settings. And this was an actual classrooms, which I thought was pretty significant, because it’s basically reinforcing the idea that what we’re seeing in a laboratory setting, so a lot of those earlier studies, were basically just like having walls in front of students, and systematically putting decorations or different things up in front of the students, and then measuring what their attention, you know, how on task they were, for the activity. But the two sets of studies, the two studies in 2022, that we talked about, looking at actual classrooms, like actual natural settings of classrooms, not a laboratory anymore, so I thought it was pretty significant that the research is really confirming the idea that busy walls that are distracting, are very difficult to learn in. And I do want to make it clear that that doesn’t mean you want blank walls. It’s still very important to have student work. You know up on your walls, it’s very important to have images and representations that are welcoming so you don’t want a wall that’s full of people who don’t look like your students, because that alone can increase cognitive load on students. If a student is in classroom and is kind of thinking, wow, why does the industry look very different from, you know, my family, like, do I belong here and you don’t want students to be preoccupied with ideas of not belonging and belonging in the classroom, because that’ll occupy precious cognitive resources that could be spent on learning the academic content.
LW– One of the things about this article is I’ve been thinking about classrooms differently since We went through a global pandemic, where we actually lost physical classrooms. And I’ve been thinking that classrooms are a technology that we use to get a group of people to collaboratively concentrate on something for a period of time. And just like any tool, there are right ways to take care of it. And there’s right ways to use it. And there are less effective ways to take care of it. And there are less effective ways to use it. And so considering that our physical space is a tool, it’s nice to encounter research that says, hey, this is how you take care of this tool. This is how you prepare and present this tool. And I thought that was satisfying.
Transition voice – This is better with all of you.
LW– Can I Can I do a point of order? I don’t know about you, Ralph. But I was lukewarm about the other article. I would rather if you still have time, and are comfortable actually going through all of them. And then Ralph, like, Would you be willing to conceptually cut this down to a one segment? 45 minute episode? Yeah, we’ve done we’ve done I think we’ve done it before. Yeah. segments? I think we’ve done it once. Yeah. So I just would rather have I if you’re down to like to, like hit the checklist. I would rather talk with you than what then the other thing we had planned for today, Ralph, if that’s okay, excellent. The idea that the depictions that you have in your classroom are relevant to your students you kept using, we kept back, we kept going back to depictions of who gets to be depicted as learners and participants in your room. And that that idea of who gets to be a learning participant in your room is directly related to the article… A landmark study strikes a resounding note for inclusion, this would be number three, regarding the individual’s Disability Education Act, could you tell us more about that study.
YT– There’s a moral and ethical imperative to have kids belong in environments that are welcoming, and that help them learn a variety of skills. And this applies to all students, not just students with disabilities. But more so for students with disabilities. Because one issue is, you don’t want to isolate students in the name of academics. If students need extra academic support, that’s great, you know, you should provide that. But you don’t want to put them, you know, in a situation where they are completely isolated from their friends, their peers, where they’re not really learning how to interact with other students. So there’s a in the past, there was this tendency to say that, yes, students with disabilities should be in general education classrooms, but there wasn’t really a lot of evidence to support whether or not this had positive impacts on their academics when you had significant positive impacts on kind of just their mental well being just their ability to be happy and healthy kids. But we didn’t really have a lot of evidence on what this would mean for their actual learning. So this study, you know, it was a large scale study, and it looked at 24,000 adolescents. And what it found was that spending a majority of the day at least 8% in general education classrooms boosted test scores, reading and math test scores by 24 and 18. Points, just pretty significant. So what the study, basically the takeaway from the study, is that there’s really no excuse to not make the general education classroom, the default setting for students with disabilities, that really, we should be trying to do our best to make sure that they’re not isolated, that they’re not put in environments where they don’t feel connected to their peers. That really the default approach should be putting them in general education classrooms, and then providing additional support on top of that, not to replace that, but to put that additional IEP support on top of that, and to make sure that they get the tailored instruction that they need. So to me, one of the, you know, one of the big reasons why we included this in our list is because it’s very important not to have approaches that focus so much on academic support, that we sacrifice a student’s mental well being that we need to make sure that all students, not just students with disabilities, but all students are in environments where they can learn how to interact with other students, they can make friends, because all of that is important to their, to their development, to their development as a child to their social and emotional development. And now that we have kind of these concrete numbers showing that there are academic benefits on top of all of these social and emotional benefits, that should be the default approach to have 80% or more of their time in mainstream classrooms, and general ed classrooms.
MR– This was a study that was in my category of affirmation. Working with Universal Design for Learning, or UDL is a substantial fraction of my research agenda, just generally. And so this is something where advocates for students and people with disabilities generally have been, have been saying this for decades, for a long, long time now. And so to have a really substantially sized study, like what you cited in your round up, to be able to demonstrate the academic impact, like all the other impacts are valuable and important. I appreciate you opened your comments with a moral and ethical imperative like that’s chef’s kiss, yes, sir. And for anybody who may still be inclined to argue from the academic measurement lens, here are some really clear numbers to say that’s another reason that we have got to design classrooms, both from a physical and from an instructional standpoint, with the idea of proactive flexibility. And that was really that’s in my head, what I think is the actionable takeaway from research like this is when we think about working with students. And let us imagine I design a learning experience. And let us imagine that 80% of my students engage with that experience in a way that doesn’t require any more active intervention from me, they there’s Okay, these are the instructions, I’m going to start doing them. And then there are some number of students in my classroom who are not able to engage in the way that I initially crafted it for any of a variety of reasons. And some of those reasons are going to be what show up in IEPs. And some of them are not. But we, it is a incumbent upon us as educators to respond to those needs, both proactively and then when we become aware of them in the moment, to provide as much access to that fundamental learning experience in our classroom as we possibly can. Because the benefits are tremendous, and are widespread across the full spectrum of academic outcomes that we could possibly think to be relevant. And so what I appreciated seeing the study show up in your Roundup is specifically speaking to academic outcomes, and has a huge impact for students with disabilities, I folks, those who have an IEP and those who do not to be able to be learning with their peers. And I think that it speaks to the the social nature of learning, like to be able to be with your your primary and most qualified instructor for the content, because they designed the learning experience, to be able to be learning with your peers, we’re working on the same questions that we have got to help students be in that environment to the greatest extent possible. And that doesn’t mean ignoring IEPs. IEPs are appropriate, we should do those things also. And we should do everything that we can to be able to make that environment as accessible for as many students as possible. Rather than saying this is the baseline experience. And if you can’t engage with it, as I initially designed it, then you got to go somewhere else that’s going to have dramatic consequences for the learning that those students are able to have, if they’re not able to access that experience that you’ve designed. So I really appreciate it because it’s another resounding call to make what we design as accessible as possible for all the students who are assigned to our instruction. Well, I feel like that’s a really great connection if we’re going to another art study on your list. Planning for flexibility and the diversity of experiences. I feel like it’s a good segue into the importance of play based learning, which is another study that showed up on your list. Because play can mean so many different things to so many different learners and isn’t necessarily tied to do individual interests, or nascent passions that learners may have like there, I really am compelled by building things like my, my five year old daughter, the older of the two, she loves to build things, she loves to do chemistry, she loves to mix things together. And so if she’s going into if you’ve got magnet tiles, she is here for it, she’s going to build some awesome stuff with those magnet tiles. And in the outgrowth of that kind of work, you can start to ask really compelling questions that a teacher can start to link back to content goals, you can start to link back to other material to do interlinkage and make a more interconnected schema. And all of that has to start with learners having the opportunity to play to be able to be creative, and to be able to get some of the benefits of these brain breaks things that we were talking about earlier, because play can be relaxing. And so while when I first saw the section dividers like play based learning, and I was like, Yeah, play based learning is good. I, I don’t know that I needed this study to tell me that, but that your roundup was a good reminder of some of the learning opportunities and the benefits that come from play based learning. And so for that, I appreciated it.
LW– And, you know, these articles are for the entire education space. As a secondary science instructor, what playing based might mean in my classroom is very different from what like the original target audience of that article is about the age range of that audience. So though, that wasn’t necessarily a super compelling article for me, it does reinforce that if you’re an elementary school teacher, you’re feeling pressure to do these certain things with your kids. Like, sit them down, and drill these math problems. And that’s what that’s what you got to do. While you know that giving them time to be self directed in their exploration is very, very important to having large returns on their learning. That tension that you feel that what you know is good for your kids is supported, we are like, that is what teaching is and you have professional pedagogical permission to use your time to support the things that are good for your kids.
YT– Yeah, and one of the, for me, one of the big takeaways about that research is that oftentimes, you know, if you’re a teacher, the best approach is the middle ground. So you don’t want, you know, teacher directed teacher centered instruction, where you’re basically telling students everything that they need to be doing. But if you look at the, you know, the opposite end of the spectrum, if you let kids do whatever they want, oftentimes, it’s not going to be very productive. So what you want is something that’s kind of more in the middle, where you let them explore, let them be curious, let them try to figure things out on their own, and then step in, kind of when they’re straying too far off the path, that they’re way off the mark, then you can say things like, you know, maybe you should try this. And that’s really what it kind of boils down to, for me. It’s not like telling them what the answer is, but it’s kind of guiding them towards the answer. So that if they’re really confused, or they’re struggling, just, you know, step in and say, Well, you know, maybe, you know, if you’re building a tower as high as you can, you know, maybe try having the base slope be a little bit longer or bigger, or something, you know, just stepping in with your expertise, and not necessarily telling them what to do. But just give them ideas, gently nudge them towards the answer, you don’t want to, you know, tell them what the answer is. But if left to their own devices, kids can spend a lot of time trying to figure out the answer. And that that in of itself can be fairly unproductive. So it’s really just stepping in and shining them gently.
MR– It makes me think of some of the themes that came out from our recent discussion around reverse engineering of if we say, do whatever you want, but I don’t have enough experience to know what I want, then I don’t necessarily know where I can go or what I can do. And it makes me think, again, of my five year old daughters, and being able to let them play in a fairly open way. They will reveal to you their interests and their curiosities, and their noticings and wonderings. And then it is the work of the educator to see them noticing to see them wandering, and then to work with that and sculpt that and direct that. For example, It makes me think of at home when I saw one of my daughter’s mixing things together in the bathroom. She had water in a cup and she was mixing shampoo and she was mixing conditioners. She was seeing what was happening in her potion. And that was interesting. We let that go for a little while and then eventually started dumping a whole bunch of shampoo into the mixture. And it was like, my child, why are you doing that? And she’s like, well, I want to see something change color or something. And she’s running out of ideas, I noticed she’s running out of ideas for how she could make changes. And so then that was an opportunity for me to say, Oh, if you want to see color changes, let me tell you about cabbage juice. ” Let’s make some cabbage juice. And let’s get a few things out of the fridge. And let’s talk about what things can mix and some of their properties that might start to predict color changes. And we had a whole great experience doing some cabbage juice chemistry, which if listeners you’re not familiar with, is a great opportunity for it’s a pH indicator. And so it changes colors, depending on the pH of the solution. And we had a really wonderful experience and the girls learned about acids and bases and indicators. And I can make something out of that only because the girls revealed to me their interest in color change and mixtures, which I only knew because they had played in the first place. And part of it is also like just giving teachers more tools, more ideas of things to try in the classroom. Because now there’s still room for direct instruction in the classroom. You know, you want students to get their basic facts, you know, going, you want to talk about dates and names, like, you know, imagine talking about the life of an inventor, without ever mentioning the inventors name, like that’s a piece of factual information that’s very important to know. So you still have to go over all of these basic foundational facts. But it’s also about finding different ways to encourage kids to learn about the material. So you can have, you know, a short session where you’re doing a lot of direct instruction, where you going over the facts, where you go over kind of just the basic information that they need to know. But also you want them to be more curious and creative, and to start taking what they’ve learned, and start applying and applying it in different ways. You know, maybe they can act out their friends’ historical events, or maybe they can think about what would have happened if a different country won World War Two, there’s room for all these different approaches. And then there’s the middle ground, which is okay, now that we’ve gone over the basics, now that you’ve gone and tried to explore, and to brainstorm all these wild scenarios. Now let’s try to bring the class back together. And let’s try to figure out, okay, what are the things that I think you should know, at the end of the lesson. So it’s really important not to rely on one strategy, not to rely on this, you know, completely student centered discovery learning approach, because we kind of know that doesn’t work very well. Or focusing too much on direct instruction, and kind of explicit instruction and making sure that kids understand kind of the content, it’s good to have all these different approaches. Because every student is different, and some students respond very well to direct instruction, then they’re really good at picking things up. Some students need to explore things a little bit more. And to figure out, you know, what are the boundaries where they are the edges of what we’re learning about, because that’s what gets them engaged.
LW– The play based learning, the center is giving control to the learner about how they are progressing through the material. And one other study that does the same thing is number nine. Why learners push the pause button, talking about the value of videotaping lessons and instructions for and the benefits that may not be so well understood of that kind of interfacing.
YT– Yeah, so this, once again, goes into cognitive load theory. The way that you are connected, is to imagine you’re in class, right? And you’re going over a really complex topic. There are students who are going to be sitting in your class and will be confused. But they will be too scared to raise their hands and say, I don’t understand this, can you please go back and say it over again, because I’m just not getting it. What’s going to happen? For the most part those students are going to just sit there, except that they’re confused. And either that they’re, you know, quote, unquote, good students, they’re gonna go back to the material later on their own time and figure it out. Or there’s gonna be a big gap in their understanding. And all of this will be because oftentimes, and we even spoke about this a little bit earlier. The teacher has 60 minutes of material to go over in 60 minutes, right? You never think to yourself, I have, you know, I have a full class here. Let me only half the time over my lesson and spend the other half, you know, most of the time you want to cram as much as you can, because the goal is to get students to learn as much as possible in that limited amount of time that you have. So oftentimes, oftentimes, it’s inadvertent, but you’re kind of as a teacher, you’re kind of giving off the signal that there’s a cost to stopping and going over the material over again, if any students are confused. And there are two different dimensions to that cost for students. There’s a personal psychological cost, which is that a lot of students just have a lot of anxiety about appearing as if they don’t know the material. Because that’s, you know, frightening, you know, it’s very frightening to tell the rest of the class, I’m scared, I’m not good. I don’t understand material, you know, it’s a scary thing to do, especially if you’re a shy students, if you’re an introvert, you know, you don’t want to, or if you’re just a very reserved student, it’s, it’s, it can be challenging for students to pause and say, teacher go over this again. But what you’re seeing is that with videos, when students can pause, and there’s no kind of social or psychological cost to pausing, students pause pretty profusely. And they pause in the moments of the video that are the most confusing, where something is happening, and the information is very complex. And they need to spend a little bit more time because it’s always easier to go over information than it is to process it. Because sometimes you need a few extra moments. And during the live lecture, you don’t necessarily have that luxury of pausing the teacher, and then going back to your notes, or thinking, Oh, the teacher, you know, there’s a word that the teacher said that I don’t really understand, or that’s confusing. Let me you know, go over my notes and see if we’ve gone over that vocabulary word, vocabulary word before, even in, you know, this podcast, we’re putting out terms like retrieval practice, that listeners might not necessarily be familiar with. So it’s helpful to just pause the podcast and say, Alright, what is retrieval practice, because I don’t think we ever actually defined it, and our talks, but when you’re looking at the video, if you’re looking at an instructional video, you do have the opportunity. And, and, and really, it’s, it’s a great feature to be able to pause that video. And if something’s confusing to go over again, or to look back at your notes, or to search online to see what else about it is, you know, can inform your understanding of whatever the topic is. So this is a very small study, but to me, it’s, it’s a powerful study, because it shows the importance of cognitive load on learning, which is, students can absorb only so much information, they need to need regular pauses throughout their learning, they need to be able to not just absorb the information, but they need to be able to process it. And those little pauses are kind of the point at which students are processing complex information. So what I’m seeing, obviously, this isn’t in the study, but you know, there’s kind of like a meter, a cognitive load meter. And when the teacher is starting to go over really complex material, that cognitive load meter starts increasing, and starts increasing. And eventually it hits a point where the student is overwhelmed. And it’s at that point where students often pause the video, take a few moments, to be able to process the information at their own pace at their own time. And then, you know, they rewind the video and go over the information again, or they can see the video. So to me, one of the benefits of instructional videos is that you’re no longer kind of forced to have a one to one correspondence between the teacher going over the material and the student processing the material. Because that’s never gonna happen. You know, as students have covered the material before or if there’s, you know, your your top performing students, you might be going too slow for them, or for probably half the room or, you know, more than half the class students are going to be struggling at different points and the power to be able to stop the information at those points, and to slow down time, and to be able to process it at their own pace. That’s very powerful.
LW– One of the things that you said fairly early in it, and I think it’s really important, and you refer back to it a few times, is that I think it is this pernicious fundamental misunderstanding that drives goal setting in education is that you’re this perception where even even practitioners who know, this is not true. feel a pressure to complete a predetermined curriculum. Here’s the curriculum for the school year that you are to complete with your kids. And when you said, you know, you got 60 minutes to develop to portray 60 minutes of information or experience or whatever is scripted. That’s that that is one of the pressures that teachers have to navigate that these pieces of research help us challenge that it’s okay to spend time of those 60 minutes on a brain break, even though we’re not going to get as far because they need that time. It’s okay to spend some of that time building relationships with your students, because they’re going to need that time. It’s okay to spend some of that time doing play directed learning, because they need some of that time. And this, this idea that the curriculum is your job, is internalized by a lot of teachers. And I think especially new teachers, that I’m not doing well, because I’m not keeping pace with my colleagues, or I’m not doing well, because I’m not going to get through all the curriculum. And I just think that that judgment is intrinsically flawed, because it ignores so many of the parts of good pedagogy, that you’re round up the highlights, and this is just another one that if you give control of the speed of the lecture to your kids, they’re going to be able to use that at a rate that is important to them. So again, thank you for this work that you’re doing.
MR– Well, and the control, I think is what’s key. And what I think is underlying this specific study is what are the affordances of the tools that we are using. And I think specifically, you highlighted several times in your comments, Youki the It is ridiculous to imagine that a lecture I would give for even 10 minutes is going to align with the pace at which a room of 30 learners need to encounter the information to appropriately internalize it. That’s absurd. And I think any reasonable educator would be like, yeah, that is absurd. Of course not. Is that okay? If that is true, videos are an excellent opportunity to turn some control about pacing over to students. So even if I’m going to do 10 minutes of lecture to facilitate conversation, there is tremendous value in creating a two minute video of me reiterating the most critical information from that discussion, in a way that facilitates students to pause and rewind. And it can be easy to get frustrated, be like, well, they’re just gonna listen to it at 2x The speed. So like, am I wasting my time? No, the fact that they’re gonna listen to it at 2x, the speed and then pause when they need to, and re-listen to that comment one more time, because that was a crescendo moment, and they need to hear it twice. What a wonderful opportunity with this specific tool. And let us take advantage of that, as educators, because we can’t do that in a live delivery of instruction. And this is research to show that they are going to use it, you’re not wrong, they’re absolutely going to mess with the delivery controls. And isn’t that great? Isn’t that great news. They’re going to use the control, they have to modulate the delivery of information to match what they can interpret. terrific news.
YT– Yeah, and I mean, one of my goals isn’t necessarily to promote, you know, instructional videos to promote the pause button. For me, really, if it sheds light on just how students think and learn. And my goal is to have anyone reading that section to have this aha moment where they think, oh, you know what, the pacing of instruction doesn’t necessarily match the pacing of learning. And that disconnect, can manifest itself in different ways. And one way that we see is with how students learn, or how students pause instructional videos, but there’s so many different ways. And it’s, I mean, it’s funny because a lot of these studies are tied to each other, you know, but I mean, just the idea that the pacing is different. The teacher versus learner pacing might not be in alignment, you know, manifests itself in the research on brain breaks, that, you know, if students need time to process the information, brain breaks, give them that time to reflect and to absorb that information and to be able to make those connections that can’t happen necessarily in real time when the student is sitting, absorbing all of that information, because that that alone requires a lot of cognitive effort, you know, you need to reflect afterwards, to really understand the material.
LW– There’s one last one, there’s one last one, and I’m kind of glad that it got last because this is the one that I had highlighted. As a personal note, I’ve got a two and a half year old niece. And I am really excited to visit her over this, this winter break, and use my entire body to talk to her about letters and sounds, I’m really excited about that. So that’s sort of like opening up a holiday activity for me based on this particular article. So tell us about a better way to learn your ABCs.
YT–I always love studies like this, because when you see it when you see something like kids acting out the letter S and wiggling like a snake in the classroom, it’s very easy to think, Oh, they’re having fun. But there’s a deep fundamental cognitive process going on there, which is that they’re learning the material in different ways. They’re processing the material in different ways. And when you process material in different ways, instead of just verbally when you’re processing it processing, processing it kinesthetically verbally, when you’re enacting what you’re learning, it just creates more durable learning, it encodes the material much more deeply, it makes it so that kids are just more connected to what they’re learning. And it results in just better learning outcomes. So when you have an example where kids are learning their ABCs, but you try to link it to them just moving out and attacking all the different letters and pretending like, you know, when you’re doing the C and cat, and the difference between C and cat versus the C and sauce, and having kids kind of like explicitly act out those differences. And having that explosive cuts out, versus the softer soft sound like really, kids will understand the difference between those two C sounds, if you just approach it in different ways. If you just know very dryly about the different C sounds, they’re not going to engage with the material as steeply, as opposed to a few start really getting them to move their bodies and get them engaged and get them to think about what the differences in those sounds are.
MR– And this actually overlaps with a really old episode, I don’t remember what it was, but I think it was in the double O’s, like four or five or six years ago. But one of the very first studies we read that was a brain scan study that was looking at math it was but it was the same idea of approaching this in a way that activates more of our senses, which then activates more of our processing regions across our brain, which gives us an opportunity to then encode that information across more regions of our brain, which then produces the more durable learning that you’re referencing. And so I see this in my two five year old daughters at home who are in the process of learning to read. There, they are somewhere between pre reading and early reading. And so this kind of an issue of one letter that can make two sounds is so salient to me right now. And just helping them access that nuance across more of their sensory processing regions, like I absolutely believe that can make a difference, because that’s a nuance that is going to hit them right at their zone of proximal development like that is at the edge of what they can access. And so being able to access it with more of their body and more of their cognition is exactly what they’re going to need to be able to fully grasp and hold on to those subtleties, of which there are a tremendous number. Man languages are the worst, like, why do we talk this way. And so being able to deal with all those nuances and exceptions, is something that all the help we can give them, benefits them, and we’ll help them make that progress more quickly, which is then satisfying. And honestly, my five year olds like to wiggle so they enjoy it too. So we can do these things that make them happy. That makes them enjoy it. That makes them connect positive emotions to reading in the first place, which has a tremendous number of benefits as far as cultivating a lifelong love of learning and a lifelong love of reading in general. So it goes back to what we’ve said several times.Now, this afternoon, have this wide constellation of benefits, both proximal and distal to the experience that are all good. And so the fact that wiggling helps me learn this letter right here right now is a good enough reason unto itself. And if it has all these other downstream benefits also have a pleasant experience and a bonding experience with Uncle Laurence, who’s acting silly. And I’m going to remember him being silly for the rest of my life. So be it. That seems awesome. Like those great, let’s do all these things together.
YT– Yeah, and one thing I also like about this research is that, you know, there was a time when you would read a study like that and think, oh, no, these are kinesthetic learners. But now we know pretty clearly that it’s not that there are learners who learn in a specific way. But that learning things in multiple ways, trying to learn things in different ways. It’s just better when you draw something, you’re thinking about the original concept, you’re thinking about the original kind of semantic information, but you’re also producing that information in different ways. And that helps you remember the material. So it’s, like, it’s very important to kind of highlight the contributions of research like this. Like, you know, the ABC study has on our understanding of the importance of encoding things in different ways.
MR– This has been great, we’ve hung out all afternoon, have a conversation with you about all things the research you’ve rounded up and your approach to science communication, generally. So first off from me and from the show. Thank you, Youki, for taking your afternoon to have a conversation with us. We’re gonna let you have the last word. So if readers have enjoyed what you’ve written, and they want to learn more from you about education, and what education research can do for their practice, where can they find the things that you create?YT– So everything is on edutopia.org. And you can search for my name up Terada, and then search for education research highlights of 2022. And that should take you right to the article. But we also do have a research newsletter that is relatively new. And you can sign up for that if you search for the researchers in Edutopia research newsletter, that should get you to the signup page. But yeah, we have it monthly and it has highlights. So if you like the highlights, and the yearly Roundup, you’ll like the highlights that we do every month for the research newsletter. And they have and we also include graphs, lots of graphs, I love graphs, and all the other articles and videos that we produce related to research.