This is a bi-weekly newsletter on the latest in educational research and schools.

The decline of reading

A US study suggests that students aren’t learning reading through research-based comprehension strategies. This follows another study which suggests the proportion of US adults who read for pleasure has declined by 40%. Some are arguing the age of traditional text is ending.

Chart from this FT article.

Making Creative Connections Helps Vocab Learning

In this study of students learning a foreign language vocabulary they were encouraged to make deliberate connections through writing and drawing. The fact that students had deliberately made connections meant they were more likely to recall the words later.

Drawing is a great way to learn (if it’s designed right)

We know from Mayer’s Research that drawing can be an effective generative learning activity. Drawing actually tends to outperform text-focused generative learning tasks (like reading, highlighting, summarising) partly because we need to think really hard about the key information when drawing. Recent research makes clear that it needs to be designed right. Here are three tips from the research:

Provide a starting point (e.g a partial template, outline or background)
Use prompts (e.g. “Show how X affects Y” or provide symbols)
Model drawing first