Information about education provided online, with recent results of scientific research and useful information for teachers, parents, students and the general public. Contributing to an informed debate.
How Morocco is improving student learning: the success of the Pioneer Schools
Moroccan Pioneer Schools have replaced intuition with evidence to achieve learning gains that turned around a looming educational crisis. Using a combination of explicit instruction and Teaching at the Right Level, paired with rigorously scripted pedagogy and solid digital monitoring, the program has quadrupled proficiency rates in one single year, providing an inspiring model for global educational reform.
Clermont Gauthier
Steve Bissonnette
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The Forgotten Desirable Difficulty: Contextual Interference
As I wrote in a previous piece, Robert and Elizabeth Bjork once identified five desirable difficulties. Three of them have since become educational darlings: spaced practice, interleaving, and retrieval practice. They appear in books, professional development sessions, and policy documents. The remaining two have been far less fortunate. Contextual interference and reduced feedback rarely receive the same attention. Perhaps because they are harder to explain. Perhaps because they run counter to what feels like good teaching (whatever that is). My last piece was about reduced feedback. This one is about the other: contextual interference, a desirable difficulty that is quietly powerful and consistently overlooked.
Paul A. Kirschner
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Good teaching is not a special measure
Why the principles that support children with special educational needs are the foundations of effective teaching for all.
David Didau
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Is Testing the Next Frontier in Ed Reform?
A short-lived experiment in Louisiana suggests the power of tying reading tests to content that students have been taught.
Natalie Wexler
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The Box Metaphor for Working Memory
How many boxes can you hold? Late last year, I went to a talk by Dr. Sarah Oberle where she posed this question and I have been using a modified version of this metaphor ever since. It is clearly a trick question. The answer, like so many things in our complex world of education is, of course, it depends. It depends on several factors that match up quite nicely with the same questions of what we can hold in working memory. Below I’ll walk through a few of these and hopefully it will give you a better way of thinking about working memory as well.
Cindy Nebel
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What's Really Behind the "Southern Surge"?
Improved reading scores in states like Louisiana are due to far more than “phonics” or “accountability.”
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Understanding how we learn: An interview with John Sweller
In this interview, the man behind cognitive load theory shares his thoughts about memory, explicit instruction and how evidence-based practices can improve student learning.
Iniciativa Educação
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Notetaking Formats
One of the most common metaphors to describe what the first few years of medical school is like is that it is like drinking water from a fire hose. There is an overwhelming amount of information that students need to learn, and need to learn fast. One of the areas that I help medical students with is in improving their notetaking to help them manage the “fire hose” of information.
Althea Need Kaminske
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Can vocabulary and knowledge be effectively developed in early childhood education? The benefits of a content-rich literacy curriculum
More people are learning to read than ever before. However, pupils’ performance in reading fluently and understanding what they read remains unsatisfactory — a trend aggravated by the covid-19 pandemic. As a result, reading comprehension has become an increasingly important focus of research. A 2025 study focusing on preschool education seeks to address two specific questions in this context. Does integrating vocabulary instruction with content knowledge help preschoolers’ reading comprehension? And do variables such as the children’s prior knowledge when they start preschool, their socioeconomic background, or the fact that they are being taught in a second language influence the outcomes?
Célia Oliveira
Soraia Araújo
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The Key to Motivating Students--and Maybe Everyone Else Too
Students won’t learn unless they’re motivated. But the best way to motivate them is to enable them to experience achievement.
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To Boost Learning, Weave Writing Activities Into Regular Instruction
Weaving explicit writing instruction into class discussion can maximize the benefits of any content-rich curriculum—and help students become proficient writers.
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Want Students to Be Good Speakers? Teach Them to Write
A push for "oracy" in England points up connections between writing and oral language