This year in the science of learning
The state of the research and the movement 2025
Hello, Bell Ringers! I can’t believe 2025 is nearly a wrap. It’s been a great year.
This newsletter’s first full year was a packed one: I sent 71 newsletters, conducted 11 video/podcast interviews, wrote seven Tools for Practice posts with the help of very smart educators, hosted one summer reader book club (a blast) and one live Q&A with readers and Paul Kirschner, a giant in the science of learning. And I launched the Science of Learning Tracker, which is going to give readers an idea of where the science of learning is being implemented, whether it’s states, universities, districts or schools.
Now it’s time to look back at what happened this year, and read the tea leaves for where we might be headed next year.
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The Bell Ringer’s most-read stories of the year
What were you most interested in this year? It’s math, more math, why curriculum review sites are so wild, and retrieval practice. Here are this year’s top five:
* NCTM position paper ignores reality of math teaching challenges
Earlier this year, a position paper published by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics highlighted suggestions for improving math teaching, but few of them were based in evidence of how students learn. I took the points of the paper and compared them to what the evidence shows matters most in math learning.
* My kingdom for a reliable curriculum review
The organizations that review curricula to help leaders choose what is best for students is piecemeal and confusing, my reporting showed, with each organization coming up with its own criteria and none of them focused on which programs produced reliable learning results for students.
* Retrieval practice is not the “glorified path to rote learning.”
It’s a lot more than quizzing, it’s the key to thinking, according to the research. One of The Bell Ringer’s “Four Big Ideas” series, this interview with Powerful Teaching’s Patrice Bain examines the research on retrieval practice, how to use it effectively, and includes Bain’s four top ideas to help implement it both in classrooms and at home.
* Students read few—or no—books in top ELA programs, survey finds
The Bell Ringer was among the first to report on this important news: some of the U.S.’s most popular reading curricula, including Wonders, feature either very few whole books, or none at all, across elementary grades. This interview with Karen Vaites, whose Curriculum Insight Project conducted the initial review, highlights this important development that’s been filling the headlines recently.
* How Kansas built their own LETRS-like training for math
I was excited to see this reporting get so much attention, on how the state of Kansas is training teachers in the foundations of brain science and evidence-based teaching techniques for math. The Kansas Math Project brought on researchers, including Sarah Powell at the University of Texas at Austin, and has beefed up professional development as well as created free training videos.
Now for the big event:
This year in the science of learning: 2025
Last year, I started this year-end reflection on what was happening in the science of learning across the United States without much of anything concrete to say:
“There’s little right now in terms of data: we don’t know how many teachers know about ideas like cognitive load theory or working memory; we don’t have data on how many teachers understand the research behind how humans learn. In the U.S. anyway, it’s just too early to know. If you are reading this, you are an early-adopter…,” I wrote last December.
Now, in only a year, that’s beginning to change.
