Review of Research in Education

We integrate work from human development, psychology, education, and neuroscience to argue for five interrelated developmental principles that together provide the conceptual basis for a fundamental shift in thinking in education about the nature of learning, and hence the work of teaching, and the purpose and design of schools and youth-facing policies. These principles foreground humans’ natural agency, subjectivity, and variability and the dynamic, adaptive interdependence of body, mind, and culture in development and learning. We take the analogy of weaving cloth to highlight the properties and valuable variations of effective educational systems. We argue that reconceptualizing learning is necessary to meaningfully improve schooling and its outcomes, support equity and human dignity, and ultimately, build a sustainable democratic society.

Relationships between individual development and historical change are understudied, and yet an understanding of these relationships is foundational to understanding human development. The chapter provides a case study model for investigating individual-historical relations that coordinates archival, ethnographic, interview, and experimental methods. The methodological approach is illustrated in studies on numerical cognition conducted in Papua New Guinea. Two generalizable methodological assumptions are articulated: that the emergence of novel representations and ideas is rooted in individuals’ activities in collective practices and that the dynamic sociogenetic processes in collective practices provide the context for individual development. The chapter concludes by pointing to extensions of the framework to additional studies conducted in a wide range of communities.

This chapter suggests that individual and cultural/contextual contributions to learning and development can be understood as mutually constituting aspects of a holistic fractal process flowing across generations. To examine specific aspects of the dynamic mutually constituting process, the chapter suggests foregrounding or focusing on one aspect of the process and keeping others in the background for particular analyses. The chapter treats learning/development as a dynamic process in which individuals and generations transform their participation in ongoing endeavors and in so doing, create and innovate context and culture. The mutually constituting approach changes research questions and reorients methods for understanding human learning and development.

This chapter focuses on the utopian methodological approach taken up by social design-based experiments, their conceptual underpinnings, and commitments. The methods are drawn from Gutiérrez’s empirical work and detail ways of seeing and capturing human learning activity crucial to envisioning and enacting new social futures with radical possibilities for those from historically nondominant communities. It elaborates methodological commitments to seeking complexity in human learning activity as it centers equity understood as worldmaking. A review of a range of methodological tools employed across Gutierrez’s studies is presented—from an analytical focus on ensembles and the multiplicity of social spaces in learning ecologies to attending to how people’s repertoires of practices are constituted through participation in everyday activity, as they move in and across the ecologies of everyday life.

Children develop and learn within dynamic contexts, yet the simplifying assumptions of common statistical methods often relegate such complexity to unexplained error. This chapter discusses ideas from the dynamic systems literature, which focuses on the interplay within and between components of complex systems, such as individuals and their multitiered contexts. This chapter presents three scenarios highlighting knowledge from the dynamic systems literature. These scenarios have implications requiring reconsidering common approaches to explaining the variance associated with change, the conceptualization of effect sizes, and the use of between-person data and analyses to make within-person inferences. The final section provides resources for moving beyond dynamic metaphors and principles, so theories can be translated into testable hypotheses.

In this collection of commentaries, the authors respond to the suite of chapters in this special issue and ask and answer: “Where do we need to go?” Thinking through the “mother value” of dignity, the authors explore the possibilities for education research under the unifying purpose of cultivating “dignity-affirming educational environments” for all people.

Transforming difficulties into opportunities for thriving is at the heart of this volume on the science of learning and development. This chapter brings the perspective of European research and the Global North and South and discusses some of the challenges included in the call to create the conditions for promoting sustainable and equitable futures for all. Among others, globalizing transformative knowledge by recreating, replicating, and scaling up success stories in education research can overcome methodological or epistemological limitations. Examples of cocreation and interdisciplinary work are included to produce socially relevant knowledge and be effective in tackling the real problems affecting children and youth. Dialogic learning and successful educational actions illustrate how educational success and transformation can happen.

Transforming the South African education system after decades of apartheid remains a dream for all. This chapter contributes on how this dream can be achieved. To this end, I raise two arguments. First, transformation will require young people to become adept at handling tensions and dilemmas. Second, I propose that the science of learning and development (SoLD) has a possibility to develop such competences. I begin with a look at the colonial education curricula in South Africa until the dawn of a democratic dispensation in 1994. This is followed by a critique of the post-1994 curriculum. In closing, I propose the SoLD model as an alternative to the classroom in South Africa as a route to equity and justice.

In analyzing the disseminated call, the commentary suggests the need for a consciousness consistent with a quote from Maya Angelou concerning identity. It is applied—in this case—to the situation of social science and specifically developmental science vis-à-vis published scholarship pertaining to communities of color. Questioned is the field’s long-term positionality regarding the persistent marginalization of Blacks. Suggested is the need to be candid in acknowledging the redundant “embracing of the lie of Black inferiority.” Argued is that the field’s positionality when it comes to representations of communities of color (i.e., embodied in “scholarly efforts”) serves as an untoward, incentivized, and under acknowledged contributor to the science of learning and development, which has problematic consequences for all.

The chapters in this issue are a clarion call for the science of learning and development to create productive, sustainable, and care-centered partnerships across academic fields that extend into partnerships with local communities. While applauding the wisdom of this communitarian aspiration, this commentary cautions that forming productive intellectual peerages between the often viewed as elite and distant Academy and local communities, who too often feel ignored, undeserved, and oppressed, is difficult. To mitigate some of the anticipated challenges, this commentary suggests that what is needed is for both scholars and local scholar-practitioners to intentionally create intellectual safe spaces—boundary areas—where new intricate ideas and complex interpersonal relationships might be given time to flourish and thrive.

We note two possibilities for how our science might capitalize on advances in computing that harness and weave “big data” into the rich tapestry of how human development unfolds. First, we propose that the classic theoretical models that have guided developmental research since the 1970s and the hierarchical analytical models used to operationalize those theories might both be replaced with new network models that capture multidirectional interplay among many facets of a person and their context. Second, we suggest that contemporary person-specific (idiographic) network models based on newly available streams of data about a human’s ongoing activities and experiences can reshape what we discover about individuals and how those discoveries are injected back into people’s lives.

This commentary describes several key principles from the science of learning and development (SoLD) and illustrates them using concepts and ideas from social and emotional learning (SEL). Emphasizing the importance of ecological systems in shaping developmental pathways and challenging the individual-centric approach, the first concept focuses on the centrality of developmental relationships. The second underscores the significance of stage-salient tasks in SEL, advocating for practices targeting developmental systems aligned with specific stages. Shifting the focus from product-driven to process-oriented interventions, the third concept highlights the need to prioritize understanding underlying processes for effective interventions. Lastly, the commentary emphasizes simplifying and localizing complex developmental science for practical application, distilling adaptable practices resonant with diverse contexts. Throughout, examples from SEL research and practice illustrate these concepts’ potential to bridge the research-practice gap in human development and education.

In this chapter, I consider how research in the field of literacy illuminates convergences of understandings about how people learn culled from the fields of biology, psychology, and neuroscience. I further consider how research in the field of literacy could be enhanced by drawing more deeply on state-of-the-art findings about how human learning unfolds. To support this discussion, I examine emerging understandings about literacy learning and development in the areas of reading and multiliteracies and across transnational contexts. I conclude by suggesting an equity-oriented agenda for literacy research and practice that leverages and advances existing knowledge about how people learn.

We call attention to the historical divisions in the study of learning defined by populations, with some scholarly communities focused on learners with disabilities and others studying learning with nondisabled students. We believe this to be an unfortunate circumstance that needs to be addressed explicitly so the needs of students with disabilities will be more aptly addressed. We describe the coexistence of these two epistemic cultures that have been maintained in part by disciplinary silos, identify potential contributors to the provenance and persistence of these parallel cultures, and close with reflections on the road ahead.

This commentary outlines the potential benefits of applying advances in the science of learning and development to special education service delivery and research. Building from a dynamic ecological systems perspective of development, it is argued that special education should focus on the whole child in context to leverage the correlated contributions of multiple factors in the learning and development of students with disabilities. The concept of targeted universalism is presented as a framework for creating universal service delivery structures that are centered on tailoring supports to the daily experiences and functioning of students who receive special education. Person-oriented analysis and longitudinal, idiographic designs are considered as an approach to guide the development and evaluation of such frameworks.

This chapter explores how learning to be in relation is core to human learning. Reductive views of cultural variation and individualized conceptualizations of thriving overlook the processes through which human beings learn to live relationally in ways that support systems transformation and collective well-being. Synthesizing literature on learning and development, we provide a conceptual model that examines four interrelated dimensions of relationality: (a) embodiment, mobilities, attention, and place; (b) affect, awe, and emotion; (c) pedagogical interactions, supports, and participation; and (d) reimagining learning and the disciplines. We argue that attending to relationality in ways that include between-persons + place + more-than-human relations helps conceptualize learning as deeply tied to the ongoing forms of adaptation, ethical relations, and worldmaking required for socio-ecological well-being.

Teachers in the United States report persistently high levels of stress and burnout. In response, teacher well-being interventions have become increasingly prevalent in educational settings. To advance the development of a rigorous science of teacher well-being, our chapter offers a bioecological framework for understanding this construct; synthesizes findings from 15 years of peer-reviewed, published interventions; and critiques gaps in the literature. Of the 24 studies reviewed, most used experimental methodologies to evaluate mindfulness-based approaches aimed at bolstering teachers’ individual skills of both a positive and negative valence. Ultimately, far more attention to the unique experiences of teachers of color is needed, as is more focus on essential components of interventions and contextual-level factors related to the school system.

This chapter provides a systematic review of research published between 2006 and 2022 on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) platforms in writing instruction. We theorize writing and platforms as complex ecologies, investigating the interplay of their relations and implications for educational equity. Our findings suggested three functional categories of AI platforms in writing instruction (assistive, assessment, and authentication) and a focus on the technical dimensions of platforms and their intersections with the cognitive dimensions of writing. Finally, we found a focus on equity notably absent from our corpus. Taken together, these findings suggest an agenda for equity-oriented research and pedagogy that confronts aspects of platform and writing environments that have, to date, been omitted from the empirical record.

This review focuses on a subset of literature on the arts and arts education that explores how learning is conceptualized and enacted in the context of out-of-school time (OST) arts education environments that primarily engage Black, Indigenous, and young People of Color in the United States. The review is grounded in principles of critical qualitative inquiry and sets forth four propositions, which represent key practices from OST arts education with a focus on equity and diversity in education: creating representations, exploring identity and narrative, practicing creativity, and collaborating as an outcome. The discussion offers an alternative from deficit perspectives on youth and toward asset-focused, culturally sustaining perspectives that value the artistic strengths young people bring to a learning environment.

In this review, we use the metaphor of a “fast fish” to illustrate the importance of contextualized agency, which assumes that learners must (a) be centrally agentive in their own learning; (b) be able to act on and modify the cognitive, physical, social, and emotional contexts of their learning to support their best performance; and (c) understand learning principles related to human cognitive, social, and emotional architecture. A close analysis of two areas of research—feedback and transfer—illuminates how the relationships between agency and context have been treated in the literature and what features of each are well explored. We consider how contextualized agency manifests in prominent pedagogies and offer suggestions for future research and educational practice.

This chapter surfaces examples of the ways educators, programs, and families are making connections to and from out-of-school time (OST) experiences and into other contexts in learners’ lives, including additional programs, homes, communities, and schools. Through a review, the authors test, refine, and expand a design framework for connections across settings described in connected learning scholarship and identify shared goals and outcome indicators for collectively fostering equity through connective OST practices. The review has implications for practice in terms of offering design principles, examples, and outcome indicators for making connections that policymakers, program leaders, and educators can take up and for research by investigating and theorizing the role connective practices in OST programs can play in learning ecosystems.

This chapter is grounded in a closer examination of the multiple origins of our theories of learning. Two questions guide our inquiry. First, in what ways has the science of learning and development originated in the lifeways of our ancestors? And second, what are some Global South Side origins of our theories of learning? First, we use two river stories to highlight growing restorative sociocultural and socioaxiological currents in the field. We then offer five origin theories: (a) spiritwork; (b) land is, therefore we are; (c) storying relations; (d) formal and organic intellectuals; and (e) settings grow from settings. We describe each one and potential ways forward for those interested in designing collective thriving grounded in our age-old theories of life.

The concept of “thriving” in educational policy refers to a loosely defined mix of academic, socioemotional, and civic outcomes associated with youth well-being. In this chapter, we analyze three focus areas in K–12 education—social emotional learning, 21st-century skills, and digital citizenship—and conclude that they are currently built on an individualistic neoliberal paradigm of learning and success. We argue that this paradigm is incommensurate with the personal, social, and civic flourishing necessary to sustain equitable multiracial democratic futures and offer instead an alternative collective logic of thriving. Our critical metasynthesis of the emergent field of social-design-based experimentation offers design principles educators can use to reorganize collective learning environments to support expansive youth thriving in schools and society.

This chapter focuses on effective preparation for civic reasoning, discourse, and problem solving. It reviews literatures, including major synthetic reviews and studies from the science of learning and development (SoLD), civics education, and mathematics education. Based on these reviews, the authors make the case for a more comprehensive form of civic education in which reasoning, discourse, and problem solving permeate the curriculum across grades and subject matter. As an example, the authors illustrate how mathematical tools and techniques inform powerful fact-based civic reasoning and discourse and how SoLD informs both. This approach to learning engages students in politically relevant issues in a nonpartisan way as they prepare to become democratic decision-makers and problem solvers of the future.

The growing differentiation of specialties in education creates the need for a common framework. This chapter discusses the basic premises of complex dynamical systems theory (CDST), its intellectual foundations, and its applicability to the field of education, with a particular focus on the areas of learning and development, school reform, and the persistence of inequity in society. The vocabulary of CDST is reviewed and applied to these problem areas to help deepen our understanding of the challenges facing policymakers and practitioners and provide growing points for the integration of these areas of knowledge into a coherent basis for further research and exploration. The differences between CDST and traditional research paradigms are also duly considered.

Researchers of child learning and development continue to hone understandings of cultural and social impacts on cognition, development, and education. Concurrently, Indigenous educators call for decolonizing schooling at all levels. Land-based education (LBE), as an instructional approach, responds to calls to decolonize education. The authors use LBE to understand the cultural and social nuances and complexities of Indigenous learning in preschool and primary school age Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander children. Through ethnographic case studies in Hawai’i and Sāmoa, we expand conceptions of culture in learning to attune to the diversity and specificity of Indigenous contexts, argue that LBE must be place-based, and recognize land is an active and necessary coparticipant in the learning process.