The year 2020 was a year of the pandemic that no one expected. The COVID-19 pandemic impacted lives and livelihoods across the globe. From students, to teachers, and even the schools, the year 2020 and even 2021 was a challenging one. Education studies of students were severely impacted, with schools and educational institutions around the world being closed. Most schools and teachers were forced to transform the physical classrooms into digital ones, and in some places even hybrid ones.
When it comes to online education studies, there are certain things that work and some that don’t. Researchers around the world started collecting data about education studies during the pandemic.
Here are the top 7 significant education studies that researchers across the globe have been able to come up with.
Secret classroom management techniques used by expert teachers
- Talking about education studies, classroom management by expert and skilled teachers can appear to be invisible.
- There is a lot of preparation done by skilled teachers for classroom management.
- Outbursts by students are quite common and probably unavoidable in schools.
- Some find it difficult to participate in class activities, while some just cannot complete their assignments on-time.
- What distinguishes expert and skilled teachers from the less-experienced peers is that they focus on building long-term relationships with the learners.
- They follow a holistic approach towards discipline and convert misbehavior in the classroom to see how active learning and project-based learning can be promoted in the class, to make it more engaging and fun for the learners.
- Skilled teachers also probe the reason for misbehavior, and mostly confront students privately.
- The focus of experienced teachers in classroom management is to understand the classroom behavior dynamics and not individual interruption by students.
Digital vs Paper based learning
- In education studies, the debate between digital and paper-based learning is a major argument and conflict.
- Some believe that digital screens are only good for collecting information, while books are irreplaceable and captivating for the learners.
- Researchers have found that paper-based books produced better comprehension results than e-books.
- Children tend to understand and grasp print learning better when digital and paper books are compared.
- However, learning is more fun and interesting with e-books having sounds and motion.
Teaching vocabulary to kids
- In education studies, vocabulary words help to unleash the hidden Thespian in kids.
- Researchers asked 8-year-old learners to listen to words in different languages, and use their hands and body to mimic the words.
- For example, when learning the German word ‘Flugzeug’, which means ‘airplane’, the learners could spread their hands like wings of an airplane and pretend to fly.
- After 2 months, the research showed 73 percent more likeliness that the young, budding thespians who used gestures and actions to enact the words were able to recollect and remember them than those students who did not use any gestures.
Students asking good questions are better learners
- Is education only about learning answers to questions, reading notes, comprehension?
- No, active learning is about active participation of students in the learning process by asking quality questions, especially the ones that are thought-provoking and probing.
- In the education studies carried out by researchers, students who read and studied a particular topic and prepared their own set of questions scored 14 percentage points higher compared to those who used passive learning techniques like reading and rereading a topic from the book.
Neuroscientists have mentioned that teaching handwriting to children is crucial
- Even in a world where typing is slowly replacing handwriting, children need to be taught handwriting.
- Both handwriting and drawing fosters deeper learning, and the neural tracing found by researchers in 7-year-old students are an indicator of this.
- Handwriting and drawing are an indispensable aspect of education that stimulate certain centers in the brain which typing cannot.
- Replacing handwriting by typing is a big disaster.
Understanding what a good school means
- When we talk about education studies, most people think that an excellent school is one that helps students to get better marks and higher grades. However, this is not true.
- A good school is not the one in which students score well in the examination.
- A good school is one which focuses on holistic learning and all-round growth and development of kids.
- A study conducted on 9th grade students in Chicago public schools showed that the schools which focused on the emotional and social aspects of learning were able to get far better high school and graduation results than those schools which primarily focused on academic growth alone.
Disproving the idea about immigrant students
- Immigrant students being a burden on the academic system is just a myth.
- Instead of putting a strain on the educational system, immigrant students have a positive impact on the academic growth and success of educational institutions.
- Researchers in their education studies have pointed out to the hard work and persistence of immigrant students being the reasons for their success.
- The positive attitude and their desire to succeed have a direct impact on the local students as well, resulting in a boost in academic growth and performance.
Education studies carried out by researchers are important and present different aspects of learning and education in front of everyone.
