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The turning point: Why we must transform education now

Global warming. Accelerated digital revolution. Growing inequalities. Democratic backsliding. Loss of biodiversity. Devastating pandemics. And the list goes on. These are just some of the most pressing challenges that we are facing today in our interconnected world.

The diagnosis is clear: Our current global education system is failing to address these alarming challenges and provide quality learning for everyone throughout life. We know that education today is not fulfilling its promise to help us shape peaceful, just, and sustainable societies. These findings were detailed in UNESCO’s Futures of Education Report in November 2021 which called for a new social contract for education.

That is why it has never been more crucial to reimagine the way we learn, what we learn and how we learn. The turning point is now. It’s time to transform education. How do we make that happen?

Here’s what you need to know. 

Why do we need to transform education?

The current state of the world calls for a major transformation in education to repair past injustices and enhance our capacity to act together for a more sustainable and just future. We must ensure the right to lifelong learning by providing all learners - of all ages in all contexts - the knowledge and skills they need to realize their full potential and live with dignity. Education can no longer be limited to a single period of one’s lifetime. Everyone, starting with the most marginalized and disadvantaged in our societies, must be entitled to learning opportunities throughout life both for employment and personal agency. A new social contract for education must unite us around collective endeavours and provide the knowledge and innovation needed to shape a better world anchored in social, economic, and environmental justice.  

What are the key areas that need to be transformed?

• Inclusive, equitable, safe and healthy schools

Education is in crisis. High rates of poverty, exclusion and gender inequality continue to hold millions back from learning. Moreover, COVID-19 further exposed the inequities in education access and quality, and violence, armed conflict, disasters and reversal of women’s rights have increased insecurity. Inclusive, transformative education must ensure that all learners have unhindered access to and participation in education, that they are safe and healthy, free from violence and discrimination, and are supported with comprehensive care services within school settings. Transforming education requires a significant increase in investment in quality education, a strong foundation in comprehensive early childhood development and education, and must be underpinned by strong political commitment, sound planning, and a robust evidence base.

• Learning and skills for life, work and sustainable development

There is a crisis in foundational learning, of literacy and numeracy skills among young learners. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, learning poverty has increased by a third in low- and middle-income countries, with an estimated 70% of 10-year-olds unable to understand a simple written text. Children with disabilities are 42% less likely to have foundational reading and numeracy skills compared to their peers. More than 771 million people still lack basic literacy skills, two-thirds of whom are women. Transforming education means empowering learners with knowledge, skills, values and attitudes to be resilient, adaptable and prepared for the uncertain future while contributing to human and planetary well-being and sustainable development. To do so, there must be emphasis on foundational learning for basic literacy and numeracy; education for sustainable development, which encompasses environmental and climate change education; and skills for employment and entrepreneurship.

• Teachers, teaching and the teaching profession

Teachers are essential for achieving learning outcomes, and for achieving SDG 4 and the transformation of education. But teachers and education personnel are confronted by four major challenges: Teacher shortages; lack of professional development opportunities; low status and working conditions; and lack of capacity to develop teacher leadership, autonomy and innovation. Accelerating progress toward SDG 4 and transforming education require that there is an adequate number of teachers to meet learners’ needs, and all education personnel are trained, motivated, and supported. This can only be possible when education is adequately funded, and policies recognize and support the teaching profession, to improve their status and working conditions.

• Digital learning and transformation

The COVID-19 crisis drove unprecedented innovations in remote learning through harnessing digital technologies. At the same time, the digital divide excluded many from learning, with nearly one-third of school-age children (463 million) without access to distance learning. These inequities in access meant some groups, such as young women and girls, were left out of learning opportunities. Digital transformation requires harnessing technology as part of larger systemic efforts to transform education, making it more inclusive, equitable, effective, relevant, and sustainable. Investments and action in digital learning should be guided by the three core principles: Center the most marginalized; Free, high-quality digital education content; and Pedagogical innovation and change.

• Financing of education

While global education spending has grown overall, it has been thwarted by high population growth, the surmounting costs of managing education during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the diversion of aid to other emergencies, leaving a massive global education financial gap amounting to US$ 148 billion annually. In this context, the first step toward transformation is to urge funders to redirect resources back to education to close the funding gap. Following that, countries must have significantly increased and sustainable financing for achieving SDG 4 and that these resources must be equitably and effectively allocated and monitored. Addressing the gaps in education financing requires policy actions in three key areas: Mobilizing more resources, especially domestic; increasing efficiency and equity of allocations and expenditures; and improving education financing data. Finally, determining which areas needs to be financed, and how, will be informed by recommendations from each of the other four action tracks .

What is the Transforming Education Summit?

UNESCO is hosting the Transforming Education Pre-Summit on 28-30 June 2022, a meeting of  over 140 Ministers of Education, as well as  policy and business leaders and youth activists, who are coming together to build a roadmap to transform education globally. This meeting is a precursor to the Transforming Education Summit to be held on 19 September 2022 at the UN General Assembly in New York. This high-level summit is convened by the UN Secretary General to radically change our approach to education systems. Focusing on 5 key areas of transformation, the meeting seeks to mobilize political ambition, action, solutions and solidarity to transform education: to take stock of efforts to recover pandemic-related learning losses; to reimagine education systems for the world of today and tomorrow; and to revitalize national and global efforts to achieve SDG-4.

• More on the Transforming Education Summit
• More on the Pre-Summit

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This article is related to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals .

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The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2021

From reframing our notion of “good” schools to mining the magic of expert teachers, here’s a curated list of must-read research from 2021.

It was a year of unprecedented hardship for teachers and school leaders. We pored through hundreds of studies to see if we could follow the trail of exactly what happened: The research revealed a complex portrait of a grueling year during which persistent issues of burnout and mental and physical health impacted millions of educators. Meanwhile, many of the old debates continued: Does paper beat digital? Is project-based learning as effective as direct instruction? How do you define what a “good” school is?

Other studies grabbed our attention, and in a few cases, made headlines. Researchers from the University of Chicago and Columbia University turned artificial intelligence loose on some 1,130 award-winning children’s books in search of invisible patterns of bias. (Spoiler alert: They found some.) Another study revealed why many parents are reluctant to support social and emotional learning in schools—and provided hints about how educators can flip the script.

1. What Parents Fear About SEL (and How to Change Their Minds)

When researchers at the Fordham Institute asked parents to rank phrases associated with social and emotional learning , nothing seemed to add up. The term “social-emotional learning” was very unpopular; parents wanted to steer their kids clear of it. But when the researchers added a simple clause, forming a new phrase—”social-emotional & academic learning”—the program shot all the way up to No. 2 in the rankings.

What gives?

Parents were picking up subtle cues in the list of SEL-related terms that irked or worried them, the researchers suggest. Phrases like “soft skills” and “growth mindset” felt “nebulous” and devoid of academic content. For some, the language felt suspiciously like “code for liberal indoctrination.”

But the study suggests that parents might need the simplest of reassurances to break through the political noise. Removing the jargon, focusing on productive phrases like “life skills,” and relentlessly connecting SEL to academic progress puts parents at ease—and seems to save social and emotional learning in the process.

2. The Secret Management Techniques of Expert Teachers

In the hands of experienced teachers, classroom management can seem almost invisible: Subtle techniques are quietly at work behind the scenes, with students falling into orderly routines and engaging in rigorous academic tasks almost as if by magic. 

That’s no accident, according to new research . While outbursts are inevitable in school settings, expert teachers seed their classrooms with proactive, relationship-building strategies that often prevent misbehavior before it erupts. They also approach discipline more holistically than their less-experienced counterparts, consistently reframing misbehavior in the broader context of how lessons can be more engaging, or how clearly they communicate expectations.

Focusing on the underlying dynamics of classroom behavior—and not on surface-level disruptions—means that expert teachers often look the other way at all the right times, too. Rather than rise to the bait of a minor breach in etiquette, a common mistake of new teachers, they tend to play the long game, asking questions about the origins of misbehavior, deftly navigating the terrain between discipline and student autonomy, and opting to confront misconduct privately when possible.

3. The Surprising Power of Pretesting

Asking students to take a practice test before they’ve even encountered the material may seem like a waste of time—after all, they’d just be guessing.

But new research concludes that the approach, called pretesting, is actually more effective than other typical study strategies. Surprisingly, pretesting even beat out taking practice tests after learning the material, a proven strategy endorsed by cognitive scientists and educators alike. In the study, students who took a practice test before learning the material outperformed their peers who studied more traditionally by 49 percent on a follow-up test, while outperforming students who took practice tests after studying the material by 27 percent.

The researchers hypothesize that the “generation of errors” was a key to the strategy’s success, spurring student curiosity and priming them to “search for the correct answers” when they finally explored the new material—and adding grist to a 2018 study that found that making educated guesses helped students connect background knowledge to new material.

Learning is more durable when students do the hard work of correcting misconceptions, the research suggests, reminding us yet again that being wrong is an important milestone on the road to being right.

4. Confronting an Old Myth About Immigrant Students

Immigrant students are sometimes portrayed as a costly expense to the education system, but new research is systematically dismantling that myth.

In a 2021 study , researchers analyzed over 1.3 million academic and birth records for students in Florida communities, and concluded that the presence of immigrant students actually has “a positive effect on the academic achievement of U.S.-born students,” raising test scores as the size of the immigrant school population increases. The benefits were especially powerful for low-income students.

While immigrants initially “face challenges in assimilation that may require additional school resources,” the researchers concluded, hard work and resilience may allow them to excel and thus “positively affect exposed U.S.-born students’ attitudes and behavior.” But according to teacher Larry Ferlazzo, the improvements might stem from the fact that having English language learners in classes improves pedagogy , pushing teachers to consider “issues like prior knowledge, scaffolding, and maximizing accessibility.”

5. A Fuller Picture of What a ‘Good’ School Is

It’s time to rethink our definition of what a “good school” is, researchers assert in a study published in late 2020.⁣ That’s because typical measures of school quality like test scores often provide an incomplete and misleading picture, the researchers found.

The study looked at over 150,000 ninth-grade students who attended Chicago public schools and concluded that emphasizing the social and emotional dimensions of learning—relationship-building, a sense of belonging, and resilience, for example—improves high school graduation and college matriculation rates for both high- and low-income students, beating out schools that focus primarily on improving test scores.⁣

“Schools that promote socio-emotional development actually have a really big positive impact on kids,” said lead researcher C. Kirabo Jackson in an interview with Edutopia . “And these impacts are particularly large for vulnerable student populations who don’t tend to do very well in the education system.”

The findings reinforce the importance of a holistic approach to measuring student progress, and are a reminder that schools—and teachers—can influence students in ways that are difficult to measure, and may only materialize well into the future.⁣

6. Teaching Is Learning

One of the best ways to learn a concept is to teach it to someone else. But do you actually have to step into the shoes of a teacher, or does the mere expectation of teaching do the trick?

In a 2021 study , researchers split students into two groups and gave them each a science passage about the Doppler effect—a phenomenon associated with sound and light waves that explains the gradual change in tone and pitch as a car races off into the distance, for example. One group studied the text as preparation for a test; the other was told that they’d be teaching the material to another student.

The researchers never carried out the second half of the activity—students read the passages but never taught the lesson. All of the participants were then tested on their factual recall of the Doppler effect, and their ability to draw deeper conclusions from the reading.

The upshot? Students who prepared to teach outperformed their counterparts in both duration and depth of learning, scoring 9 percent higher on factual recall a week after the lessons concluded, and 24 percent higher on their ability to make inferences. The research suggests that asking students to prepare to teach something—or encouraging them to think “could I teach this to someone else?”—can significantly alter their learning trajectories.

7. A Disturbing Strain of Bias in Kids’ Books

Some of the most popular and well-regarded children’s books—Caldecott and Newbery honorees among them—persistently depict Black, Asian, and Hispanic characters with lighter skin, according to new research .

Using artificial intelligence, researchers combed through 1,130 children’s books written in the last century, comparing two sets of diverse children’s books—one a collection of popular books that garnered major literary awards, the other favored by identity-based awards. The software analyzed data on skin tone, race, age, and gender.

Among the findings: While more characters with darker skin color begin to appear over time, the most popular books—those most frequently checked out of libraries and lining classroom bookshelves—continue to depict people of color in lighter skin tones. More insidiously, when adult characters are “moral or upstanding,” their skin color tends to appear lighter, the study’s lead author, Anjali Aduki,  told The 74 , with some books converting “Martin Luther King Jr.’s chocolate complexion to a light brown or beige.” Female characters, meanwhile, are often seen but not heard.

Cultural representations are a reflection of our values, the researchers conclude: “Inequality in representation, therefore, constitutes an explicit statement of inequality of value.”

8. The Never-Ending ‘Paper Versus Digital’ War

The argument goes like this: Digital screens turn reading into a cold and impersonal task; they’re good for information foraging, and not much more. “Real” books, meanwhile, have a heft and “tactility”  that make them intimate, enchanting—and irreplaceable.

But researchers have often found weak or equivocal evidence for the superiority of reading on paper. While a recent study concluded that paper books yielded better comprehension than e-books when many of the digital tools had been removed, the effect sizes were small. A 2021 meta-analysis further muddies the water: When digital and paper books are “mostly similar,” kids comprehend the print version more readily—but when enhancements like motion and sound “target the story content,” e-books generally have the edge.

Nostalgia is a force that every new technology must eventually confront. There’s plenty of evidence that writing with pen and paper encodes learning more deeply than typing. But new digital book formats come preloaded with powerful tools that allow readers to annotate, look up words, answer embedded questions, and share their thinking with other readers.

We may not be ready to admit it, but these are precisely the kinds of activities that drive deeper engagement, enhance comprehension, and leave us with a lasting memory of what we’ve read. The future of e-reading, despite the naysayers, remains promising.

9. New Research Makes a Powerful Case for PBL

Many classrooms today still look like they did 100 years ago, when students were preparing for factory jobs. But the world’s moved on: Modern careers demand a more sophisticated set of skills—collaboration, advanced problem-solving, and creativity, for example—and those can be difficult to teach in classrooms that rarely give students the time and space to develop those competencies.

Project-based learning (PBL) would seem like an ideal solution. But critics say PBL places too much responsibility on novice learners, ignoring the evidence about the effectiveness of direct instruction and ultimately undermining subject fluency. Advocates counter that student-centered learning and direct instruction can and should coexist in classrooms.

Now two new large-scale studies —encompassing over 6,000 students in 114 diverse schools across the nation—provide evidence that a well-structured, project-based approach boosts learning for a wide range of students.

In the studies, which were funded by Lucas Education Research, a sister division of Edutopia , elementary and high school students engaged in challenging projects that had them designing water systems for local farms, or creating toys using simple household objects to learn about gravity, friction, and force. Subsequent testing revealed notable learning gains—well above those experienced by students in traditional classrooms—and those gains seemed to raise all boats, persisting across socioeconomic class, race, and reading levels.

10. Tracking a Tumultuous Year for Teachers

The Covid-19 pandemic cast a long shadow over the lives of educators in 2021, according to a year’s worth of research.

The average teacher’s workload suddenly “spiked last spring,” wrote the Center for Reinventing Public Education in its January 2021 report, and then—in defiance of the laws of motion—simply never let up. By the fall, a RAND study recorded an astonishing shift in work habits: 24 percent of teachers reported that they were working 56 hours or more per week, compared to 5 percent pre-pandemic.

The vaccine was the promised land, but when it arrived nothing seemed to change. In an April 2021 survey  conducted four months after the first vaccine was administered in New York City, 92 percent of teachers said their jobs were more stressful than prior to the pandemic, up from 81 percent in an earlier survey.

It wasn’t just the length of the work days; a close look at the research reveals that the school system’s failure to adjust expectations was ruinous. It seemed to start with the obligations of hybrid teaching, which surfaced in Edutopia ’s coverage of overseas school reopenings. In June 2020, well before many U.S. schools reopened, we reported that hybrid teaching was an emerging problem internationally, and warned that if the “model is to work well for any period of time,” schools must “recognize and seek to reduce the workload for teachers.” Almost eight months later, a 2021 RAND study identified hybrid teaching as a primary source of teacher stress in the U.S., easily outpacing factors like the health of a high-risk loved one.

New and ever-increasing demands for tech solutions put teachers on a knife’s edge. In several important 2021 studies, researchers concluded that teachers were being pushed to adopt new technology without the “resources and equipment necessary for its correct didactic use.” Consequently, they were spending more than 20 hours a week adapting lessons for online use, and experiencing an unprecedented erosion of the boundaries between their work and home lives, leading to an unsustainable “always on” mentality. When it seemed like nothing more could be piled on—when all of the lights were blinking red—the federal government restarted standardized testing .

Change will be hard; many of the pathologies that exist in the system now predate the pandemic. But creating strict school policies that separate work from rest, eliminating the adoption of new tech tools without proper supports, distributing surveys regularly to gauge teacher well-being, and above all listening to educators to identify and confront emerging problems might be a good place to start, if the research can be believed.

Best education articles of 2023

Now three years since COVID’s first classroom closures and a year before districts start to feel the true impact of the fiscal cliff, 2023 marked a pivotal moment for students and schools across America. Fresh scores revealed the stalled state of learning recovery. Educators warned about an escalating chronic absenteeism crisis that has seen students disengage and thrown off track. New political alliances formed around school choice legislation and education savings accounts. Districts became one of the preferred targets of cyberhackers, who posted sensitive student information online. A national alarm was sounded about the state of teen mental health.

From the classroom to the ballot box to the dark web, we’ve been tracking the key storylines of 2023. Here’s our most memorable and impactful journalism of the year...

The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2021

Education Next

Our annual look back at the year’s most popular Education Next articles is itself a popular article with readers. It’s useful as an indicator of what issues are at the top of the education policy conversation.

When we crafted the introduction to this list a year ago, for the top articles of 2020 , we observed, “This year, as our list indicates, race and the Covid-19 pandemic dominated the discussion.” Since then, a new president has been inaugurated, but our list signals that the public hasn’t entirely turned the page: both the pandemic and race-related issues attracted high reader interest in 2021, just as they did the year before.

Several articles directly or indirectly related to the pandemic and its effect made the top-20 list. The no. 1 article, “ Pandemic Parent Survey Finds Perverse Pattern: Students Are More Likely to Be Attending School in Person Where Covid Is Spreading More Rapidly ,” by Michael B. Henderson, Paul E. Peterson, and Martin R. West, reported on what the article called “a troubling pattern: students are most likely to be attending school fully in person in school districts where the virus is spreading most rapidly.” The article explained “To be clear, this pattern does not constitute evidence that greater use of in-person instruction has contributed to the spread of the virus across the United States. It is equally plausible that counties where in-person schooling is most common are places where there are fewer measures and practices in the wider community designed to mitigate Covid spread.”

Other articles whose findings related to the pandemic or had implications for education amid or after the pandemic included “ A Test for the Test-Makers ,” “ The Shrinking School Week ,” “ The Covid-19 Pandemic Is a Lousy Natural Experiment for Studying the Effects of Online Learning ” “ The Politics of Closing Schools ,” “ Addressing Significant Learning Loss in Mathematics During Covid-19 and Beyond ,” and “ Move To Trash: Five pandemic-era education practices that deserve to be dumped in the dustbin .”

Articles about race-related education issues also did well with readers. “ Critical Race Theory Collides with the Law ,” “ Teaching About Slavery ,” “ Ethnic Studies in California ,” and “ Segregation and Racial Gaps in Special Education ” all dealt with those topics.

Perhaps the conflicts over pandemic policies and Critical Race Theory helped provide a push for school choice. Choice—whether in the form of vouchers, scholarships, or charter schools—was the subject of several other articles that made the top 20 list, including “ School Choice Advances in the States ,” “ School Choice and the ‘Truly Disadvantaged,’ ” “ What’s Next in New Orleans ,” and “ Betsy DeVos and the Future of Education Reform .”

Who knows what 2022 will bring? We hope for our readers the year ahead is one of good health and of continued learning. We look forward to a time when pandemic-related articles no longer dominate our list.

The full Top 20 Education Next articles of 2021 list follows:

1. Pandemic Parent Survey Finds Perverse Pattern: Students Are More Likely to Be Attending School in Person Where Covid Is Spreading More Rapidly Majority of students receiving fully remote instruction; Private-school students more likely to be in person full time By Michael B. Henderson, Paul E. Peterson, and Martin R. West

2. Critical Race Theory Collides with the Law Can a school require students to “confess their privilege” in class? By Joshua Dunn

3. Teaching about Slavery “Asking how to teach about slavery is a little like asking why we teach at all” By Danielle Allen, Daina Ramey Berry, David W. Blight, Allen C. Guelzo, Robert Maranto, Ian V. Rowe, and Adrienne Stang

4. Ethnic Studies in California An unsteady jump from college campuses to K-12 classrooms By Miriam Pawel

5. Segregation and Racial Gaps in Special Education New evidence on the debate over disproportionality By Todd E. Elder, David Figlio, Scott Imberman, and Claudia Persico

6. Making Education Research Relevant How researchers can give teachers more choices By Daniel T. Willingham and David B. Daniel

7. Proving the School-to-Prison Pipeline Stricter middle schools raise the risk of adult arrests By Andrew Bacher-Hicks, Stephen B. Billings, and David J. Deming

8. What I Learned in 23 Years Ranking America’s Most Challenging High Schools Most students are capable of much more learning than they are asked to do By Jay Mathews

9. A Test for the Test Makers College Board and ACT move to grow and diversify as the pandemic fuels test-optional admissions trend By Jon Marcus

10. Addressing Significant Learning Loss in Mathematics During Covid-19 and Beyond The pandemic has amplified existing skill gaps, but new strategies and new tech could help By Joel Rose

11. The Shrinking School Week Effects of a four-day schedule on student achievement By Paul N. Thompson

12. Computer Science for All? As a new subject spreads, debates flare about precisely what is taught, to whom, and for what purpose By Jennifer Oldham

13. The Covid-19 Pandemic Is a Lousy Natural Experiment for Studying the Effects of Online Learning Focus, instead, on measuring the overall effects of the pandemic itself By Andrew Bacher-Hicks and Joshua Goodman

14. School Choice Advances in the States Advocates describe “breakthrough year” By Alan Greenblatt

15. The Politics of Closing Schools Teachers unions and the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe By Susanne Wiborg

16. Move to Trash Five pandemic-era education practices that deserve to be dumped in the dustbin By Michael J. Petrilli

17. School Choice and “The Truly Disadvantaged” Vouchers boost college going, but not for students in greatest need By Albert Cheng and Paul E. Peterson

18. The Orchid and the Dandelion New research uncovers a link between a genetic variation and how students respond to teaching. The potential implications for schools—and society—are vast. By Laurence Holt

19. What’s Next in New Orleans The Louisiana city has the most unusual school system in America. But can the new board of a radically decentralized district handle the latest challenges? By Danielle Dreilinger

20. Betsy DeVos and the Future of Education Reform My years as assistant secretary of education gave me a firsthand look at how infighting among education reformers is hampering progress toward change. By Jim Blew

Congratulations to all of our authors!

— Education Next

P.S. You can find the Top 20 Education Next articles of 2020 here , 2019 here , 2018 here , 2017 here , 2016 here , 2015 here , 2014 here and 2013 here .

P.P.S. You can find the Top 10 Education Next blog posts of 2021 here.

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Vol. 24, No. 3

We Recommend You Read

The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2020

Race and the pandemic dominate the discussion

by Education Next

Public-School Attendance Zones Violate a Civil Rights Law

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by Tim DeRoche

In Pandemic, Private Schools Face Peril

Policy choices may help to preserve options for families

by Juliet Squire

The 10 Education Issues Everybody Should Be Talking About

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What issues have the potential to define—or re define—education in the year ahead? Is there a next “big thing” that could shift the K-12 experience or conversation?

These were the questions Education Week set out to answer in this second annual “10 Big Ideas in Education” report.

You can read about last year’s ideas here . In 2019, though, things are different.

This year, we asked Education Week reporters to read the tea leaves and analyze what was happening in classrooms, school districts, and legislatures across the country. What insights could reporters offer practitioners for the year ahead?

Some of the ideas here are speculative. Some are warning shots, others more optimistic. But all 10 of them here have one thing in common: They share a sense of urgency.

Accompanied by compelling illustrations and outside perspectives from leading researchers, advocates, and practitioners, this year’s Big Ideas might make you uncomfortable, or seem improbable. The goal was to provoke and empower you as you consider them.

Let us know what you think, and what big ideas matter to your classroom, school, or district. Tweet your comments with #K12BigIdeas .

No. 1: Kids are right. School is boring.

Out-of-school learning is often more meaningful than anything that happens in a classroom, writes Kevin Bushweller, the Executive Editor of EdWeek Market Brief. His essay tackling the relevance gap is accompanied by a Q&A with advice on nurturing, rather than stifling students’ natural curiosity. Read more.

No. 2: Teachers have trust issues. And it’s no wonder why.

Many teachers may have lost faith in the system, says Andrew Ujifusa, but they haven’t lost hope. The Assistant Editor unpacks this year’s outbreak of teacher activism. And read an account from a disaffected educator on how he built a coalition of his own. Read more.

No. 3: Special education is broken.

Forty years since students with disabilities were legally guaranteed a public school education, many still don’t receive the education they deserve, writes Associate Editor Christina A. Samuels. Delve into her argument and hear from a disability civil rights pioneer on how to create an equitable path for students. Read more.

No. 4: Schools are embracing bilingualism, but only for some students.

Staff Writer Corey Mitchell explains the inclusion problem at the heart of bilingual education. His essay includes a perspective from a researcher on dismantling elite bilingualism. Read more.

No. 5: A world without annual testing may be closer than you think.

There’s agreement that we have a dysfunctional standardized-testing system in the United States, Associate Editor Stephen Sawchuk writes. But killing it would come with some serious tradeoffs. Sawchuk’s musing on the alternatives to annual tests is accompanied by an argument for more rigorous classroom assignments by a teacher-practice expert. Read more.

No. 6: There are lessons to be learned from the educational experiences of black students in military families.

Drawing on his personal experience growing up in an Air Force family, Staff Writer Daarel Burnette II highlights emerging research on military-connected students. Learn more about his findings and hear from two researchers on what a new ESSA mandate means for these students. Read more.

No. 7: School segregation is not an intractable American problem.

Racial and economic segregation remains deeply entrenched in American schools. Staff Writer Denisa R. Superville considers the six steps one district is taking to change that. Her analysis is accompanied by an essay from the president of the American Educational Research Association on what is perpetuating education inequality. Read more.

No. 8: Consent doesn’t just belong in sex ed. class. It needs to start a lot earlier.

Assistant Editor Sarah D. Sparks looked at the research on teaching consent and found schools and families do way too little, way too late. Her report is partnered with a researcher’s practical guide to developmentally appropriate consent education. Read more.

No. 9: Education has an innovation problem.

Are education leaders spending too much time chasing the latest tech trends to maintain what they have? Staff Writer Benjamin Herold explores the innovation trap. Two technologists offer three tips for putting maintenance front and center in school management. Read more.

No. 10: There are two powerful forces changing college admissions.

Some colleges are rewriting the admissions script for potential students. Senior Contributing Writer Catherine Gewertz surveys this changing college admissions landscape. Her insights are accompanied by one teacher’s advice for navigating underserved students through the college application process. Read more.

Wait, there’s more.

Want to know what educators really think about innovation? A new Education Week Research Center survey delves into what’s behind the common buzzword for teachers, principals, and district leaders. Take a look at the survey results.

A version of this article appeared in the January 09, 2019 edition of Education Week as What’s on the Horizon for 2019?

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Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

Our Best Education Articles of 2019

Looking for inspiration to start the new decade off on the right foot? Our most popular education articles of 2019 explore how children develop purpose, how we can best support our students’ mental health and social-emotional development, why we benefit from listening to each other’s stories, and more.

And…if you want to put the scientific findings from these articles into practice, check out our new website for educators, Greater Good in Education (GGIE), officially launching on February 20, 2020.

In response to our readers’ call for more practical resources for the classroom, GGIE features free research-based practices, lessons, and strategies for educators to foster their students’ and their own well-being, and for school leaders to develop positive school climates—all in the service of cultivating kinder, happier, and more equitable classrooms and schools.

If you’d like to take a deeper dive into the science behind social-emotional learning, mindfulness, and ethical development, join us for our annual Summer Institute for Educators . Applications are due February 15, 2019.

To whet your appetite, here are the 10 best education articles of 2019, based on a composite ranking of pageviews and editors’ picks.

What Are the Best Ways to Prevent Bullying in Schools? , by Diana Divecha: A new study identifies the most effective approaches to bullying prevention.

How to Help Young People Transition into Adulthood , by Betty Ray: Modern “rites of passage” can help teens prepare for an uncertain future.

Five Childhood Experiences That Lead to a More Purposeful Life , by Maryam Abdullah: Research suggests that our paths to finding purpose can be shaped by early childhood experiences.

How Colleges Today Are Supporting Students’ Mental Health , by Amy L. Eva:   Colleges and universities are addressing well-being in students with new and innovative approaches.

How Understanding Your Brain Can Help You Learn , by Jill Suttie: A new book explains six keys to learning that can help anyone overcome barriers to success in school or in life.

Four Ways Schools Can Support the Whole Child , by Lisa Flook: Beyond just teaching academics, schools can foster students’ development in their relationships, identity, emotional skills, and overall well-being.

Honoring the Teacher's Heart: Well-Being Practices for School Change

Join our new online Community of Practice for educators!

How to Support Teens’ Social-Emotional Development , by Amy L. Eva: We need to appeal to teens’ need for status and respect for SEL to work in high schools.

How to Help Students with Learning Disabilities Focus on Their Strengths , by Rebecca Branstetter: We can empower students with learning disabilities with the language we use and the way we teach and guide them.

How to Become a Scientist of Your Own Emotions , by Jill Suttie: A Q&A with researcher Marc Brackett about how to cultivate emotional intelligence in ourselves and our kids.

What Happens When We Listen to Teachers’ Stories? by Amy L. Eva: Teachers of Oakland wants to change the conversation about education by humanizing teachers. 

What Teens Are Actually Thankful For (video), by Jane Park: A first-grade teacher, a best friend, a parent—high schoolers share their gratitude letters with their recipients. 


 A Lesson in Thanks and Vulnerability (podcast): A junior high school teacher spent his life defying stereotypes about how men should express their emotions. Here he takes on a new challenge: getting his students to express gratitude.

About the Author

Amy L. Eva, Ph.D. , is the associate education director at the Greater Good Science Center. As an educational psychologist and teacher educator with over 25 years in classrooms, she currently writes, presents, and leads online courses focused on student and educator well-being, mindfulness, and courage. Her new book, Surviving Teacher Burnout: A Weekly Guide To Build Resilience, Deal with Emotional Exhaustion, and Stay Inspired in the Classroom, features 52 simple, low-lift strategies for enhancing educators’ social and emotional well-being.

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Short articles

Nov 03,2022

"Apart from developing literacy, it has also had a positive impact on students who have had a pleasant experience while going through the pandemic." In this reader submission, Anisah Khoridatul, Grade 6 Teacher SD Ar-Ridha Al Salaam, Depok, shares the details of a student diary project in place at the school.

Sep 28,2022

In this reader submission, teacher at SMA Lokon St. Nikolaus Tomohon in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, Martha Goni, shares the details of a Retreat Program the school has implemented, and the positive impact it is having on Year 12 students.

Aug 31,2022

A recent longitudinal study in the Philippines has followed a cohort of 4,500 public elementary school students for 5 years. The study found that children who attended preschool consistently outperformed those who did not in literacy, mathematics and social-emotional skills.

Jul 20,2022

New research has shown that while the use of immersive virtual reality (IVR) increases student enjoyment and presence in a task, when used on its own it does not improve procedural or declarative knowledge when compared to the more traditional learning activity of watching a video.

Jul 18,2022

Education systems across the world have taken different approaches to addressing the challenges of the pandemic. Jaylene S Miravel – a teacher at Lal-lo North Central School in the Philippines – shares how she is supporting students who are falling behind in reading during this prolonged period of remote learning.

May 18,2022

Satyam Mishra was one of two educators from India to make it into the prestigious Global Teacher Prize Top 50 for 2021. In today’s article, he shares practical examples for making mathematics more engaging and relevant for students.

May 04,2022

A new framework for learning through play has been developed to support teachers in the classroom and help guide policy and practice in the early years of schooling. The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) and the LEGO Foundation have worked together to develop the framework.

Apr 20,2022

Students have a diverse range of personal and contextual factors that influence their access to and achievement in their education. A new global study calls for a re-evaluation of education systems to promote personalised education.

Apr 05,2022

After investing a lot of time and emotion into applying for a new job or promotion, finding out the position is not yours can have a negative impact on your confidence. In this reader submission, Dr Poppy Gibson and Dr Robert Morgan from the UK share their three steps for moving forward after being an unsuccessful candidate for a new position.

Mar 16,2022

How can you and your colleagues help students better prepare for the challenges and opportunities they’ll face in the future? A major new report looks at the global ‘megatrends’ shaping education. We’ve picked out 10 discussion points and suggestions for possible learning activities to inspire you and your colleagues, and get the conversation started.

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Times Higher Education’s most-read articles of 2021

Reopening of international study opportunities looms large as covid-19 continues to dominate news agenda.

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Our annual most-read list always covers key concerns of Times Higher Education readers – workload, careers, and academic freedom, to give just three examples – but often seems to say something more tangible about the year just past. The 2020 list , for instance, was dominated by stories about Covid-19. The pandemic also looms large in this year’s edition, but with a significantly different bent, with the focus shifting from the shock of campus shutdowns to the question of when major university sectors would reopen to international students. Would-be overseas learners’ interest in articles on this topic no doubt reflected the isolation and desperation many of them felt as border closures and travel restrictions chopped and changed in the face of a rapidly evolving threat from the pandemic.

Nevertheless, the list as a whole also reflects the diversity of THE ’s journalism. Perhaps this offers a glimmer of hope that 2022 will be the year that some sort of normality returns – for academics, university professionals and students, including those who travel to study.

15.  Four in 10 UK PhD students ‘at high risk of suicide’, says study

Articles on the welfare of doctoral students always attract significant attention, reflecting the particular pressures on this group of learners. This story, reporting on research suggesting that a significant proportion of UK PhD students were at risk of taking their own lives, put these issues into sharp focus, and came as funders sought to finally take action to improve the doctoral experience.

14.  Harvard moves Chinese language programme to Taiwan

The shifting sands of the relationship between China and the West featured regularly in THE ’s journalism during 2021, but this story – reporting that Harvard University would move its intensive Chinese-language programme from Beijing to Taiwan because of alleged difficulties operating in mainland China – particularly piqued readers’ interest. Jennifer Liu, head of Chinese languages at Harvard, said that the move reflected what she felt was a less friendly environment for US institutions in China in recent years.

13.  Polish pressure forces Holocaust historian to self-censor

Few THE articles attract more commentary on social media than those exploring the Polish right’s attempts to enforce a narrative of exclusive victimhood in relation to the Holocaust, downplaying accounts of local complicity unearthed by some historians. This article, based on one France-based researcher saying that she would tone down her upcoming book and shy away from naming names for fear of legal action, got a lot of clicks too.

12.  Covid-hit British Council sells Indian IELTS business to IDP

It has been a difficult year for the British Council, which was forced to close 20 offices around the world as part of a restructuring programme triggered by cuts to the UK overseas aid budget and was  stripped of the contract to operate the Turing overseas mobility scheme . This story examined some of the fallout from these difficulties, with the council opting to sell the Indian arm of its IELTS English language testing business for £130 million.

11.  German universities’ teaching in English is unavoidably flawed

Is it a good thing if European universities offer more degrees taught using English? It is a question that  THE has explored repeatedly, and the answer offered in this opinion piece – by Brian Bloch, lecturer in English for academic research at the University of Münster – was a resounding “no”. Limited fluency among teachers in Germany and concerns about the marginalisation of national culture could lead to a backlash against institutions’ pitch to the international market, the article warns.

10.  MIT digital learning dean quits as edX sale backlash grows

The sale of non-profit online course platform edX to for-profit competitor 2U was big news in the summer, but not everybody was happy about it. As this scoop by our North America editor Paul Basken revealed, Krishna Rajagopal announced his resignation as dean of digital learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – which founded edX with Harvard University – after telling colleagues that he had “serious continuing reservations about the path forward for edX that MIT has announced”.

9.  Quarantine? Depends on students’ citizenship, says Australia

One of the frustrations of the Covid pandemic has been the apparent contradictions thrown up by hasty changes to restrictions seeking to respond to a fast-moving virus. This article highlighted how the first planeload of international students to reach Sydney in 21 months faced spending their initial fortnight in quarantine – a prospect other foreigners from the same embarkation point were set to avoid.

8.  Servant leaders should not be slaves to their institutions

What should higher education leaders do in the presence of such pain, chaos and wilful ignorance that surfaced during the pandemic, asked this opinion piece by consultant Kathy Johnson Bowles. They should start acting upon principles rather than the politics of power and place, she argued, becoming teacher-activists who dare to disrupt, employ the language and logic of change to serve a greater good, help individuals rise from poverty and realise their potential for prosperity.

7.  Australian borders shut on the eve of their opening

For much of the year it was a question of “will they, won’t they” when it came to the reopening of Australia’s borders to international students. In this story it was very nearly will and then won’t, as Canberra deferred the reopening by a fortnight with barely 30 hours to go, in response to the emergence of the Omicron variant. Australia eventually welcomed international students back on 15 December .

6.  Nicholas Hitchon: the ‘Seven Up’ scientist known to millions

Interviewing academics is one of the joys of writing for THE but this article profiled a researcher best known not for his professional accomplishments but as “Nick”, one of the stars of the  Up  documentaries. Nicholas Hitchon, who has worked at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1982, said that he did not think of the series “as my story any longer – it’s everyone’s story; it shows the human condition”.

5.  Three hard truths I learned before moving to a non-academic career

Although many PhD students and postdocs aspire to careers in research, it’s a sad fact that there simply aren’t enough jobs to go round. In this blog, former lecturer – and now user experience expert – Janelle Ward shared her insights into the transition out of academia, telling peers that employers will value experience more than doctorates.

4.  Australia must start readmitting international students

As many Western sectors prepared to welcome back international students for a new academic year, anxiety grew in Australia over the summer as the country’s borders remained closed. “The strategy of Covid Zero, aided by harsh lockdowns and closed borders, has become a mantra indifferent to distinctions and disproportionate in application,” wrote RMIT University lecturer Binoy Kampmark, urging the embrace of vaccine passports to allow the return of overseas learners.

3.  Australia plots international education restart from the bunker

By August, Australian international education policy was in flux, with representative groups plotting out practical steps to revive the Covid-struck sector as new waves of infection forced much of the country back under lockdown. Plans under consideration included dedicated charter flights, a digital vaccine passport, and visa fee waivers, reported our Asia-Pacific editor John Ross.

2.  Workaholic academics need to stop taking pride in their burnout

Academic workload is another staple of THE most-read lists, and with good reason, in light of surveys suggesting excessive levels of overtime across the sector. In this opinion piece, Fleur Jongepier and Mathijs van de Sande urged scholars to take a stand: “Make a real effort to work only the hours you’re paid for (and let the shit hit the fan from time to time); go on holidays (and stay true to your auto reply); avoid bragging about how busy you are (often a twisted form of virtue signalling); leave meetings early to pick up your kids, go on a date or visit friends (and be open about having a life); don’t hire the workaholic with huge publication lists but the team player who wouldn’t be a passive bystander; tell your students that academic excellence, or writing a PhD thesis, does not require 60- let alone 80-hour workweeks; tell them that academia needs people who have rich non-academic lives. And last but not least, publish less and complain more to those in positions of power.”

1.  UK relaxes post-study work visa rules for remote learners

This January article is not long by THE standards, coming in at 283 words, and couldn’t claim to be either a big scoop or the result of extensive journalistic investigation. But its appearance at the top of this year’s most-read list reflects would-be international students’ keen interest in access to major study markets as the coronavirus pandemic rumbled on. The story explained that international students who were studying remotely would still be eligible to apply for the UK’s new two-year post-study work visa as long as their degree did not finish this year, under a concession announced by the Home Office.

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Best Education Articles of 2021: Our 21 Most Shared Stories This Year About Students, Learning Recovery, Mental Health, School Politics & More

It feels as if schools have now entered a third phase of the pandemic filled with child vaccines, adult boosters, rolling quarantines and learning recovery efforts — and of course mounting questions about the infectious new Omicron variant. If the 2019 school year was defined by emergency measures and campus closures, and the 2020 school year was about triaging the best possible classroom plans for unvaccinated school populations, the 2021 school year has thus far been one steeped in hope and urgency: Hope that vaccines will bring an end to the global health emergency and allow classrooms to safely return to normal, and urgency surrounding the students who have been pushed off track over the past 20 months — from core skills to key milestones to college and career goals.

Our most widely circulated education coverage this year focused largely on how school is still looking a whole lot different today than it did two years ago, how educators and policymakers are both recognizing the need for urgent learning recovery efforts, and how emerging political fights over schools and curriculum are straining an already stretched system.

These were our 21 most shared and debated articles of 2021:

Exclusive Data: An Inside Look at the Spy Tech That Followed Kids Home for Remote Learning — and Now Won’t Leave

Investigation: When the pandemic forced Minneapolis students into remote learning, district officials partnered with Gaggle, a digital surveillance company that uses artificial intelligence and a team of content moderators to track the online behaviors of millions of kids across the U.S. every day. Now, public records obtained by The 74 offer an unprecedented look at how the Minneapolis school district deployed a controversial security tool that saw rapid national growth during the pandemic but carries significant civil rights and privacy concerns. The data highlight how Gaggle puts children under relentless digital surveillance long after classes end for the day. In Minneapolis, officials say the tool helps identify youth at risk of suicide. But some worry that rummaging through students’ personal files and conversations on their school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts could backfire. Read Mark Keierleber’s full report . 

— Read Our Previous Coverage: ‘Don’t get Gaggled’ — Minneapolis school district spends big on student surveillance tool, raising ire after terminating its police contract ( Read more ) 

With Up to 9 Grade Levels Per Class, Can Schools Handle the Fallout From COVID’s K-Shaped Recession?

Learning Loss: Wealthy newcomers from expensive cities like New York and San Francisco propelled housing prices in Austin, Texas, into the stratosphere in 2020, pushing out families of modest means and sending demographic shockwaves through the area’s schools. It’s just one manifestation of the pandemic’s K-shaped recession, a downturn barely felt by the affluent people at the top of the K but devastating to the people at the bottom. As schools prepared to reopen this past fall, research was showing that COVID had put the most disadvantaged students even further behind while propelling privileged children ahead and hollowing out the middle. Meaning the span of academic mastery in individual classrooms — seven grade levels in “normal” times — had widened even further, to as many as nine grade levels. In this chapter of The 74’s series examining the link between the pandemic’s economic turmoil and challenges in classrooms, Beth Hawkins takes you inside an Austin school that’s poised to meet the needs of its “bookend students” — the kids furthest ahead and behind — and may be a model for addressing the COVID classroom crisis. Read our full dispatch from Texas — and see other chapters from our K-shaped report: 

— Early Education: D.C.’s missing students and the rush to avert a COVID classroom crisis ( Read more )

— School Funding: Will fallout from COVID’s K-shaped recession finally fix Delaware’s Jim Crow-era school funding rules? ( Read more )

— Prepared For the Crisis: Recession, recovery & robotics — Can CTE and Reno’s reinvented schools avert the COVID classroom crisis? ( Read more )

— Rebuilding Towards Equity: Trailblazing leader was hired to fix Colorado Springs schools. Will doubling down on his reforms avert crisis? ( Read more )

— 74 Explains: WATCH — How COVID’s K-shaped recession could widen achievement gaps: 

— Inside Our Special Report: The fallout from the pandemic’s K-Shaped recession may be felt by students for years ( See our full series )

Chaos Theory: Amid Pandemic Recovery Efforts, School Leaders Fear Critical Race Furor Will ‘Paralyze’ Teachers

Critical Race Theory: Calls for teachers to wear body cameras, mountains of records requests and threats against school administrators are among the flashpoints in an emerging new front in the nation’s culture wars, as parents and other opponents of critical race theory push back against its perceived influence in the classroom . As of June, when this feature was originally published, nine states had banned implementation of the once-obscure theory, which in the minds of many encompasses a host of racial and equity-related initiatives, from culturally responsive teaching to social-emotional learning. For many teachers, the backlash felt like a new kind of McCarthyism, where they fear being harassed, fined or fired for a wide array of classroom activities associated with the examination of structural racism in America. “It’s a huge distraction at a time when we can’t afford a distraction,” Dan Domenech, executive director of AASA, The School Superintendents Association, told reporter Linda Jacobson ahead of the start of the 2021 school year. “This has been a year the majority of students were not exposed to the kind of learning they should have been exposed to. Now you’re going to paralyze teachers because they are afraid to teach.” Read our special report . 

— From July: On the Front Lines — From security guards to twitter breaks, how school leaders are responding to an unsettling season of public outrage ( Read more )

How White Extremists Teach Kids to Hate

School Safety: Five days after extremists used the fringe video gaming platform Dlive to livestream a mob attack on the U.S. Capitol in January, a youthful white nationalist logged on to the site and offered his take about the future of a movement he helped create — a radical agenda, experts warn, that’s targeted at teens . As the Capitol riot reawakens many Americans to the persistent reality of white supremacists among us, experts on extremism are sounding the alarm about the ways alt-right groups weaponize video games and streaming platforms to recruit and radicalize impressionable young minds. For teenagers whose isolation has been heightened by the pandemic, the desire for connection makes them particularly vulnerable, particularly in the current political climate. But experts say parents and educators can intervene before it’s too late. Read more Mark Keierleber’s report . 

Fearing a ‘Second Pandemic’ of Student Trauma, School Leaders Are Doubling Down on Mental Health First Aid Training

Mental Health: Between April and October of 2020, emergency room visits rose 24 percent for kids ages 5 to 11 and 31 percent for ages 12 to 17 over the year before, a trend experts attribute to pandemic stressors adding to the already mounting crisis of anxiety-related disorders in young people. As students then returned to in-person learning last winter, these symptoms began showing up in classrooms — and teachers became the first line of defense . Fearing what this might mean for the start of the 2021 school year, educators began signing up for Mental Health First Aid certification over the summer. The course, administered by nonprofits including Communities in Schools, reminds adults nationwide that they aren’t “superheroes” — but they can guide young people toward getting help with a mental health challenge while decreasing the stigma and judgment around the struggles many are facing in the pandemic’s wake. In the first installment of a special three-part series produced in partnership with Texas Tribune, Bekah McNeel looked at how this training helped educators at one Texas school — as well as other teachers around the country — deal with their students’ often hidden mental health issues. Read our special report .

— Also in This Series: How a mental health ‘desert’ in Texas became a beacon of counseling services for thousands of children and families ( Read more ) 

— Through Students’ Eyes: Second graders ‘show’ their pandemic challenges through art — and ‘tell’ how their teacher helped them stay strong ( Read more ) 

Social-Emotional Learning or ‘White Supremacy with a Hug’? Yale Official’s Departure Sparks a Racial Reckoning

SEL: For seven years, Dena Simmons drove efforts to make the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence’s popular social-emotional learning program, RULER, more culturally relevant for students with life experiences like hers — a Black girl from the Bronx. Her message resonated with educators across the country in districts struggling with the racial mismatch between teachers and students. “Dena’s star was certainly on the rise … because she brought a perspective in content that was transformational,” Andre Perry of the Brookings Institution told reporter Linda Jacobson. But Marc Brackett, the Yale center’s director and a well-known guru on the role of emotions in learning, saw things differently. Emails shared with The 74 and interviews with Simmons and other former staff members at the center show Brackett balked at efforts to include political figures, such as former President Barack Obama, and current texts, such as a book about a transgender boy, into RULER’s lessons. Such approaches, Brackett warned, could get the program “banned.” Simmons’s frustrations peaked in 2020, when she became the target of racial slurs during an online event meant to foster racial healing, and she resigned in January. The clash at the Yale center — and the response to her departure — tell a larger story about what some see as a pressing need to address historical discrimination and others criticize as efforts to politicize the SEL curriculum. As one leader in the world of social-emotional learning said, “There is a measure of urgency that was not present two years ago.” Read our full investigation .

Texas Teachers Go Door to Door as Kids Disappear From Remote Classes

Remote Learning: Middle school teacher Brandee Brandt pounded on the door of a San Antonio apartment for the third time. “It’s Ms. Brandt! Davey, are you there?” she called. Finally, Davey’s older brother cracked open the door. “You really aren’t going away are you?” he said, trying to sound annoyed as a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “You know we’re not giving up!” Brandt replied. During the first half of the 2020-21 school year, teachers from Rawlinson Middle School visited around 100 homes , seeking out kids in urgent need of support and engagement. With half the school’s 1,350 students learning remotely during that timeframe, and thus at a higher risk of chronic absence, the teachers come knocking at the first sign of trouble. “I felt a sense of urgency,” Principal Sherry Mireles said, “If they’re not getting their schooling, it’s our responsibility. “I’m not going to allow a 12-, 13-, 14-year-old to drop out. Not on my watch.” Bekah McNeel rode along this spring and has the story .

— The COVID Warriors: See our special series on the educators going above and beyond to save the pandemic generation at The74Million.org/COVIDWarriors . 

How Are States Spending Their COVID Education Relief Funds?

School Funding: Asked by the U.S. Education Department to identify the top issues facing students and schools in the wake of the pandemic, state education officials are remarkably consistent: Their plans for spending their share of federal COVID relief aid for education demonstrate a strong need to expand learning opportunities and address students’ social and emotional needs. But an analysis by FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, finds that states that have submitted to the department are pursuing those goals in a variety of ways. Contributors Brooke LePage and Phyllis W. Jordan of FutureEd break down how, from tutoring and mental health supports to universal pre-K, museum trips — even a student film festival — states are looking to spend their COVID ed relief funds. Read the essay, and click through our interactive maps .

A Better Equation: New Pandemic Data Supports Acceleration Rather than Remediation to Make Up for COVID Learning Loss

Learning Acceleration: In a report released last May, researchers offered some advice for education leaders . As they decide how to spend their federal stimulus dollars and address learning losses in the school year to come, they should consider the lackluster impact of remediation — the typical gap-closing practice of making up missed material before moving on — and new evidence suggesting there’s a better way. TNTP and Zearn analyzed the experiences of 2 million students during the current academic year and found that, on Zearn’s math app, classrooms featuring acceleration — a strategy in which students are challenged by grade-level lessons and instructed in specific missing skills as needed — saw dramatic growth. Students receiving this kind of support completed over 25 percent more grade-level work than they would have using remediation. By contrast, students in remediation continued to struggle. Beth Hawkins talks to the team about their findings .

Long-Term NAEP Scores for 13-Year-Olds Drop for First Time Since Testing Began in 1970s — ‘A Matter for National Concern,’ Experts Say

Student Achievement: Over the past few years, education observers have grown accustomed to downbeat news from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, with multiple rounds of the test pointing to largely stagnant scores across various subjects. The release this year of results from NAEP’s 2020 long-term trends assessment offers revelations that are startling as well as discouraging: For the first time in the half-century history of that test, reading and math scores for 13-year-olds significantly declined . Black and Hispanic students in that age group both lost ground in math since the test was last given, in 2012, and the lower performance of 9-year-old girls opened up a gender gap with boys that did not exist nine years ago. Worst of all were the plunging scores of low-performing students — especially those scoring at the 10th percentile, who declined an astonishing 12 points in eighth-grade math. “It’s really a matter for national concern, this high percentage of students who are not reaching even what I think we’d consider the lowest levels of proficiency,” said George Bohrnstedt, a senior vice president at the American Institutes for Research. Read Kevin Mahnken’s full report .

From Tragedy to Triumph to Failure: How 9/11 Helped Pass No Child Left Behind — And Fueled its Eventual Demise

History: Two decades have passed since the morning that changed America forever — a morning that found President George W. Bush in a Florida elementary school, reading with students and attempting to jump-start the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act . Within months of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a collective sense of grief and purpose led the federal government to declare war on terrorism, even as it pledged to provide an excellent education for every child. But while it is generally acknowledged that Congress passed the landmark legislation partially as a demonstration of national unity, some believe the Bush administration’s emphasis on the global war on terror set back the mission of education reform, as attention waned and bipartisanship dissolved. “That whole sweet thing that was put together in the ’80s and came together in various states and then saw this incredible peak in Washington in 2001 — all of that largely fell apart because of 9/11, and the failure of everyone on all sides to hold it together in the wake of 9/11,” former Bush adviser Sandy Kress told The 74’s Kevin Mahnken. Read our full feature . 

Can Right Answers Be Wrong? Latest Clash Over ‘White Supremacy Culture’ Unfolds in Unlikely Arena: Math Class

Math Skills: A document outlining how to be an “antiracist math educator” has sparked criticism for promoting the idea that focusing on getting students to produce the right answer is one way that “white supremacy culture” shows up in math class. Educators drawing inspiration from the document, part of a larger math equity project at The Education Trust-West — funded with $1 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — say the emphasis on accurate calculations shuts down students’ thinking process and turns math into a competition. They say the middle grades especially are a period when many Black and Hispanic students turn off math, resulting in persistent racial disparities in advanced high school classes. Making math more culturally relevant by linking concepts to socioeconomic issues, they say, can help students see the reasons for math in their lives. But some Black scholars think the document only reinforces teachers’ bias against students of color. “The workbook’s ultimate message is clear: Black kids are bad at math, so why don’t we just excuse them from really learning it,” Erec Smith of York College of Pennsylvania told reporter Linda Jacobson. And even math educators devoted to increasing equity said the document can widen divides at a time of political polarization. Read our full report .

One Fate, Two Fates. Red States, Blue States: New Data Reveal a 432-Hour In-Person Learning Gap Produced by the Politics of Pandemic Schooling

School Closures: Through the pandemic, schools in Republican states offered in-person learning at nearly twice the rate of those in Democratic states , according to new data, amounting to an estimated 66 additional days of face-to-face instruction for those students. The numbers, provided to The 74 by the school calendar tracking website Burbio, deliver a cumulative view of schooling decisions throughout COVID-19 and reinforce evidence of a partisan divide long highlighted by researchers. Averaged from September through May, states that voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election gave students the chance to learn in the classroom 74.5 percent of the time, compared to 37.6 percent of the time in states that voted for Joe Biden. The full impact of that disparity remains largely unmeasured, says Chad Aldeman, policy director at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. But he suspects the effects on students could be vast. “Time is a rough proxy for learning,” he told The 74’s Asher Lehrer-Small. “So lost instructional time is likely to lead to lost learning.” Read our full report . 

‘Equal Treatment, not Special Treatment’: Conservative Supreme Court Justices Appear Ready to Strike Down Religious Barriers to Public School Choice Funding

SCOTUS: Maine allows private religious schools to participate in its tuition benefit program for families that don’t have a public high school in their community — except for schools that seek to instill religious beliefs in their students. That caveat is at the heart of Carson v. Makin , a school choice case argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in December . Plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Bindas, with the libertarian Institute for Justice, argued that the state is discriminating against religion. He is representing two families that were told they could not receive a tuition benefit because they wanted their children to attend religious schools. Based on the justices’ questioning, experts said, states would likely no longer be able to defend such rules after the court rules next year. “Very few of the justices paid any attention to the longstanding principle at the heart of American constitutional tradition — that taxpayers should not be forced to fund religious education,” said Alex Luchenitser of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Read Linda Jacobson’s full report on the arguments.

Districts Are Receiving Billions for Academic Recovery, But Some Parents Struggle to Find Tutoring for Their Children

Personalized Learning: Research showing that so-called high-dosage tutoring could give struggling students the academic boost they need to recover from the pandemic created a buzz earlier this year. Parent advocacy groups and policymakers expected to see districts use relief funds on such programs. But nearly halfway through the school year, some districts aren’t using their American Rescue Plan aid to offer tutoring, according to reviews from Burbio and the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Others limit services to specific students or have struggled to find enough tutors. That leaves parents such as Aida Mieja of Los Angeles to pick up extra shifts cleaning offices in order to pay $470 for a private tutor for her ninth grade daughter. In districts such as Nashville, leaders signed up about half the number of tutors they had hoped to recruit this fall. “It’s this giant puzzle,” Keri Randolph, the district’s chief strategy officer, told reporter Linda Jacobson. Tutoring, she said, is “hot and sexy right now, but people have no idea how hard it is.”

— Research: Study shows Chicago tutoring program delivered huge math gains — and personalization may be the key ( Read more )

Genocide ‘In My Own Backyard’: North Carolina Educators Ignored State’s Eugenics History Long Before Critical Race Theory Pushback

Curriculum: Even as a young girl, the shadow of a dark history hung over Orlice Hodges. At 7 years old, her grandmother offered an explanation — chilling, in retrospect — of what happened to young women taken away by social workers: They went to Black Mountain to get “fixed.” As she got older, the North Carolina woman would learn the awful meaning. “’Fixed’ meant sterilization,” said Hodges, who was told by family members that her own aunt had been a victim. From 1929 to 1974, North Carolina’s eugenics program sterilized over 7,600 people — in its latter years, disproportionately targeting Black women. To this day, reports Asher Lehrer-Small, none of the state’s 10 largest school districts include the episode in social studies curricula , despite a two-decades-old recommendation from a governor-appointed committee calling on the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction to do just that. An exhibit that included first-person accounts and victims’ medical records commissioned “to ensure that no one will forget what the State of North Carolina once perpetrated upon its own citizens” toured colleges and universities for a few years in the early 2000s before being packed away in a state office basement. That North Carolina’s K-12 schools have almost without exception ignored this tragic history offers a compelling example of how knowledge of racially motivated, government-inflicted harm was suppressed long before the recent debate over critical race theory. Read the full report . 

Shipwreck Camp Delivers A Treasure Trove of Science With the Search for Sunken Boats in Lake Erie

STEM: About 6,000 ships have sunk in the Great Lakes in the last 150 years, costing thousands of lives and leaving cargo under water. Those wrecks are now providing a big hook for a summer camp to teach science to teenagers drawn in by the chance of seeing one up close . Case Western Reserve University’s Shipwreck Camp taught students about waves, the lakes, shipping history and how to search for artifacts this summer before taking students to the lake to search for the Adventure and W.R. Hanna, two ships that sank just offshore around 1900. “Shipwreck camp is a thinly veiled exposure to Great Lakes science and technology,” says James Bader, head of the center that runs the camp. “We don’t hide it very well.” Patrick O’Donnell visits the camp — and brought back these photos and videos from the middle of Lake Erie .

— Summer STEM: Saturday science lessons in the park, as Cleveland school district sneaks learning into hands-on experiments at festival ( Read more ) 

Will the Tea Party of 2022 Emerge from the Debate over Schools? Virginia Election Offers GOP Template for Midterms

EDlection: It took weeks for number-crunchers in both parties to pull apart meaningful conclusions from November’s gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey. But the races — especially in Virginia, where a well-liked Democrat was denied a second term in a state that Joe Biden won by 10 points last year — have made a few things clear. One is that education, an issue that voters have overwhelmingly trusted Democrats to manage in years past, could be a major vulnerability for the party as the 2022 midterms approach . The other is that, with the midterms now less than a year away, both parties have significant incentives to seize the initiative on K-12 schools. The GOP, which appears to have harnessed public outrage over COVID-related closures and school equity initiatives, has already announced plans to make a national education pitch with a proposed “parents’ bill of rights,” and polling indicates that their base hasn’t been this animated about the state of schools in recent memory. “In many ways, the critical race theory debate of 2021 is just the latest version of the death panel conversation from Obamacare, or the Willie Horton story of 1988,” political scientist Stephen Farnsworth told The 74’s Kevin Mahnken. “The question is whether this can be weaponized to benefit Republicans.” Read our full report .

With Nearly Half of Parents Expected to Forgo Child COVID Shots, Schools Brace for New Wave of Vaccine Hesitancy

Vaccines: Now that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has green-lit a COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11, schools are bracing for a new source of tension: In poll after poll, nearly half of parents say they do not want their kids to get it . As 74 contributor Greg Toppo writes, that could mean new skirmishes in schools already divided over social distancing and mask wearing. Even requiring the vaccine might not settle the dispute: An October poll found that 46 percent of parents simply wouldn’t send their child to school if COVID shots were required. The sources of vaccine hesitancy range from risk assessment — many parents aren’t especially worried their children will get seriously sick from coronavirus — to fears of some Black parents based on the nation’s history of mistreating research subjects in their communities. But many education experts say that without vaccination, children are likely to spend more time in quarantine, which could exacerbate learning loss. Read the full story . 

New Federal Data Confirms Pandemic’s Blow to K-12 Enrollment, With Drop of 1.5 Million Students; Pre-K Experiences 22 Percent Decline

Disenrollment: Preliminary data released in June by the National Center for Education Statistics show that public school enrollment dropped 3 percent in 2020-21 from the year before . The sizable decline — about 1.5 million students, compared with 2019-20’s total population of 51.1 million — was felt across the country, with the biggest decreases in Puerto Rico (minus 5.51 percent), Mississippi and Vermont (tied with minus 5.02 percent). The drop was concentrated heavily among the youngest children: Kindergarten enrollment fell by 9 percent, pre-K by an astonishing 22 percent, even as the high school ranks thinned by just .4 percent. Most of those young learners are expected to return to in-person classrooms, but Robin Lake, head of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, said schools and districts need to prepare now to meet academic and social-emotional needs that had been deferred in the interim. “These kids are owed a lot in terms of the time they’ve missed learning things, playing with other kids, all of that stuff,” she told The 74’s Kevin Mahnken. “So we’re encouraging school districts to put those kinds of supports in place this summer and try to reach as many kids as possible to address some of those foundational skills.” Read the full report . 

‘Oregon Trail’ at 50: How Three Teachers Created the Computer Game That Inspired — and Diverted — Generations of Student

Games: If you’re of a certain age, chances are you encountered the computer game The Oregon Trail sometime during your school years — you know, the one where you light out in a covered wagon for Oregon’s Willamette Valley, beset by bandits, bad weather and, of course, dysentery. The game now exists in 14 languages and so revolutionized computer gaming that it earned a place in the World Video Game Hall of Fame. It’s a highly improbable trajectory for a game launched in 1971 — 50 years ago today — five years before the first personal computers even came on the market. The Oregon Trail was the brainchild of three Minneapolis student teachers, who brought history to life by placing players in the shoes of settlers facing life-or-death decisions — via a hulking teletype machine connected to a mainframe miles away. Despite sales that would ultimately exceed 65 million copies, however, the trio never saw a dime for their efforts. But they tell 74 contributor Greg Toppo they are not bitter. One said he is still stopped by autograph seekers, who tell him, “’You really saved my life in middle school because of this program.’ It’s just incredible how many people we touched.” Read the full feature . 

…And a quick postscript for the time capsule: 

Photo History: Back in early March we realized it had been precisely a year — 52 weeks since the pandemic first swept through the nation, going on to close school after school like a relentless set of dominoes Over the course of a month, The 74’s Meghan Gallagher researched and assembled a photo history of that first pandemic year at schools , amassing 52 photos that captured just how much had changed in educators’ and students’ lives. They are now a haunting time capsule revisiting solemn scenes and sadness across the education landscape — masked students, sports without spectators, dining rooms turned into classrooms and socially distanced lunch periods. But these pictures also show students, their families and educators in moments of resilience and inspiration, reflecting how Americans found new ways to celebrate such milestones as graduations. The images are a reminder that it has been a school year like no other, one we won’t soon forget. See the full photo gallery . 

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How Did Students Fare This Year? 21 Big Things We Learned About Schools in 2021

By Steve Snyder

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Schools Got a Record $190 Billion in Pandemic Aid. Did It Work?

Two new studies suggest that the largest single federal investment in U.S. schools improved student test scores, but only modestly.

By Sarah Mervosh

For the last three years, U.S. schools have been in an unusual position: They had lots of money to spend.

The federal government invested $190 billion in pandemic aid for schools; the largest chunk, $122 billion, came in 2021 to help students recover. Altogether, it was the largest one-time federal investment in American education, but it came with a major question: Would it work?

Two separate studies, released on Wednesday, suggest that the money helped, but not as much as it could have.

“The money did contribute to the recovery,” said Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard University, who helped lead one of the studies. “Could the money have had a bigger impact? Yes.”

The studies — one from researchers at Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth, and the other from the University of Washington — reached similar conclusions based on test results from the 2022-23 school year for third- through eighth-grade students in about 30 states. For every $1,000 in federal aid spent, districts saw a small improvement in math and reading scores.

The Biden administration celebrated the results as proof that the federal government’s investment in March 2021, when the pandemic was still active and some schools remained closed, helped put students back on track. “This new data makes clear that the president’s investment in education helped millions of students regain ground faster,” said Neera Tanden, President Biden’s domestic policy adviser.

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Why You Should Make a Good Night’s Sleep a Priority

Poor sleep habits and sleep deprivation are serious problems for most high school and college students. This guide offers important tips on how—and why—to improve your sleep hygiene.

The time you spend in high school and college can be both fun and rewarding. At the same time, these can be some of the busiest years of your life.

Balancing all the demands on your time—a full course load, extracurricular activities, and socializing with friends—can be challenging. And if you also work or have family commitments, it can feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day. 

With so many competing priorities, sacrificing sleep may feel like the only way to get everything done. 

Despite the sleepiness you might feel the next day, one late night probably won’t have a major impact on your well-being. But regularly short-changing yourself on quality sleep can have serious implications for school, work, and your physical and mental health.

Alternatively, prioritizing a regular sleep schedule can make these years healthier, less stressful, and more successful long-term.

The sleep you need versus the sleep you get

According to the National Sleep Foundation , high school students (ages 14-17) need about eight to 10 hours of sleep each night. For young adults (ages 18 to 25), the range is need between seven and nine hours.

How do you know how much sleep you need within this range? 

According to Dr. Edward Pace-Schott, Harvard Summer School and Harvard Medical School faculty member and sleep expert, you can answer that question simply by observing how much you sleep when you don’t need to get up.

“When you’ve been on vacation for two weeks, how are you sleeping during that second week? How long are you sleeping? If you’re sleeping eight or nine hours when you don’t have any reason to get up, then chances are you need that amount or close to that amount of sleep,” says Pace-Schott. 

Most students, however, get far less sleep than the recommended amount. 

Seventy to 96 percent of college students get less than eight hours of sleep each week night. And over half of college students sleep less than seven hours per night. The numbers are similar for high school students; 73 percent of high school students get between seven and seven and a half hours of sleep .

Of course, many students attempt to catch up on lost sleep by sleeping late on the weekends. Unfortunately, this pattern is neither healthy nor a true long-term solution to sleep deprivation. 

And what about those students who say that they function perfectly well on just a couple hours of sleep?

“There are very few individuals who are so-called short sleepers, people who really don’t need more than six hours of sleep. But, there are a lot more people who claim to be short sleepers than there are real short sleepers,” says Pace-Schott.

Consequences of sleep deprivation

The consequences of sleep deprivation are fairly well established but may still be surprising.

For example, did you know that sleep deprivation can create the same level of cognitive impairment as drinking alcohol? 

According to the CDC , staying awake for 18 hours can have the same effect as a blood alcohol content (BAC) of 0.05 percent. Staying awake for 24 hours can equate to a BAC of 0.10 percent (higher than the legal limit of 0.08 percent). 

And according to research by AAA , drowsy driving causes an average of 328,000 motor vehicle accidents each year in the US. Drivers who sleep less than five hours per night are more than five times as likely to have a crash as drivers who sleep for seven hours or more.  

Other signs of chronic sleep deprivation include:

• Daytime sleepiness and fatigue
• Irritability and short temper
• Mood changes
• Trouble coping with stress
• Difficulty focusing, concentrating, and remembering

Over the long term, chronic sleep deprivation can have a serious impact on your physical and mental health. Insufficient sleep has been linked, for example, to weight gain and obesity, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes.

The impact on your mental health can be just as serious. Harvard Medical School has conducted numerous studies, including research by Pace-Schott, demonstrating a link between sleep deprivation and mental health disorders such as anxiety and depression.

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Importance of sleep for high school and college students

As difficult as it is to prioritize sleep, the advantages of going to bed early and getting quality sleep every night are very real.

College students who prioritize sleep are likely to see an improvement in their academic performance.

If you are well rested, you will experience less daytime sleepiness and fatigue. You may need less caffeine to stay awake during those long lectures. And you will also find you are more productive, more attentive to detail, and able to concentrate better while studying.

But the connection between sleep and academic performance goes well beyond concentration and attentiveness.

“Sleep is very important for consolidating memories. In any sort of experimental setting, study results show better performance if you learn material and then sleep on it, instead of remaining awake. So there’s lots and lots of evidence now indicating that sleep promotes memory strengthening and memory consolidation,” says Pace-Schott. 

There is also a strong connection between sleep quality and stress.

Students who prioritize sleep are better able to cope with the stress that comes with being an active student. 

“It’s a vicious circle where the more stressed you get, the less you sleep, and the less you sleep, the more stressed you get. And in the long term, that can lead to serious psychiatric problems,” says Pace-Schott.

In the worst case scenario, the combination of lack of sleep and stress can lead to mental health disorders such as depression, general anxiety disorder, and potentially even post-traumatic stress disorder.

But prioritizing sleep can create a positive feedback loop as well. 

Establishing a sleep schedule and adequate sleep duration can improve your ability to cope with stress. Being active and productive will help you get more done throughout the day, which also reduces feelings of stress.

And the less stressed you feel during the day, the better you will sleep at night. 

Tips for getting more sleep as a student

The key to getting a good night’s sleep is establishing healthy sleep habits, also known as sleep hygiene.

The first step is deciding to make sleep a priority. 

Staying ahead of coursework and avoiding distractions and procrastination while you study is key to avoiding the need for late night study sessions. And prioritizing sleep may mean leaving a party early or choosing your social engagements carefully. 

Yet the reward—feeling awake and alert the next morning—will reinforce that positive choice. 

The next step is establishing healthy bedtime and daytime patterns to promote good quality sleep.

Pace-Schott offers the following tips on steps you can take to create healthy sleep hygiene:

• Limit caffeine in close proximity to bed time. College students should also avoid alcohol intake, which disrupts quality sleep.
• Avoid electronic screens (phone, laptop, tablet, desktop) within an hour of bedtime. 
• Engage in daily physical exercise, but avoid intense exercise within two hours of bedtime.
• Establish a sleep schedule. Be as consistent as possible in your bedtime and rise time, and get exposure to morning sunlight.
• Establish a “wind-down” routine prior to bedtime.
• Limit use of bed for daily activities other than sleep (e.g., TV, work, eating)

Of course, college students living in dorms or other communal settings may find their sleep disturbed by circumstances beyond their control: a poor-quality mattress, inability to control the temperature of your bedroom, or noisy roommates, for example. 

But taking these active steps to promote healthy sleep will, barring these other uncontrollable circumstances, help you fall asleep faster, stay asleep, and get a more restorative sleep.

And for students who are still not convinced of the importance of sleep, Pace-Schott says that personal observation is the best way to see the impact of healthy sleep habits. 

“Keep a sleep diary for a week. Pay attention to your sleep in a structured way. And be sure to record how you felt during the day. This can really help you make the link between how you slept the night before and how you feel during the day. It’s amazing how much you will learn about your sleep and its impact on your life.” 

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2024’s Top Film Schools in North America

Each year, Variety curates a list of the top film school programs across North America. From universities that are as old (or older) than the moving picture itself, to budding programs, the schools on this list collectively offer an impressive array of educators, facilities and lessons to be learned. Countless alumni from these programs have become legendary names in the industry. They have created award-winning films and television series, enacted change both on-screen and behind-the-scenes, and often give back to the institutions that fostered their talent.

Belmont University

Nashville, TN

Collaboration between departments is key to the success of Belmont’s students in the Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business. “Our faculty are career industry professionals, who’ve worked in all forms, from indie features to the biggest studio productions,” Jay New, the school’s co-chair of motion pictures, production and screenwriting, tells Variety. He adds that students can pick up a camera on day one. “Our freshman students are required to start off with a course called cinematic storytelling, where they have a camera in hand,” he says. “They make four productions that semester. And then it just keeps going from there.” Besides state-of-the-art equipment and advantageous curriculum, students benefit from networking opportunities provided by dedicated staff. “We have students who have very seamlessly moved into the industry for internships and other opportunities in L.A. and New York, Atlanta — and obviously, Nashville as well,” says New.

Biola University

La Mirada, CA

Tucked in a suburb of Los Angeles, Biola’s Snyder School of Cinema and Media Arts offers students not only the technical skills to forge a successful career but also qualities such as teamwork, reliability and follow-through, says Dean Tom Halleen. “It’s an understanding that preparing students for the world of media in general isn’t just about having excellent technical skills.” The school features all the high-end equipment and instruction that students need to create films, and in 2026, it will open an expanded studio, growing Biola’s existing production facilities. “The building has been envisioned to accommodate the incredible rate of growth that we have,” says Halleen. “The idea behind the building is to house the full production workflow, from ideation to pre-production, production and post-production all the way through final presentation in our theater.” The school is also working in partnership with a “recently announced AI lab within our Crowell School of Business,” says Halleen.

Boston University

Boston University will renovate a second 2,500-square-foot production space this summer, which will operate in addition to the school’s current production studio. BU is also moving toward the use of LED to replace traditional lighting, which is more environmentally conscious and safer for students. “We are immensely proud of all aspects of our program, both in the classroom and beyond — the renaissance we are experiencing in curriculum growth and faculty expansion and the ongoing success of our students in the field,” says Paul Schneider, chair of the department of film and television. Current faculty members include cinematographer Tim Palmer (“Killing Eve,” “Bad Sisters”) and director and producer Amy Geller (“The Guys Next Door,” “The Rabbi Goes West”) among many other industry professionals.

California State University, Northridge

Northridge, CA

With a campus near studio lots, Cal State Northridge students are in the heart of the industry. The school has a strong documentary department and under new documentary head Judy Korin (“Adrift,” “The Great Hack”), student documentaries have garnered national attention with finalists for the Student Academy Awards and PBS Fine Cut Festival of Films. Dave Caplan (“The Connors”) is heading up a new CSUN Cinema and Television Arts mentorship program for six underserved screenwriting students that places them with working showrunners to develop their own TV scripts. Talicia Raggs (writer/producer on “NCIS: New Orleans”) and music producer/engineer/scoring mixer Michael Stern (“Iron Man 2”) are new faculty members.

Chapman University

The Dodge College of Film and Media Arts at Chapman is not only one of the most technically advanced institutions in the country — sporting multiple soundstages, editing and mixing suites plus an LED wall — it is also one of the most productive with 50 undergrad thesis films being produced this year. Yet, according to dean Stephen Galloway, what makes it truly unique is the community built between students during their four years. “We bake that in from day one. Students are working together, forming teams, not being dictatorial,” Galloway says. “We think of this as a village of filmmakers, where everybody knows each other and works together and builds those relationships that you take out into the industry.” 

Community College of Aurora

Formerly known as Colorado Film School, the Cinematic Arts department at the Community College of Aurora is expanding into virtual production, immersive entertainment and storytelling for video games. The average class size is around 13, and the curriculum is based on experiential learning, so students and the school have established educational partnerships with interactive game companies, national advertising agencies, production companies, and film festivals. The school offers six certificates and six three-year associate’s degrees so students can finish their program and enter the industry earlier than traditional programs. The price of the degree is also much less than most bachelor’s degree programs, allowing aspiring filmmakers to graduate without heavy debt.

Columbia College Chicago

Chicago, IL

Undergraduate students can take advantage of the school’s Semester in L.A. program, which introduces students to people working in the entertainment industry and L.A. internship opportunities. “At Columbia College Chicago, we focus on bringing your vision to the screen, but also on developing close working relationships with people you trust. Our classes provide the skills needed to work in any aspect of the industry you are interested in, and our vibrant community helps you build creative partnerships that start at school but continue and grow as you enter the industry,” says Eric Scholl, interim co-chair of the cinema and television arts department.

Columbia University's School of the Arts

New York, NY

In the 2023-2024 school year, the film MFA program welcomed its first class to the new writing for film and television concentration, while undergrads can work on graduate films and take advantage of the Columbia Undergraduate Film Productions group. New faculty include veteran film and TV editor and producer Elizabeth Kling (“Practical Magic,” “Addicted to Love”). Notable faculty include James Schamus, Trey Ellis and Ira Deutchman. Columbia’s notable alumni includes writer/actress Grace Edwards (“Insecure”) and helmer Kathryn Bigelow (“Zero Dark Thirty,” “The Hurt Locker”), offering plentiful networking opportunities for graduates.

Emerson College

Within the Visual and Media Arts department, Emerson promises a hands-on education in filmmaking. Students can select a production track or media studies track, with courses ranging from writing the feature film to computer animation to media criticism and theory. Students can take advantage of the school’s directing studio located on campus at the Paramount Center, or partake in the school’s Los Angeles internship program. VMA chair Shaun Clarke says, “The Visual and Media Arts department fosters the development and creative passions of our students in ways true to themselves and uniquely Emersonian: in the classroom with highly skilled faculty and inspired peers, using state-of-the-art facilities and equipment, and in the world alongside groundbreaking alumni impacting the future of film.”

Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema

Brooklyn, NY

For a top film school, Feirstein is famously more affordable than many others with tuition at $21,000. The school is also developing new curriculum, which is more focused on the overall multifaceted filmmaker, rather than specific tracks. Students benefit from an impressive faculty including the school of cinema’s executive director Richard N. Gladstein, who frequently leads master classes and lectures about film producing and the entertainment industry, and new instructors such as producer Anne Carey (“The Persian Version,” “Lost Girls”) and helmer/writer Anthony Drazen (“The West Wing”). The school also recently had masterclasses taught by John Turturro, Steven Soderbergh and Janusz Kaminski. Feirstein boasts a powerhouse advisory council that includes Ethan Hawke, Darren Aronofsky, Bruce Cohen, Stephen Daldry, Randall Poster, John Turturro, Talitha Watkins, Vicki Thomas and Doug Steiner.

Florida State University

Tallahassee, FL

The College of Motion Picture Arts at Florida State University is all about putting students first with a 5-1 student-to-faculty ratio, 24-7 facility hours, plus funding virtually all student laboratory, workshops and thesis project production expenses at the graduate and undergraduate level. An impressive 96% of graduates find work in the industry after one year. FSU is also home to the Torchlight Center for Motion Picture Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which is an off-campus cinematheque and virtual production studio available to all film students. Just last year, the college was named number four among all public film schools in the nation. 

Hofstra University

Hempstead, NY

This year, Hofstra’s Lawrence Herbert School of Communication added a BS in sports media and continues to offer BFAs in filmmaking and writing for the screen, as well as a BA in film productions and studies and another BS in television and film. Students in these programs can begin making their films their first year with access to three soundstages and a post-production facility that includes an editing classroom, screening room and color correction suite. Faculty include cinematographer Sekiya Dorsett (“In Our Mother’s Gardens”), helmer Kelcey Edwards (“The Art of Making It”) and cinematographer Mark Raker (“Five Questions”).

Ithaca College

In 2023, Ithaca’s Roy H. Park School of Communications established a special opportunities fund for students to access hands-on opportunities related to their career paths. Additionally, the James B. Pendleton Endowment gives more than $800,000 every year to the Park school, funding the Los Angeles program, annual technology upgrades, two endowed professorships, $125,000 in student scholarship awards and close to $75,000 for student, faculty and staff projects. Park also boasts an immersive volume stage known as the Cube, which lets students make use of 3D visual effects via Unreal Engine. Dean Amy Falkner says, “Recruiters often remark at how industry-ready Park students are when they enter the workforce. We owe that to our Tech Ops team who keep the broadcast studios, soundstages, virtual production studios, LED walls and post-production suites on the cutting edge of industry-grade equipment and software. The faculty incorporate all this tech in their teaching, and it takes our students to the highest level.”

Loyola Marymount

Los Angeles, CA

In the fall, LMU will introduce Masters in Entertainment Leadership and Management (MELM), a collaboration between LMU SFTV and LMU College of Business Administration. This program will be taught by industry leaders including Janet Yang, SFTV presidential fellow and president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Unique programs for LMU include its Hollywood Bootcamp, recently led by WME agent Krista Parkinson, which provides career training via access to leading executives and companies. LMU also often brings distinguished speakers to campus such as Damon Lindelof, S.S. Rajamouli, Vince Gilligan, Lauren Neustadter and Terilyn Shropshire. “We have a unique ability to provide not only an exceptional education within the classroom but also the in-person industry access and connections required to launch and sustain a successful entertainment career. Thanks to our award-winning faculty, our two campuses located in the heart of the industry (Los Angeles and Silicon Beach), and programs like Hollywood Bootcamp and our Distinguished Artist in Residence, we give aspiring filmmakers a pragmatic, real-world education to set them up for success,” says Joanne Moore, dean of the School of Film and Television.

New York Film Academy

The New York Film Academy is one of the most expansive film schools in the nation, with eight global locations and three undergraduate degree programs encapsulating over 15 areas of study. With an emphasis on a hands-on approach to filmmaking, students get access to top-of-the-line gear and facilities, personal mentoring from industry veterans, travel courses for up to eight weeks and opportunities to train in formats such as 35mm and 16mm film. NYFA has no shortage of famous alumni including Bill Hader, Issa Rae, Aubrey Plaza, Shivani Rawat, Masali Baduza and Lisa Cortés.

Northwestern

Evanston, IL

This year, Northwestern’s department of radio/television/film took students to Sundance to experience the festival and network with alumni. “Our alumni networks are our biggest asset,” says Kerry Trotter, communications director at the school. “There is a very strong, short tether between L.A. and Evanston, and alumni in the industry are often cultivating opportunities for NU students.” Additionally, each spring break the program takes a group of RTVF and communication studies students to London for site visits and networking opportunities. As part of the school’s mission to elevate entertainment education for its student body, it will offer a new minor next academic year: game design, media arts and animation. 

New Brunswick, NJ

Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts offers a myriad of programs and facilities, including the Documentary Film Lab, which allows students to work on full-length documentaries with faculty. Associate professor and chair of the Rutgers Filmmaking Center, Patrick Stettner, says of the department’s mission, “Our priority is to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of different modes of storytelling and filmmaking techniques. We recently launched a new course, AI in New Technology Filmmaking, which helps students navigate the next great tech revolution in cinema.” Mason Gross also boasts a new VR studio lab which offers students the opportunity to gain experience with virtual reality filmmaking.

Savannah College of Art and Design

Savannah, GA

With one of the largest university film studio complexes in the nation, SCAD continues to expand. New additions will include a 17,000-square-foot support building for production classrooms, costume labs, costume studio shop and a scenic production wood/machine shop. Students recently worked on a comedy series and two short films on location at SCAD’s Lacoste, France campus. Film and television coursework is supported by events with industry guests throughout the academic year, such as Kevin Bacon, Eva Longoria, Ava DuVernay and George Lopez. The school boasts a well-connected faculty, including Andra Reeve-Rabb, dean of the school of film and acting and director of SCAD’s casting office, who is the former director of casting at CBS Primetime, New York.

Scottsdale Community College

Scottsdale, AZ

Offering efficient two-year degree programs that prepare students to enter the entertainment industry is just one advantage of the Scottsdale School of Film and Theatre at Scottsdale Community College. The school’s curriculum is looking ahead to what film and theater professionals will need in the coming decade, and as such, updating courses to prepare students to work in both filmed productions and live events. Scottsdale’s TV/New Media studio is also in the early stages of a $250,000 update, focused on creating a space that features current equipment and tech students will likely use post-graduation. 

Syracuse University

Syracuse, NY

Syracuse’s Visual and Performing Arts film program focuses on hands-on education, the film production process and cross-training across film disciplines for its students. BFA and MFA degrees in film are offered through the VPA program, and BS and MA degrees in television, radio and film are offered through the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. The VPA program also hosts study opportunities in Los Angeles, New York City and Washington, D.C. “The brand of Newhouse graduates is less about making film as we know it, rather their capacity to invent the next generation of film,” says Michael Schoonmaker, professor and chair of the television, radio and film department at the communications school.  

The Los Angeles Film School

Centrally located in Hollywood and just a stone’s throw from nearby studio lots, the Los Angeles Film School offers bachelor’s and associate degrees in entertainment fields, with its film degree allowing students to pursue concentrations in production, directing or cinematography. In addition to adding an animation/VFX program that shares classes with the film program, the school recently redesigned its TechKit — which includes state-of-the-art software and hardware designed to make it possible for the student to start making films immediately — for the animation program. Famous alums include sound designer Phillip Bladh, who won an Oscar for sound for “The Sound of Metal,” video director Hannah Lux Davis, known for collaborating with Ariana Grande, Halsey and Demi Lovato, and helmer/writer/producer Kyle Newacheck, whose work has appeared on “Workaholics,” “Parks and Recreation” and “Community.”

U. of Texas at Austin - Moody College

Within the Moody College of Communication, the department of radio-television-film boasts a motion capture studio, 70×20 foot green screen and podcast suites, as well as noteworthy alums including Matthew McConaughey and Robert Rodriguez. The school has begun a curriculum overhaul to its B.S., MFA and M.A. programs, and is currently refreshing all film equipment, including cameras, lenses, audio equipment and computers. For aspiring young filmmakers, the school even offers a summer camp led by advanced graduate students, professors and media professionals.

University of North Carolina School of the Arts

Winston-Salem, NC

Now celebrating the school’s 30th anniversary, the Fighting Pickles are formally launching the Story Art Studio in 2024 as an incubator that merges the unique voice and history of the region with both classical and cutting-edge storytelling tools across the disciplines of dance, music, drama and more. The program not only encapsulates the breadth of UNCSA’s curriculum but joins with its Dean’s Advisory Council, comprising of prominent industry leaders, to create post-graduate pathways into the industry. “It’s a gift to have the focus that [students] have here without the distractions of wonderful cities like Los Angeles and New York present,” says dean Deborah LaVine. “Here, the only person they’re competing with is themselves.”

Vancouver Film School

Vancouver, B.C.

Through its school of film & television, school of animation and school of games & creative design, VFS offers an immersive curriculum across 15 programs. Students are trained by industry professionals and have access to eight world-class production centers that feature a 64,000 cubic-feet of performance and motion capture volume, a 180-degree greenscreen room, mixing labs and recording studios, film sets and studios. VFS has been ranked as the top game design school in Canada, and the second-top game design school worldwide. In the 2024 awards season, over 12,000 VFS alumni were credited on nominated and winning projects spanning the Game Awards, Golden Globes, Emmys and the Academy Awards.

Wesleyan University

Middletown, CT

The College of Film and the Moving Image at Wesleyan University seeks to blend history, analysis and production in a liberal arts context. The school recently piloted a one-week immersive summer externship program in Los Angeles, which introduces students from underrepresented groups to the entertainment industry. Two first-generation college students spent a week meeting with prominent alumni like Jenno Topping, Tony Ducret and David Stone. “While we teach skills such as analytical and creative writing, producing, shooting and editing, our goals are broader,” says Scott Higgins, director of the College of Film and the Moving Image. “We aim to help undergraduates discover their goals and to develop their creative and critical voices in a collaborative community founded on a passionate commitment to the moving image.” 

Film School Titans

USC, UCLA, Cal Arts, Tisch, AFI

Across the film school landscape, there are many notable programs but five in particular stand apart because of their impressive curriculum, notable alumni and overall influence: the American Film Institute, California Institute of the Arts, the Kanbar School of Film and Television at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, and the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

AFI is noted for its remarkable instructors such as cinematography head Stephen Lighthill and producing head Lianne Halfon. Fellows are guaranteed to make films and the school has partnered to help create the Disney/AFI Underrepresented Storytellers Initiative to help create a pathway that removes economic barriers for emerging filmmakers.

Ask many any animation luminary where they went to school, and you’ll likely hear the name CalArts. Notable alumni include Tim Burton, Brad Bird and Pete Docter, whose films have won multiple Academy Awards. Students can choose from 70 comprehensive degree programs.

The Kanbar Institute within Tisch claims Martin Scorsese as a production alum. Several years ago, the school received the largest grant in its history from the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation to establish the Martin Scorsese Institute of Global Cinematic Arts, which includes a virtual production center and cinematic studies.

As a public university, UCLA offers a world-class film school education at a price that won’t saddle a student with heavy costs. Among ambitious offerings at UCLA’s school of theater, film and television is a recently announced extended reality and artificial intelligence research studio at the school’s downtown campus. Faculty includes many noted working pros who cover every aspect of filmmaking such as costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis. Screenwriter David Koepp (“Jurassic Park,” “War of the Worlds”) and Dustin Lance Black (“Milk”) are among the school’s many notable alums.

The USC School of Cinematic Arts offers a unique interdisciplinary curriculum, in which students take courses from the full spectrum of the SCA’s offerings — prospective writers take courses in directing, directors take courses in interactive media. Helmer Ryan Coogler and writer-producer Shonda Rhimes are just a few of SCA’s highly successful alums. The school receives tremendous support from the creative community. In 2006, filmmaker and alumnus George Lucas made the largest single donation in USC history by giving the film school $175 million.

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Environmental claims and greenwashing.

December 2, 2021

Table of Contents

Making environmental claims about your products and services, remaining vigilant as a consumer, the competition act, the consumer packaging and labelling act.

• Textile Labelling Act

Further reading for businesses

Further reading for consumers.

Changes to the Competition Act

Following recent changes to the Competition Act , the Competition Bureau is reviewing its guidelines and will update them to ensure clarity and transparency for Canadians.

For more information on the changes, please consult our guide:

• Guide to the June 2024 amendments to the Competition Act

Countless Canadians are concerned about the environment and climate change. Therefore, many are looking for products and services that are less harmful to the environment. This has led to an increased demand for “green” products or services.

While the supply of “green” products has greatly increased in response to this demand, there has also been an increase of false or misleading environmental ads or claims, also known as greenwashing. This practice harms competition and innovation because consumers are being mislead and are therefore unable to make an informed purchasing decision. Businesses who actually offer a product that has a lower environmental impact may see their potential consumers being misled into purchasing products and services from competitors that made false or misleading claims.    

False, misleading or unsubstantiated environmental claims may raise concerns under the laws enforced by the Competition Bureau: the Competition Act , the Textile Labelling Act , and the Consumer Packaging and Labelling Act . The Bureau takes environmental claims seriously and will take action in accordance with the laws we enforce

To attract environmentally-conscious consumers, you may want to feature ads, slogans, logos and packaging highlighting environmental attributes or benefits of your product or service. However, if you portray your products and services as having more environmental benefits than they truly have, you may be greenwashing, which could be illegal. Businesses should avoid vague claims such as “eco-friendly” or “safe for the environment”, which can lead to multiple interpretations, misunderstanding and deception.

If your business makes an environmental claim about a product or service, remember that the laws enforced by the Bureau directly apply to environmental claims that are false, misleading or not based on  adequate and proper testing .

Follow best practices by making sure that your claims:

• are truthful and aren’t misleading ;
• are specific : be precise about the environmental benefits of your product;  
• are substantiated and verifiable : claims must be tested and all tests must be adequate and proper;
• do not result in misinterpretations;
• do not exaggerate the environmental benefits of your product; and
• do not imply that your product is endorsed by a third-party organization if it isn’t; and,

If you’re unsure whether a claim will mislead or misrepresent, then don’t make the claim!

Many Canadians wish to purchase items that have a lower impact on the environment.

When you’re shopping for products or services, be on the lookout for greenwashing . Be vigilant against environmental claims that seem vague, exaggerated or are not accompanied by supporting statements. Don’t be afraid to reach out to the manufacturer to ask them questions. Also remember that all consumer goods have an impact on the environment, including those that claim to be "green".

If you believe that a business is engaging in deceptive or anti-competitive activities, report it to the Bureau .

How the laws apply

The Bureau takes environmental claims seriously. The Bureau will take action to combat claims that raise issues under the Competition Act , the Consumer Packaging and Labeling Act as well as the Textile Labeling Act . The Bureau may take into account national and international standards, technological and scientific advances, consumer behaviour and other legal requirements. Environmental claims that raise issues under these laws will be examined on a case-by-case basis and assessed on their own merits.

Generally, the Competition Act’s deceptive marketing provisions prohibit businesses from making false or misleading claims to promote a service, product or business interest. Such claims include any messages, pictures, or verbal communications, including online and in-store advertisements, social media messages, promotional emails, among other things. To determine whether a claim is false or misleading, the courts consider the " general impression " it conveys, as well as its literal meaning.

The Competition Act also prohibits performance claims that are not based on adequate and proper testing. This includes any form of statement, warranty or guarantee of a product’s performance, efficacy or length of life. Performance claims provide consumers with important information about products or services that allow them to make informed purchasing decisions. When buying a product, Canadians expect that all performance claims are based on sound testing and that the product will perform as advertised. The Bureau’s position is that performance claims that are not based on adequate and proper testing can mislead consumers into buying one product over another, undermining a fair and properly functioning marketplace and harming Canadians.

The Consumer Packaging and Labelling Act  (CPLA) requires that prepackaged non-food consumer products bear accurate and meaningful labelling information to help consumers make informed purchasing decisions.

The CPLA prohibits the making of false or misleading representations and sets out specifications for mandatory label information such as the product's name, net quantity and dealer identity. All information on a package, whether in symbols or words, must be neither false nor misleading to consumers.

The  Textile Labelling Act  is a regulatory statute. It requires that consumer textile articles bear accurate and meaningful labelling information to help consumers make informed purchasing decisions. The Textile Labelling Act prohibits the making of false or misleading representations and sets out specifications for mandatory label information such as the generic name of each fibre present and the dealer's full name and postal address or a  CA identification number . The Textile Labelling Act allows designated inspectors to: enter any place at any reasonable time; examine textile fibre products, open packages, examine and make copies of documents or papers; and seize products, labelling, packaging or advertising material which do not conform with the Textile Labelling Act and Regulations.

The Competition Bureau has archived Environmental claims: A guide for industry and advertisers . The Guide may not reflect the Bureau’s current policies or practices and does not reflect the latest standards and evolving environmental concerns. The guide will remain available for reference, research and recordkeeping purposes, but it will not be altered or updated as of the date of archiving.

• Performance representations not based on adequate and proper tests
• False or Misleading Representations and Deceptive Marketing Practices
• Additional information about the Competition Act
• Guide to the Consumer Packaging and Labelling Act and Regulations
• Guide to the Textile Labelling and Advertising Regulations
• CA Identification Number
• (Archived) Environmental Claims: A Guide for Industry and Advertisers
• Consumer alert: Be on the lookout for greenwashing
• Complaint form
• Don’t be bamboozled: the real deal with "bamboo fabric"
• Up to $290.5 million in compensation for Canadians in Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche emissions case
• Get involved in the Circular Economy

• Open access
• Published: 02 July 2024

Does an instructional video as a stand-alone tool promote the acquisition of practical clinical skills? A randomised simulation research trial of skills acquisition and short-term retention

• Thomas Ott   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7510-7679 1 ,
• Tim Demare 1 ,
• Julia Möhrke 1 ,
• Saskia Silber 1 ,
• Johannes Schwab 1 ,
• Lukas Reuter 1 ,
• Ruben Westhphal 2 ,
• Irene Schmidtmann 2 ,
• Sven-Oliver Dietz 3 ,
• Nina Pirlich 1 ,
• Alexander Ziebart 1 &
• Kristin Engelhard 1  

BMC Medical Education volume  24 , Article number:  714 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

Metrics details

The effectiveness of instructional videos as a stand-alone tool for the acquisition of practical skills is yet unknown because instructional videos are usually didactically embedded. Therefore, we evaluated the acquisition of the skill of a humeral intraosseous access via video in comparison to that of a self-study with an additional retention test.

After ethical approval, we conducted two consecutive studies. Both were designed as randomised controlled two-armed trials with last-year medical students as independent samples at our institutional simulation centre of a tertiary university hospital centre. In Study 1, we randomly assigned 78 participants to two groups: Vid-Self participants watched an instructional video as an intervention, followed by a test, and after seven days did a self-study as a control, followed by a test. Self-Vid ran through the trial in reverse order.

In Study 2, we investigated the influence of the sequence of the two teaching methods on learning success in a new sample of 60 participants: Vid-Self watched an instructional video and directly afterward did the self-study followed by a test, whereas Self-Vid ran through that trial in reverse order.

In Studies 1 and 2, the primary outcome was the score (worst score = 0, best score = 20) of the test after intervention and control. The secondary outcome in Study 1 was the change in score after seven days.

Study 1: The Vid-Self (Participants n  = 42) was superior to the Self-Vid ( n  = 36) (mean score 14.8 vs. 7.7, p  < 0.001). After seven days, Self-vid outperformed Vid-Self (mean score 15.9 vs. 12.5, p  < 0.001).

Study 2: The Vid-Self ( n  = 30) and Self-Vid ( n  = 30) scores did not significantly differ (mean 16.5 vs. mean 16.5, p  = 0.97).

An instructional video as a stand-alone tool effectively promotes the acquisition of practical skills. The best results are yielded by a combination of an instructional video and self-study right after each other, irrespective of sequence.

Trial registrations

ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT05066204 (13/04/2021) (Study 1) and NCT04842357 (04/10/2021) (Study 2).

Peer Review reports

Instructional videos

Instructional videos are increasingly applied in medical education.[ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ] The advantage of instructional videos, in contrast to lectures and face-to-face teaching, is greater flexibility in learning when provided independently of time.[ 1 , 2 , 5 ] The need for distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the aspired individualisation and flexibility of learning within curricula foster the intensified expansion of online teaching and particularly instructional videos.[ 6 , 7 , 8 ] Instructional videos have a positive effect on knowledge.[ 9 ] However, their impact on the acquisition of practical skills is controversial due to inconsistent results.[ 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 ] Moreover, previous studies evaluated instructional videos in comparison to face-to-face teaching, or the videos were didactically embedded, which means that they were also implemented to tutor practical training and were applied repetitively.[ 10 , 11 , 12 ] To our knowledge, no study has focused on instructional videos as a stand-alone tool without didactic embedding. If instructional videos prove to be effective as stand-alone tools, crucial implications could be deduced for their deliberate application in medical school concerning distance learning, standardisation and flexibility.

• Intraosseous access

To evaluate the value of an instructional video as a stand-alone tool on technical skills acquisition, two factors must be considered. First, it is advantageous to use a procedure that is essential for patient care and that can be devided into well-defined steps. Second, it should be a procedure that has received little attention in curricula to reduce bias concerning previous experience of the participants. [ 15 , 16 , 17 ] Therefore, we chose to apply intraosseous access (IOA) to the humeral head. IOAs show high success rates in patients and can be effectively trained using skill trainers.[ 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 ] For emergencies, the application of an IOA is most common at the proximal tibial plateau and less common at the humeral head.[ 20 , 23 ] In the case of contraindications to accessing the tibia, a humeral IOA must be mastered as an alternative. Interestingly, humeral IOA training has received less attention in the literature than tibial IOA training.[ 19 , 24 ] Therefore, we produced a ten-minute instructional video on humeral IOA for adult emergency patients and evaluated its effect on students.[ 25 ].

In Study 1, we evaluated the effect of this video by comparing the intervention ‘ INSTRUCTIONAL video’ to the control ‘self-study’ on the acquisition of the skill in two study groups. The performance was quantified by a test that results in a score. Our null hypothesis with respect to the primary endpoint was as follows: The group that watched an instructional video did not differ in score from the group that did self-study at the same time. To evaluate skill retention as a secondary endpoint and to ensure the same overall training experience for both groups, we repeated that trial seven days later in reverse order of both groups. The results of the secondary endpoints of Study 1 yielded findings that are described below and are worthy of further evaluation. Therefore, six months later, we recruited a new sample with similar demographic characteristics and defined this new investigation as Study 2 . In this study, the instructional video and self-study were conducted directly after each other, and participants were tested directly afterwards. Only the order of the teaching methods differed between the two groups. The null hypothesis was formulated as follows: The group that watched an instructional video before self-study did not differ in score from the group that watched an instructional video after self-study.

Ethical aspects

The responsible ethics committee (Ethical Review Committee of the State Chamber of Physicians of Rhineland-Palatinate, Deutschhausplatz 3, 55,116 Mainz, Germany; Chairperson: Professor S. Letzel) approved Study 1 on 29. April 2021 under 2021–15807 and Study 2 on 21. October 2021 under the number 2021–16112. Participation was voluntary, and written informed consent was signed before participation.

Study design

We conducted two prospective randomised controlled two-armed simulation-based research studies as investigator-initiated trials with independent samples, aiming for a 1:1 ratio concerning the number of participants in each group. Study 1 included three points in time, and Study 2 included two points in time (Fig.  1 a, b).

a CONSORT flow chart of Study 1. In Study 1, the Self-Vid group first had to complete a self-assessment (T0), then had to perform the self-study and was tested afterwards, followed by a second self-assessment (T1). After seven days, the group watched the instructional video, was tested, and had to repeat the self-assessment for the third time (T2). The Vid-Self group first completed a self-assessment (T0) and then watched the instructional video, followed by the test and the second self-assessment (T1). After seven days, the group performed the self-study, was tested, and then, the self-assessment was repeated for the last time (T2). b CONSORT flow chart of Study 2. In Study 2, both groups had to complete a self-assessment, and then the instructional video and self-study were conducted in immediate succession according to group assignment. After that, a self-assessment was performed again

Participants, previous experience and setting

We recruited 78 last-year medical students for Study 1 and an additional 60 students for Study 2. The studies were conducted during the mandatory institutional final year training at our institutional simulation centre. One year before this training, all participants attended a curricular 20-min session of face-to-face practical training without video presentation or standardised didactic conception to a maximum of five students at a time concerning IOA located in the tibia; students applied the device several times, but without a defined number of attempts. The same device and skill trainer were used in the present study.

Study 1 was conducted in May and June, and Study 2 was conducted in November and December 2021.

Intraosseous equipment

We used the Arrow EZ-IO Intraosseous Vascular Access System (Teleflex Medical Europe Ltd., Athlone, Ireland) with cannulas of three sizes. As a skill trainer, we used the EZ-IO humeral training bone (Teleflex Medical Europe Ltd., Athlone, Ireland) for a maximum of 5 attempts. As all participants had undergone curricular IOA-training one year before the study no further familiarisation was deemed necessary and hence none was provided.

Measuring tools

The test was videotaped for evaluation. Participants were put in front of a video camera (Lumifix F2000, Panasonic, Kadoma, Japan) that pointed from the participant´s shoulder to a table containing the IOA equipment. First, participants demonstrated and explained the location of humeral IOA on their own extremity; they wore scrubs to do this. Then, the participants prepared the equipment and performed the IOA in the skill trainer. The performance of the students was assessed by a score that was designed and tested by our study group.

Currently, there are no validated checklists for assessing humeral IOA. Hence, authors who are experienced in IOA in patients performed five rounds of focus group sessions according to Schutz et al. and adapted an already validated score for tibial IOA to the needs of the present study.[ 26 , 27 ] The resulting checklist consisted of 15 weighted items quantifying the performance of humeral IOA and is cited in additional file 1. The sum of the particular items results in a score of 0 (worst performance) or 20 (best performance). The entire procedure is described in detail in additional file 2.

Evaluation of the test

Two authors (TD, JM) evaluated the videotapes as raters in a randomised sequence and were blinded to the participants’ group assignment and the time points that are described in the following section. The videotapes were observed by both rates simultaneously using Windows Media Player (Windows X, Microsoft, Redmond, USA). After watching each individual video they discussed discrepancies thoroughly and agreed on one score per videotape.

Self-assessment

Participants had to self-estimate their general capability of applying an IOA on a scale from 1 (very good) to 6 (very bad) as a global rating scale.[ 28 ].

Intervention and control

Intervention: instructional video.

A ten-minute instructional video about humeral intraosseous access was produced by the authors according to the current literature and the manufacturer’s instructions. An identical device and skill trainer were used for the instructional video and the test. Participants individually watched this video on an iPad (iPad Pro 2. Gen., Apple, Silicon Valley, USA) in a quiet room during the mandatory training.

Control: self-study

The self-study included ten minutes of unsupervised hands-on exercise with the device and the skill trainer in separate rooms. No further instructional materials were provided.

Data collection

Randomisation was performed and controlled by certain authors (TD, JM, SS, JS, and LR). Participants were randomly allocated into one of two groups by drawing a lot from an opaque box in Study 1. In Study 2, separate opaque boxes for male and female participants were provided, thus allowing us to stratify the randomisation by sex due to gender differences that were observed in Study 1 and are detailed in the Results section. Participants were instructed not to disclose information on their allocation before everybody had drawn their lots, thus ensuring allocation concealment. The two study groups were:

The ‘Vid-Self’ group (first, INSTRUCTIONAL video; second, self-study)

In Study 1, participants in the ‘Vid-Self’ group first watched the instructional video, subsequently took the test and performed the self-assessment. Seven days later, they performed a 10-min self-study and subsequently took the test and the self-assessment again.

In Study 2, participants in the ‘Vid-Self’ group watched the instructional video and then did the self-study immediately afterwards. Then they did the test and then performed the self-assessment.

The Self-Vid group (first self-study, second INSTRUCTIONAL video)

In Study 1, participants in the ‘Self-Vid’ group first performed a 10-min self-study and then took the test. Seven days later, they watched the instructional video and subsequently took the test and self-assessment.

In Study 2, participants in the ‘Self-Vid’ group performed self-study first, watched the instructional video, did the test and then performed the self-assessment.

The data were collected at three consecutive points in time (T) in Study 1. At T0, randomisation was performed, and the participants’ demographic information, previous experiences and self-assessment were collected. At T1, participants underwent the intervention or control and then took the test and self-assessment. At T2 (retention), seven days after T1, the groups were switched between intervention and control , after which the test and self-assessment were performed.

The data were collected at two consecutive points in time (T) in Study 2: T0 was identical to that in Study 1. At T1, participants had already performed the self-study and watched the instructional video in a randomised order, and then took the test and self-assessment.

Sample size considerations

For Study 1, initially we had planned pre-post-comparisons to evaluate the individual learning success in each sequence group. For this, based on the publication of Oriot et al., [ 26 ] we had assumed an improvement from the level of inexperienced participants (mean 11.06; standard deviation (SD) 4.08) halfway to the level of experienced physicians (mean 19,13; SD 1,48) and a correlation of 0.5 between both measurements. For a two-sided paired t-test to establish this improvement at the 5% significance level with 80% power, 11 participants in each group were required. However, we changed our study design due to concerns that setting a preliminary test before any study might influence students learning efforts too much. Therefore, we decided to omit the preliminary test and to focus on the comparison between instructional video and self-study as a first learning exposure as our primary endpoint. This lead to considering a difference of 3 points in the score as relevant and assumed a standard deviation of 4 based on the publication of Oriot et al., [ 26 ] which resulted in an effect size of 0.75. To obtain a power of 90% to detect such an effect at the 5% level with a two-sided two-sample t-test two groups of 39 students each were required.

For Study 2, we used our data from Study 1. The observed means and standard deviations resulted in an effect size of 1.14. Using a two-sided two-sample t-test, such an effect could be established at the 5% level with 80% power if 14 students per group were included. However, more students were interested in taking part and we did not want to exclude anybody. Therefore, actually 60 students were included in study 2. Thus, the actual sample size was sufficient to reproduce the effect of study 1 if the effect of the sequence of learning methods within a short period is indeed the same as the effect of the sequence of learning methods with a gap of one week and first test after the first learning sequence.

For both studies, we performed intention to treat analyses and included all participants with available test results. For quantitative data, the score of each group at each point in time was quoted as the mean and SD and displayed as a boxplot. For Study 1, the differences within groups are also reported as the mean and SD.

To test for differences between the Vid-Self group and Self-Vid group, a two-sided two sample t-test was performed for the primary endpoint: the difference in the sum of scores at T1 between the groups in both studies. All the other tests applied to the analysis of the secondary endpoints were exploratory; therefore, no correction for multiple testing was applied. In Study 1, we performed a two-sided two sample t-test for differences in scores between the two groups at T2. We performed paired t-tests for differences in scores within each group (dependent samples) between T1 and T2. To make test scores and self-assessments, which were measured on different scales, comparable, we standardised the variables in both studies by subtracting the mean for the complete sample from each score and dividing it by the standard deviation (SD) and computed the difference between the two standardised measurements. Small differences correspond to consistency of self-assessment and score, large differences correspond to inconsistency. We then tested for differences of these differences between genders with a two-sided two sample t-test.

In Study 1, 78 participants were tested at T1: 42 (54%) participants were assigned to Vid-Self, and 36 (46%) were assigned to Self-Vid. At T2, 59 participants were analysed, as 21 participants did not appear: 31 (53%) participants were evaluated in the Vid-Self group, and 28 (48%) in the Self-Vid group. In Study 2, 30 of 60 (50%) participants were assigned to each study group, and all were analysed. The demographic data are shown in Table  1 . (Table  1 see below).

Primary endpoint of study 1

In Study 1, the group that watched the instructional video at that point in time scored significantly greater than the group that did self-study (Self-Vid at T1) (at T1: Vid-Self: mean 14.8, SD 3.5 vs. Self-Vid: mean 7.7, SD 2.6, p  < 0.001) (Fig.  2 a, additional file 3).

Boxplot of the scores of Study 1 and Study 2. These boxplots display the scores of the two groups on the abscissa: The Self-Vid group and the Vid-Self group. The ordinate shows the score with a minimum of 0 and a maximum of 20. The horizontal thick lines indicate the median, the thin lines indicate the first and third quartiles, and the vertical bars indicate the minimum and maximum scores. The dots indicate extreme values, and the rhombs indicate the means of the scores. a Boxplot of the scores in Study 1 at T1. Study 1 (primary endpoint): Boxplot of the score at Time 1: The ‘Vid-Self’ group obtained a significantly greater score after the INSTRUCTIONAL video than did the ‘Self-Vid’ group after the self-study. (primary endpoint of Study 1: p  < 0.01). b Boxplot of the scores in Study 1 at T2. Study 1 (secondary endpoint): Boxplot of the score at Time 2 (seven days after T1): The ‘Vid-Self’ group had a significantly lower score after the self-study than did the ‘Self-Vid’ group after the instructional video (secondary endpoint of Study 1: p  < 0.01). c Boxplot of the scores in Study 2. Study 2 (primary endpoint): Boxplot of the score: The ‘Vid-self’ and ‘Self-Vid’ groups did not differ in terms of the achieved scores ( p  = 0.97)

Secondary endpoints of study 1

In Study 1, at T2 (after seven days), Vid-Self tended to yield lower scores than Self-Vid (mean 12.5, SD 3.6 vs. mean 15.9, SD 2.2, p  < 0.001) (Fig.  2 b). From T1 to T2, the scores tended to decrease for Vid-Self (T1: mean 14.8, SD 3.5; T2: mean 12.5, SD 3.6, p  < 0.001) and increase for Self-Vid (T1: mean 7.7, SD 2.6, p  < 0.001; T2: mean: 15.9, SD 2.2, p  < 0.001).

The absolute value of the score of Vid-Self tended to decrease less than the score increased in Self-Vid (mean change from T1 to T2:—2.8 vs. 7.9, p  < 0.001).

The details of the individual weighted items of the scores of those participants attending T1 and T2 are shown in Fig.  3 .

Details of the weighted scores of participants in Study 1. a  The diagram contains the data of participants of the Vid-Self group in Study 1 who performed the tests at both points in time ( n  = 31). For those participants, the diagram displays the sum of the single items of the score with respect to their weighting, as described in the “Methods” section. The values of the single items were weighted from 1 to 3 concerning the maximum number of achievable points according to their impact on clinical relevance (additional file 1). For example, the maximum score for the item “Anatomical access point” was 3 points, so for 31 participants it was were equivalent to 93 points. The points in time are displayed as follows. T 1: orange, T 2: blue. b  The diagram contains data from participants of the Self-Vid group in Study 1 who performed the test at both points in time ( n  = 24)

We investigated whether these changes in score within the seven days could be explained by the sequence (video then self-study or vice versa) or represented a decrease in skill in study 2.

In study 1 Vid-Self compassed 19 female and 17 male participants whereas Self-Vid compassed 25 female and 17 male participants.

Separated by gender, female and male participants did not exhibit substantial differences in score over both groups (T1: mean: 11.2, SD 4.8 vs. mean 12.0, SD 4.6, p  = 0.459; T2: mean 13.3, SD 3.8 vs. mean 14.9, SD 2.9, p  = 0.069, additional file 3).

Separated by gender and study groups at T1 female and male participants did not show a difference either (additional file 3). At T2 female participants of Vid-self tended to show a lower score than male (female mean: 10.9, SD 3.1, male mean: 14.4, SD 3.3, p = 0.007) whereas there was no difference at T2 between sexes in Self-Vid (additional file 3).

Concerning self-assessment female participants generally tended towards a worse self-assessment than male (T0: p  < 0.001, T1: p  = 0.027, T2, p  = 0.001, additional file 3).

Separated by gender and study groups at T0 female participants of the Vid-Self group tended to show a worse self-assessment than male participants whereas in the Self-Vid group sexes did not exhibit differences in self-assessment (Vid-Self: p  = 0.002, Self-Vid: p  = 0.1, additional file 3).

When addressing gender differences in consistency of self-assessment and score, a significant difference of differences between females and males was observed only at T2 in the Self-Vid group ( p  = 0.049); moreover, there was no difference in the other points over time (particular p  > 0.05). Due to this sex difference at T2, we stratified for sex in Study 2.

Primary endpoint of study 2

In Study 2, neither group differed in score (Vid-Self: mean 16.5, SD 3.0 vs. Self-Vid: mean 16.5, SD 3.1, p  = 0.97) (Fig.  2 c).

Secondary endpoints of study 2

In Study 2, self-assessments were recorded for the Vid-Self group (mean 4.5, SD 1.2; mean 2.9, SD 0.9), and the Self-Vid group (mean 4.1, SD 1.1; mean 2.5, SD 0.9). Again, female and male participants did not exhibit substantial differences in score (mean 16.8, SD 2.8 vs. mean 16.2, SD 3.2, p  = 0.417). Again, male participants tended to have slightly better self-assessments than did their scores, while the opposite trend was observed for female participants, but the difference was not statistically significant ( p  > 0.1). An overview of the entire results is provided in additional file 3.

Two studies showed that an instructional video, as a stand-alone tool without didactic embedding, promoted the acquisition of practical clinical skills. Furthermore, participants generally obtained the highest scores after watching the instructional video (Vid-Self group: 14.8 points on day one; Self-Vid group: 15.9 points on day seven). In comparison, the participants performed significantly worse directly after self-study (Self-Vid group: 7.7 points on day one; Vid-Self group: 12.5 points on day seven). The decline in score in Study 1 over seven days in the Vid-Self group suggested that there was a short-term decline in this skill, even though self-study was performed directly before the test. The follow-up study (Study 2) showed that, regardless of the sequence of the skill acquisition methods (self-study or video), the immediate combination of the two skill acquisition methods was most successful, as both groups scored 16.5 points (Fig.  2 b). We deduce that an instructional video as a stand-alone tool effectively promotes the acquisition of this practical skill, and self-study even fosters that acquisition.

Acquisition of practical skills

Traditionally, practical skills were taught face-to-face in group sessions. Due to the pandemic, groups had to be reduced in size, which required an increased number of instructors as well as sessions. Therefore, recently, alternative teaching methods such as instructional videos have been more frequently integrated into medical education.[ 1 , 2 , 3 , 6 , 7 ] Instructional videos teach identical content in a cross-sectional and longitudinal manner and therefore may ensure more standardisation of a specific content than face-to-face instruction.[ 1 , 3 ] A previous study evaluated the effect of a ten-minute video followed by ten minutes of untutored training in comparison to 20 min of face-to-face instruction concerning paediatric tibial IOA.[ 12 ] The video group scored significantly higher on the subsequent test than did the control group (7.56 vs. 6.00, maximum possible: 10). Although the latter study included a smaller but more highly qualified sample, the present study showed similar results for inexperienced participants. Another previous study evaluated three teaching methods concerning subcuticular suturing but in an elaborate didactic embedding procedure involving eight minutes of video, face-to-face instruction and independent practice.[ 10 ] The main difference from our study was that those participants watched the video first and subsequently were randomised into the cited groups. Furthermore, the video group repeatedly watched the video. However, as in our study, video promoted the acquisition of the skill, as did instructor-led training, whereas independent practice was less effective. However, the present study revealed that an instructional video as a stand-alone tool can teach practical skills well without additional didactic embedding or extensive previous experience. To optimise learning success, a combination of an instructional video with self-study is recommended, independent of the sequence of both teaching methods.

Skill decline

A decrease in clinical skills depends on affective, cognitive, and psychomotor aspects, time, frequency of practice, and prior experience. [ 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 ] Over a 12-month period, experienced providers show a decline in the skill of accessing IOA, as do undergraduates in basic life support.[ 30 , 31 ] Furthermore, experienced providers show better retention of internal pacemaker placement skills over a three-month period than inexperienced physicians.[ 32 ] In novices, the ability to perform paracentesis decreases within three months, and the ability to perform endoscopic intubation decreases within two months. The performance of focused transthoracic echocardiography and suturing decreases within one month.[ 11 , 33 , 34 , 35 ] Only the above cited study described a decrease in skill concerning subcuticular suturing within one week.[ 10 ] The group that was trained by a video declined less (12.74 to 12.41) than the instructor trained (14.17 to 13.00) and the independent practice group (13.54 to 11.2) [ 10 ]. As mentioned above, the videos in that study were used repetitively. Therefore, participants were exposed to more video experience than in the present study. Future trials should focus on how repetitive videos foster skill retention.

To explore this decrease in skill, we analysed the development of single items in our score (additional file 1) in both groups (Fig.  3 ). The score consists of 15 weighted items and a maximum score of 20 (additional file 2). Figure  3 shows the sum of the scores for each item and its weights. In the Vid-Self group in Study 1, the decrease in score from T1 to T2 was based mainly on the following items: anatomical access (weighted: 3), angle of insertion (weighted: 2), injection of local anaesthetic, fixation of the cannula, and marking of the patient (weighted: 1 each). The first two items are clinically relevant for successfully applying an IOA. These factors appear to contribute most to the decline. In the Self-Vid group, the increase in scores was caused mainly by the same items and also by the item arm position. Therefore, in our opinion, the score adequately reflects performance in terms of relevant clinical aspects. Furthermore, the cited items of the score seem to be efficiently taught via an instructional video.

Gender aspects

In Study 1, we noticed trends, however, without a statistically significant difference: Female participants tended to have a lower mean score in all groups. Due to the greater proportion of female participants in the Vid-Self group who had a lower score after seven days, this could be a confounder or a gender issue. The latter has been controversially discussed in many fields of medicine.[ 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 ] Furthermore, males in the Self-Vid group had better self-assessments than did their performance, while females had worse self-assessments than did their performance. Therefore, we stratified patients by sex in Study 2. However, there was no statistically significant difference concerning sex in Study 2.

Limitations

First, any simulation-based study has limitations due to the artificial environment. Therefore, the results should be interpreted with caution concerning possible transferability in patient care, and generalizability is limited to laboratory conditions.[ 11 , 12 ] Second, we found no validated score for the evaluation of humeral IOA; therefore, we thoroughly performed the adoption of this validated score for tibial access (additional file 2) according to an established procedure.[ 27 ] We partially used weighted items within this score that may influence the achieved score disproportionally high concerning the particular item and we did not perform a statistical validation. However, we developed our score out of a validated score and estimated this as appropriate for our needs. Further validation is worthwhile. Third, although all students attended a curricular training in intraosseous vascular access one year before the study 49 of 78 (62%) participants in study 1 and 21 of 60 (35%) in study 2 stated not to have had any training before. Apparently, this training had no substantial impact on the participants and further studies should include familiarisation with the equipment used. Fourth, a dropout in Study 1 of 27% (21/78) of the participants in the follow-up at Time 2 (seven days after Time 1) was quite high. This was probably caused by the organisational effort of those participants being engaged in remote hospitals to attend the follow-up. However, dropout may have caused an imbalance in the sex ratio at time 2, influencing us to reevaluate our findings in Study 2, as discussed above. Fifth, self-study as a control instrument seems to be trivial because teaching is certainly better than not teaching. Nevertheless, our aim was to evaluate a video as a stand-alone tool, so we needed the best possible inert control group. All participants had already completed curricular IOA training for the tibial access site one year before the study. Therefore, we decided not to perform a pretest concerning the video, as in previous studies, but rather defined self-study as the best possible control for contrasting the effect of the video.[ 10 , 11 ].

Conclusions

A practical skill can be efficiently acquired by an instructional video as a stand-alone tool without didactic embedding and is superior to self-study despite previous curricular experience. Therefore, instructional videos can be used to a satisfactory extent for skill acquisition when direct teaching is impossible, such as during a pandemic. A decline in performance can be observed within seven days after the instructional video, which cannot be prevented even by self-study immediately before testing. However, the best results could be achieved by the immediate combination of instructional video and self-study. Hereby, the sequence of the methods has no influence on the acquisition. Gender differences could not be detected in the present studies. The evaluated instructional video proved to be a stand-alone tool for the acquisition of the defined practical skill. Instructional videos could greatly increase the efficiency of teaching in medical schools and provide a useful supplement to students' education.

Availability of data and materials

The dataset supporting the conclusions of this article is available in the LabArchives repository, https://doi.org/10.25833/8cc7-eb07 at https://doi.org/10.25833/8cc7-eb07

The raw data were anonymised according to the protocols of the present study.

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Acknowledgements

We sincerely thank the Chair of our Department of Anaesthesiology and the staff coordination, as well as the Department of Research and Training, for their great support while conducting the study. This manuscript contains portions of the doctoral thesis of Tim Demare, University Medical Centre of the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany. Parts of the study were presented as a scientific online poster during the annual congress of the German Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Anästhesiologie und Intensivmedizin) 12.-14. May 2022, DAC Digital (Deutscher Anästhesie Congress), Nürnberg, Germany ( https://www.ai-online.info/images/ai-ausgabe/2022/05-2022/Supplement_8-2022_DAC_Abstracts.pdf —page 194).

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Thomas Ott, Tim Demare, Julia Möhrke, Saskia Silber, Johannes Schwab, Lukas Reuter, Nina Pirlich, Alexander Ziebart & Kristin Engelhard

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Contributions

All the authors have made substantial intellectual contributions to the conception, design, data acquisition, analysis and interpretation of the data collected in this study and further drafted the manuscript. The following contains only the specific main focuses of the contributions of the particular author. T.O., T.D., S.D., J.M., S.S., J.S., R.W., and L.R. contributed to the conception, design and development of the study. The focus group rounds, literature research and development of the score were realised by T.D., T.O., J.M., J.S., L.R. and S.S. The instructional video was planned, scripted and produced by T.O., J.S., J.M., L.S. and T.D. The data acquisition was mainly planned, coordinated and performed by T.D., L.R., J.M., S.S., J.S. T.D. and J.M. evaluated all the videotapes of all the tests. T.O., R.W., I. S., T.D., A.Z. and N.P. contributed to the analysis and interpretation of the data. The draft of the manuscript was created by T.O., I.S., T.D., S.D., N.P., A.Z. and K.E. All the authors critically revised the manuscript concerning the intellectual content. All the authors approved the final manuscript and agreed to be accountable for all the aspects of the work.

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The trial was carried out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and all relevant guidelines and regulations. This study was approved by the responsible ethical review board: ethics committee of the Medical Association of the State Rhineland-Palatinate (Ethical Review Committee of the State Chamber of Physicians of Rhineland-Palatinate, Deutschhausplatz 3, 55116 Mainz, Germany; Chairperson: Professor S. Letzel) concerning Study 1 on 29. April 2021 under the number 2021–15807 and Study 2 on 21. October 2021 under the number 2021–16112.

The study was conducted during the mandatory institutional final year training at our institutional simulation centre. All participants signed a written informed consent concerning anonymous data analysis and publication. Participation was voluntary, and denial of participation did not have any consequence on participation in the mandatory training.

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Ott, T., Demare, T., Möhrke, J. et al. Does an instructional video as a stand-alone tool promote the acquisition of practical clinical skills? A randomised simulation research trial of skills acquisition and short-term retention. BMC Med Educ 24 , 714 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-05714-6

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Received : 23 February 2023

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-05714-6

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