research article of education

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Education articles from across Nature Portfolio

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News and Comment

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Improving academic mentorship practices

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• Sarvenaz Sarabipour
• Paul Macklin
• Natalie M. Niemi

Need a policy for using ChatGPT in the classroom? Try asking students

Students are the key users of AI chatbots in university settings, but their opinions are rarely solicited when crafting policies. That needs to change, says Maja Zonjić.

• Maja Zonjić

Chromatic inclusivity in chemistry

Reliance on colour-based experiments in the undergraduate laboratory is a considerable hurdle for those with colour vision deficiency. Designing course material that relies on interpretation and not perception creates a more accessible environment for all.

• Nicholas J. Roberts
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Harvard educational review.

Edited by Maya Alkateb-Chami, Jane Choi, Jeannette Garcia Coppersmith, Ron Grady, Phoebe A. Grant-Robinson, Pennie M. Gregory, Jennifer Ha, Woohee Kim, Catherine E. Pitcher, Elizabeth Salinas, Caroline Tucker, Kemeyawi Q. Wahpepah

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Journal Information

• ISSN: 0017-8055
• eISSN: 1943-5045
• Keywords: scholarly journal, education research
• First Issue: 1930
• Frequency: Quarterly

Description

The Harvard Educational Review (HER) is a scholarly journal of opinion and research in education. The Editorial Board aims to publish pieces from interdisciplinary and wide-ranging fields that advance our understanding of educational theory, equity, and practice. HER encourages submissions from established and emerging scholars, as well as from practitioners working in the field of education. Since its founding in 1930, HER has been central to elevating pieces and debates that tackle various dimensions of educational justice, with circulation to researchers, policymakers, teachers, and administrators.

Our Editorial Board is composed entirely of doctoral students from the Harvard Graduate School of Education who review all manuscripts considered for publication. For more information on the current Editorial Board, please see here.

A subscription to the Review includes access to the full-text electronic archives at our Subscribers-Only-Website .

Editorial Board

2023-2024 Harvard Educational Review Editorial Board Members

Maya Alkateb-Chami Development and Partnerships Editor, 2023-2024 Editor, 2022-2024 [email protected]

Maya Alkateb-Chami is a PhD student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research focuses on the role of schooling in fostering just futures—specifically in relation to language of instruction policies in multilingual contexts and with a focus on epistemic injustice. Prior to starting doctoral studies, she was the Managing Director of Columbia University’s Human Rights Institute, where she supported and co-led a team of lawyers working to advance human rights through research, education, and advocacy. Prior to that, she was the Executive Director of Jusoor, a nonprofit organization that helps conflict-affected Syrian youth and children pursue their education in four countries. Alkateb-Chami is a Fulbright Scholar and UNESCO cultural heritage expert. She holds an MEd in Language and Literacy from Harvard University; an MSc in Education from Indiana University, Bloomington; and a BA in Political Science from Damascus University, and her research on arts-based youth empowerment won the annual Master’s Thesis Award of the U.S. Society for Education Through Art.

Jane Choi Editor, 2023-2025

Jane Choi is a second-year PhD student in Sociology with broad interests in culture, education, and inequality. Her research examines intra-racial and interracial boundaries in US educational contexts. She has researched legacy and first-generation students at Ivy League colleges, families served by Head Start and Early Head Start programs, and parents of pre-K and kindergarten-age children in the New York City School District. Previously, Jane worked as a Research Assistant in the Family Well-Being and Children’s Development policy area at MDRC and received a BA in Sociology from Columbia University.

Jeannette Garcia Coppersmith Content Editor, 2023-2024 Editor, 2022-2024 [email protected]

Jeannette Garcia Coppersmith is a fourth-year Education PhD student in the Human Development, Learning and Teaching concentration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. A former public middle and high school mathematics teacher and department chair, she is interested in understanding the mechanisms that contribute to disparities in secondary mathematics education, particularly how teacher beliefs and biases intersect with the social-psychological processes and pedagogical choices involved in math teaching. Jeannette holds an EdM in Learning and Teaching from the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she studied as an Urban Scholar and a BA in Environmental Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley.

Ron Grady Editor, 2023-2025

Ron Grady is a second-year doctoral student in the Human Development, Learning, and Teaching concentration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His central curiosities involve the social worlds and peer cultures of young children, wondering how lived experience is both constructed within and revealed throughout play, the creation of art and narrative, and through interaction with/production of visual artifacts such as photography and film. Ron also works extensively with educators interested in developing and deepening practices rooted in reflection on, inquiry into, and translation of the social, emotional, and aesthetic aspects of their classroom ecosystems. Prior to his doctoral studies, Ron worked as a preschool teacher in New Orleans. He holds a MS in Early Childhood Education from the Erikson Institute and a BA in Psychology with Honors in Education from Stanford University.

Phoebe A. Grant-Robinson Editor, 2023-2024

Phoebe A. Grant-Robinson is a first year student in the Doctor of Education Leadership(EdLD) program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her ultimate quest is to position all students as drivers of their destiny. Phoebe is passionate about early learning and literacy. She is committed to ensuring that districts and school leaders, have the necessary tools to create equitable learning organizations that facilitate the academic and social well-being of all students. Phoebe is particularly interested in the intersection of homeless students and literacy. Prior to her doctoral studies, Phoebe was a Special Education Instructional Specialist. Supporting a portfolio of more than thirty schools, she facilitated the rollout of New York City’s Special Education Reform. Phoebe also served as an elementary school principal. She holds a BS in Inclusive Education from Syracuse University, and an MS in Curriculum and Instruction from Pace University.

Pennie M. Gregory Editor, 2023-2024

Pennie M. Gregory is a second-year student in the Doctor of Education Leadership (EdLD) program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Pennie was born in Incheon, South Korea and raised in Gary, Indiana. She has decades of experience leading efforts to improve outcomes for students with disabilities first as a special education teacher and then as a school district special education administrator. Prior to her doctoral studies, Pennie helped to create Indiana’s first Aspiring Special Education Leadership Institute (ASELI) and served as its Director. She was also the Capacity Events Director for MelanatED Leaders, an organization created to support educational leaders of color in Indianapolis. Pennie has a unique perspective, having worked with members of the school community, with advocacy organizations, and supporting state special education leaders. Pennie holds an EdM in Education Leadership from Marian University.

Jennifer Ha Editor, 2023-2025

Jen Ha is a second-year PhD student in the Culture, Institutions, and Society concentration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research explores how high school students learn to write personal narratives for school applications, scholarships, and professional opportunities amidst changing landscapes in college access and admissions. Prior to doctoral studies, Jen served as the Coordinator of Public Humanities at Bard Graduate Center and worked in several roles organizing academic enrichment opportunities and supporting postsecondary planning for students in New Haven and New York City. Jen holds a BA in Humanities from Yale University, where she was an Education Studies Scholar.

Woohee Kim Editor, 2023-2025

Woohee Kim is a PhD student studying youth activists’ civic and pedagogical practices. She is a scholar-activist dedicated to creating spaces for pedagogies of resistance and transformative possibilities. Shaped by her activism and research across South Korea, the US, and the UK, Woohee seeks to interrogate how educational spaces are shaped as cultural and political sites and reshaped by activists as sites of struggle. She hopes to continue exploring the intersections of education, knowledge, power, and resistance.

Catherine E. Pitcher Editor, 2023-2025

Catherine is a second-year doctoral student at Harvard Graduate School of Education in the Culture, Institutions, and Society program. She has over 10 years of experience in education in the US in roles that range from special education teacher to instructional coach to department head to educational game designer. She started working in Palestine in 2017, first teaching, and then designing and implementing educational programming. Currently, she is working on research to understand how Palestinian youth think about and build their futures and continues to lead programming in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. She holds an EdM from Harvard in International Education Policy.

Elizabeth Salinas Editor, 2023-2025

Elizabeth Salinas is a doctoral student in the Education Policy and Program Evaluation concentration at HGSE. She is interested in the intersection of higher education and the social safety net and hopes to examine policies that address basic needs insecurity among college students. Before her doctoral studies, Liz was a research director at a public policy consulting firm. There, she supported government, education, and philanthropy leaders by conducting and translating research into clear and actionable information. Previously, Liz served as a high school physics teacher in her hometown in Texas and as a STEM outreach program director at her alma mater. She currently sits on the Board of Directors at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America, a nonprofit organization working to diversify the leadership pipeline in the United States. Liz holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a master’s degree in higher education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Caroline Tucker Co-Chair, 2023-2024 Editor, 2022-2024 [email protected]

Caroline Tucker is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Culture, Institutions, and Society concentration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research focuses on the history and organizational dynamics of women’s colleges as women gained entry into the professions and coeducation took root in the United States. She is also a research assistant for the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative’s Subcommittee on Curriculum and the editorial assistant for Into Practice, the pedagogy newsletter distributed by Harvard University’s Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning. Prior to her doctoral studies, Caroline served as an American politics and English teaching fellow in London and worked in college advising. Caroline holds a BA in History from Princeton University, an MA in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, and an EdM in Higher Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Kemeyawi Q. Wahpepah Co-Chair, 2023-2024 Editor, 2022-2024 [email protected]

Kemeyawi Q. Wahpepah (Kickapoo, Sac & Fox) is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Culture, Institutions, and Society concentration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Their research explores how settler colonialism is addressed in K-12 history and social studies classrooms in the United States. Prior to their doctoral studies, Kemeyawi taught middle and high school English and history for eleven years in Boston and New York City. They hold an MS in Middle Childhood Education from Hunter College and an AB in Social Studies from Harvard University.

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Individual subscriptions must have an individual name in the given address for shipment. Individual copies are not for multiple readers or libraries. Individual accounts come with a personal username and password for access to online archives. Online access instructions will be attached to your order confirmation e-mail.

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Article Submission FAQ

Submissions, question: “what manuscripts are a good fit for her ”.

Answer: As a generalist scholarly journal, HER publishes on a wide range of topics within the field of education and related disciplines. We receive many articles that deserve publication, but due to the restrictions of print publication, we are only able to publish very few in the journal. The originality and import of the findings, as well as the accessibility of a piece to HER’s interdisciplinary, international audience which includes education practitioners, are key criteria in determining if an article will be selected for publication.

We strongly recommend that prospective authors review the current and past issues of HER to see the types of articles we have published recently. If you are unsure whether your manuscript is a good fit, please reach out to the Content Editor at [email protected] .

Question: “What makes HER a developmental journal?”

Answer: Supporting the development of high-quality education research is a key tenet of HER’s mission. HER promotes this development through offering comprehensive feedback to authors. All manuscripts that pass the first stage of our review process (see below) receive detailed feedback. For accepted manuscripts, HER also has a unique feedback process called casting whereby two editors carefully read a manuscript and offer overarching suggestions to strengthen and clarify the argument.

Question: “What is a Voices piece and how does it differ from an essay?”

Answer: Voices pieces are first-person reflections about an education-related topic rather than empirical or theoretical essays. Our strongest pieces have often come from educators and policy makers who draw on their personal experiences in the education field. Although they may not present data or generate theory, Voices pieces should still advance a cogent argument, drawing on appropriate literature to support any claims asserted. For examples of Voices pieces, please see Alvarez et al. (2021) and Snow (2021).

Question: “Does HER accept Book Note or book review submissions?”

Answer: No, all Book Notes are written internally by members of the Editorial Board.

Question: “If I want to submit a book for review consideration, who do I contact?”

Answer: Please send details about your book to the Content Editor at [email protected].

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Question: “the submission guidelines state that manuscripts should be a maximum of 9,000 words – including abstract, appendices, and references. is this applicable only for research articles, or should the word count limit be followed for other manuscripts, such as essays”.

Answer: The 9,000-word limit is the same for all categories of manuscripts.

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Answer: Any references that identify the author/s in the text must be masked or made anonymous (e.g., instead of citing “Field & Bloom, 2007,” cite “Author/s, 2007”). For the reference list, place the citations alphabetically as “Author/s. (2007)” You can also indicate that details are omitted for blind review. Articles can also be blinded effectively by use of the third person in the manuscript. For example, rather than “in an earlier article, we showed that” substitute something like “as has been shown in Field & Bloom, 2007.” In this case, there is no need to mask the reference in the list. Please do not submit a title page as part of your manuscript. We will capture the contact information and any author statement about the fit and scope of the work in the submission form. Finally, please save the uploaded manuscript as the title of the manuscript and do not include the author/s name/s.

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Answer: If you think your manuscript is a strong fit for HER, we welcome a request for invitation. Invited manuscripts receive one round of feedback from Editors before the piece enters the formal review process. To submit information about your manuscript, please complete the Invitation Request Form . Please provide as many details as possible. The decision to invite a manuscript largely depends on the capacity of current Board members and on how closely the proposed manuscript reflects HER publication scope and criteria. Once you submit the form, We hope to update you in about 2–3 weeks, and will let you know whether there are Editors who are available to invite the manuscript.

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Question: “who reviews manuscripts”.

Answer: All manuscripts are reviewed by the Editorial Board composed of doctoral students at Harvard University.

Question: “What is the HER evaluation process as a student-run journal?”

Answer: HER does not utilize the traditional external peer review process and instead has an internal, two-stage review procedure.

Upon submission, every manuscript receives a preliminary assessment by the Content Editor to confirm that the formatting requirements have been carefully followed in preparation of the manuscript, and that the manuscript is in accord with the scope and aim of the journal. The manuscript then formally enters the review process.

In the first stage of review, all manuscripts are read by a minimum of two Editorial Board members. During the second stage of review, manuscripts are read by the full Editorial Board at a weekly meeting.

Question: “How long after submission can I expect a decision on my manuscript?”

Answer: It usually takes 6 to 10 weeks for a manuscript to complete the first stage of review and an additional 12 weeks for a manuscript to complete the second stage. Due to time constraints and the large volume of manuscripts received, HER only provides detailed comments on manuscripts that complete the second stage of review.

Question: “How soon are accepted pieces published?”

Answer: The date of publication depends entirely on how many manuscripts are already in the queue for an issue. Typically, however, it takes about 6 months post-acceptance for a piece to be published.

Submission Process

Question: “how do i submit a manuscript for publication in her”.

Answer: Manuscripts are submitted through HER’s Submittable platform, accessible here. All first-time submitters must create an account to access the platform. You can find details on our submission guidelines on our Submissions page.

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

Our Best Education Articles of 2020

In February of 2020, we launched the new website Greater Good in Education , a collection of free, research-based and -informed strategies and practices for the social, emotional, and ethical development of students, for the well-being of the adults who work with them, and for cultivating positive school cultures. Little did we know how much more crucial these resources would become over the course of the year during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now, as we head back to school in 2021, things are looking a lot different than in past years. Our most popular education articles of 2020 can help you manage difficult emotions and other challenges at school in the pandemic, all while supporting the social-emotional well-being of your students.

In addition to these articles, you can also find tips, tools, and recommended readings in two resource guides we created in 2020: Supporting Learning and Well-Being During the Coronavirus Crisis and Resources to Support Anti-Racist Learning , which helps educators take action to undo the racism within themselves, encourage their colleagues to do the same, and teach and support their students in forming anti-racist identities.

Here are the 10 best education articles of 2020, based on a composite ranking of pageviews and editors’ picks.

Can the Lockdown Push Schools in a Positive Direction? , by Patrick Cook-Deegan: Here are five ways that COVID-19 could change education for the better.

How Teachers Can Navigate Difficult Emotions During School Closures , by Amy L. Eva: Here are some tools for staying calm and centered amid the coronavirus crisis.

Six Online Activities to Help Students Cope With COVID-19 , by Lea Waters: These well-being practices can help students feel connected and resilient during the pandemic.

Help Students Process COVID-19 Emotions With This Lesson Plan , by Maurice Elias: Music and the arts can help students transition back to school this year.

How to Teach Online So All Students Feel Like They Belong , by Becki Cohn-Vargas and Kathe Gogolewski: Educators can foster belonging and inclusion for all students, even online.

How Teachers Can Help Students With Special Needs Navigate Distance Learning , by Rebecca Branstetter: Kids with disabilities are often shortchanged by pandemic classroom conditions. Here are three tips for educators to boost their engagement and connection.

How to Reduce the Stress of Homeschooling on Everyone , by Rebecca Branstetter: A school psychologist offers advice to parents on how to support their child during school closures.

Three Ways to Help Your Kids Succeed at Distance Learning , by Christine Carter: How can parents support their children at the start of an uncertain school year?

How Schools Are Meeting Social-Emotional Needs During the Pandemic , by Frances Messano, Jason Atwood, and Stacey Childress: A new report looks at how schools have been grappling with the challenges imposed by COVID-19.

Six Ways to Help Your Students Make Sense of a Divisive Election , by Julie Halterman: The election is over, but many young people will need help understanding what just happened.

Train Your Brain to Be Kinder (video), by Jane Park: Boost your kindness by sending kind thoughts to someone you love—and to someone you don’t get along with—with a little guidance from these students.

From Othering to Belonging (podcast): We speak with john a. powell, director of the Othering & Belonging Institute, about racial justice, well-being, and widening our circles of human connection and concern.

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The relationship between education and health: reducing disparities through a contextual approach

Anna zajacova.

Western University

Elizabeth M. Lawrence

University of North Carolina

Adults with higher educational attainment live healthier and longer lives compared to their less educated peers. The disparities are large and widening. We posit that understanding the educational and macro-level contexts in which this association occurs is key to reducing health disparities and improving population health. In this paper, we briefly review and critically assess the current state of research on the relationship between education and health in the United States. We then outline three directions for further research: We extend the conceptualization of education beyond attainment and demonstrate the centrality of the schooling process to health; We highlight the dual role of education a driver of opportunity but also a reproducer of inequality; We explain the central role of specific historical socio-political contexts in which the education-health association is embedded. This research agenda can inform policies and effective interventions to reduce health disparities and improve health of all Americans.

URGENT NEED FOR NEW DIRECTIONS IN EDUCATION-HEALTH RESEARCH

Americans have worse health than people in other high-income countries, and have been falling further behind in recent decades ( 137 ). This is partially due to the large health inequalities and poor health of adults with low education ( 84 ). Understanding the health benefits of education is thus integral to reducing health disparities and improving the well-being of 21 st century populations. Despite tremendous prior research, critical questions about the education-health relationship remain unanswered, in part because education and health are intertwined over the lifespans within and across generations and are inextricably embedded in the broader social context.

We posit that to effectively inform future educational and heath policy, we need to capture education ‘in action’ as it generates and constrains opportunity during the early lifespans of today’s cohorts. First, we need to expand our operationalization of education beyond attainment to consider the long-term educational process that precedes the attainment and its effect on health. Second, we need to re-conceptualize education as not only a vehicle for social success, valuable resources, and good health, but also as an institution that reproduces inequality across generations. And third, we argue that investigators need to bring historical, social and policy contexts into the heart of analyses: how does the education-health association vary across place and time, and how do political forces influence that variation?

During the past several generations, education has become the principal pathway to financial security, stable employment, and social success ( 8 ). At the same time, American youth have experienced increasingly unequal educational opportunities that depend on the schools they attend, the neighborhoods they live in, the color of their skin, and the financial resources of their family. The decline in manufacturing and rise of globalization have eroded the middle class, while the increasing returns to higher education magnified the economic gaps among working adults and families ( 107 ). In addition to these dramatic structural changes, policies that protected the welfare of vulnerable groups have been gradually eroded or dismantled ( 129 ). Together, these changes triggered a precipitous growth of economic and social inequalities in the American society ( 17 ; 106 ).

Unsurprisingly, health disparities grew hand in hand with the socio-economic inequalities. Although the average health of the US population improved over the past decades ( 67 ; 85 ), the gains largely went to the most educated groups. Inequalities in health ( 53 ; 77 ; 99 ) and mortality ( 86 ; 115 ) increased steadily, to a point where we now see an unprecedented pattern: health and longevity are deteriorating among those with less education ( 92 ; 99 ; 121 ; 143 ). With the current focus of the media, policymakers, and the public on the worrisome health patterns among less-educated Americans ( 28 ; 29 ), as well as the growing recognition of the importance of education for health ( 84 ), research on the health returns to education is at a critical juncture. A comprehensive research program is needed to understand how education and health are related, in order to identify effective points of intervention to improve population health and reduce disparities.

The article is organized in two parts. First, we review the current state of research on the relationship between education and health. In broad strokes, we summarize the theoretical and empirical foundations of the education-health relationship and critically assess the literature on the mechanisms and causal influence of education on health. In the second part, we highlight gaps in extant research and propose new directions for innovative research that will fill these gaps. The enormous breadth of the literature on education and health necessarily limits the scope of the review in terms of place and time; we focus on the United States and on findings generated during the rapid expansion of the education-health research in the past 10–15 years. The terms “education” and “schooling” are used interchangeably. Unless we state otherwise, both refer to attained education, whether measured in completed years or credentials. For references, we include prior review articles where available, seminal papers, and recent studies as the best starting points for further reading.

THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN EDUCATION AND HEALTH

Conceptual toolbox for examining the association.

Researchers have generally drawn from three broad theoretical perspectives to hypothesize the relationship between education and health. Much of the education-health research over the past two decades has been grounded in the Fundamental Cause Theory ( 75 ). The FCT posits that social factors such as education are ‘fundamental’ causes of health and disease because they determine access to a multitude of material and non-material resources such as income, safe neighborhoods, or healthier lifestyles, all of which protect or enhance health. The multiplicity of pathways means that even as some mechanisms change or become less important, other mechanisms will continue to channel the fundamental dis/advantages into differential health ( 48 ). The Human Capital Theory (HCT), borrowed from econometrics, conceptualizes education as an investment that yields returns via increased productivity ( 12 ). Education improves individuals’ knowledge, skills, reasoning, effectiveness, and a broad range of other abilities, which can be utilized to produce health ( 93 ). The third approach, the Signaling or Credentialing perspective ( 34 ; 125 ) has been used to explain the observed large discontinuities in health at 12 or 16 years of schooling, typically associated with the receipt of a high school and college degrees, respectively. This perspective views earned credentials as a potent signal about one’s skills and abilities, and emphasizes the economic and social returns to such signals. Thus all three perspectives postulate a causal relationship between education and health and identify numerous mechanisms through which education influences health. The HCT specifies the mechanisms as embodied skills and abilities, FCT emphasizes the dynamism and flexibility of mechanisms, and credentialism identifies social responses to educational attainment. All three theoretical approaches, however, operationalize the complex process of schooling solely in terms of attainment and thus do not focus on differences in educational quality, type, or other institutional factors that might independently influence health. They also focus on individual-level factors: individual attainment, attainment effects, and mechanisms, and leave out the social context in which the education and health processes are embedded.

Observed associations between education and health

Empirically, hundreds of studies have documented “the gradient” whereby more schooling is linked with better health and longer life. A seminal 1973 book by Kitagawa and Hauser powerfully described large differences in mortality by education in the United States ( 71 ), a finding that has since been corroborated in numerous studies ( 31 ; 42 ; 46 ; 109 ; 124 ). In the following decades, nearly all health outcomes were also found strongly patterned by education. Less educated adults report worse general health ( 94 ; 141 ), more chronic conditions ( 68 ; 108 ), and more functional limitations and disability ( 118 ; 119 ; 130 ; 143 ). Objective measures of health, such as biological risk levels, are similarly correlated with educational attainment ( 35 ; 90 ; 140 ), showing that the gradient is not a function of differential reporting or knowledge.

The gradient is evident in men and women ( 139 ) and among all race/ethnic groups ( 36 ). However, meaningful group differences exist ( 60 ; 62 ; 91 ). In particular, education appears to have stronger health effects for women than men ( 111 ) and stronger effects for non-Hispanic whites than minority adults ( 134 ; 135 ) even if the differences are modest for some health outcomes ( 36 ). The observed variations may reflect systematic social differences in the educational process such as quality of schooling, content, or institutional type, as well as different returns to educational attainment in the labor market across population groups ( 26 ). At the same time, the groups share a common macro-level social context, which may underlie the gradient observed for all.

To illustrate the gradient, we analyzed 2002–2016 waves of the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) data from adults aged 25–64. Figure 1 shows the levels of three health outcomes across educational attainment levels in six major demographic groups predicted at age 45. Three observations are noteworthy. First, the gradient is evident for all outcomes and in all race/ethnic/gender groups. Self-rated health exemplifies the staggering magnitude of the inequalities: White men and women without a high school diploma have about 57% chance of reporting fair or poor health, compared to just 9% for college graduates. Second, there are major group differences as well, both in the predicted levels of health problems, as well as in the education effects. The latter are not necessarily visible in the figures but the education effects are stronger for women and weaker for non-white adults as prior studies showed (table with regression model results underlying the prior statement is available from the authors). Third, an intriguing exception pertains to adults with “some college,” whose health is similar to high school graduates’ in health outcomes other than general health, despite their investment in and exposure to postsecondary education. We discuss this anomaly below.

Predicted Probability of Health Problems

Source: 2002–2016 NHIS Survey, Adults Age 25–64

Pathways through which education impacts health

What explains the improved health and longevity of more educated adults? The most prominent mediating mechanisms can be grouped into four categories: economic, health-behavioral, social-psychological, and access to health care. Education leads to better, more stable jobs that pay higher income and allow families to accumulate wealth that can be used to improve health ( 93 ). The economic factors are an important link between schooling and health, estimated to account for about 30% of the correlation ( 36 ). Health behaviors are undoubtedly an important proximal determinant of health but they only explain a part of the effect of schooling on health: adults with less education are more likely to smoke, have an unhealthy diet, and lack exercise ( 37 ; 73 ; 105 ; 117 ). Social-psychological pathways include successful long-term marriages and other sources of social support to help cope with stressors and daily hassles ( 128 ; 131 ). Interestingly, access to health care, while important to individual and population health overall, has a modest role in explaining health inequalities by education ( 61 ; 112 ; 133 ), highlighting the need to look upstream beyond the health care system toward social factors that underlie social disparities in health. Beyond these four groups of mechanisms that have received the most attention by investigators, many others have been examined, such as stress, cognitive and noncognitive skills, or environmental exposures ( 11 ; 43 ). Several excellent reviews further discuss mechanisms ( 2 ; 36 ; 66 ; 70 ; 93 ).

Causal interpretation of the education-health association

A burgeoning number of studies used innovative approaches such as natural experiments and twin design to test whether and how education causally affects health. These analyses are essential because recommendations for educational policies, programs, and interventions seeking to improve population health hinge on the causal impact of schooling on health outcomes. Overall, this literature shows that attainment, measured mostly in completed years of schooling, has a causal impact on health across numerous (though not all) contexts and outcomes.

Natural experiments take advantage of external changes that affect attainment but are unrelated to health, such as compulsory education reforms that raise the minimum years of schooling within a given population. A seminal 2005 study focused on increases in compulsory education between 1915 and 1939 across US states and found that a year of schooling reduced mortality by 3.6% ( 78 ). A re-analysis of the data indicated that taking into account state-level mortality trends rendered the mortality effects null but it also identified a significant and large causal effect on general health ( 88 ). A recent study of a large sample of older Americans reported a similar pattern: a substantial causal effect of education for self-rated health but not for mortality ( 47 ). School reform studies outside the US have reported compelling ( 122 ) or modest but significant ( 32 ) effects of schooling on health, although some studies have found nonsignificant ( 4 ), or even negative effects ( 7 ) for a range of health outcomes.

Twin design studies compare the health of twins with different levels of education. This design minimizes the influence of family resources and genetic differences in skills and health, especially for monozygotic twins, and thus serves to isolate the effect of schooling. In the US, studies using this design generated robust evidence of a causal effect of education on self-rated health ( 79 ), although some research has identified only modest ( 49 ) or not significant ( 3 ; 55 ) effects for other physical and mental health outcomes. Studies drawing on the large twin samples outside of the US have similarly found strong causal effects for mortality ( 80 ) and health ( 14 ; 16 ; 51 ) but again some analyses yielded no causal effects on health ( 13 ; 83 ) or health behaviors ( 14 ). Beyond our brief overview, readers may wish consult additional comprehensive reviews of the causal studies ( 40 ; 45 ; 89 ).

The causal studies add valuable evidence that educational attainment impacts adult health and mortality, even considering some limitations to their internal validity ( 15 ; 88 ). To improve population health and reduce health disparities, however, they should be viewed as a starting point to further research. First, the findings do not show how to improve the quality of schooling or its quantity for in the aggregate population, or how to overcome systematic intergenerational and social differences in educational opportunities. Second, their findings do take into account contexts and conditions in which educational attainment might be particularly important for health. In fact, the variability in the findings may be attributable to the stark differences in contexts across the studies, which include countries characterized by different political systems, different population groups, and birth cohorts ranging from the late 19 th to late 20 th centuries that were exposed to education at very different stages of the educational expansion process ( 9 ).

TOWARD A SOCIALLY-EMBEDDED UNDERSTANDING OF THE EDUCATION-HEALTH RELATIONSHIP

To date, the extensive research we briefly reviewed above has identified substantial health benefits of educational attainment in most contexts in today’s high-income countries. Still, many important questions remain unanswered. We outline three critical directions to gain a deeper understanding of the education-health relationship with particular relevance for policy development. All three directions shift the education-health paradigm to consider how education and health are embedded in life course and social contexts.

First, nearly universally, the education-health literature conceptualizes and operationalizes education in terms of attainment, as years of schooling or completed credentials. However, attainment is only the endpoint, although undoubtedly important, of an extended and extensive process of formal schooling, where institutional quality, type, content, peers, teachers, and many other individual, institutional, and interpersonal factors shape lifecourse trajectories of schooling and health. Understanding the role of the schooling process in health outcome is relevant for policy because it can show whether interventions should be aimed at increasing attainment, or whether it is more important to increase quality, change content, or otherwise improve the educational process at earlier stages for maximum health returns. Second, most studies have implicitly or explicitly treated educational attainment as an exogenous starting point, a driver of opportunities in adulthood. However, education also functions to reproduce inequality across generations. The explicit recognition of the dual function of education is critical to developing education policies that would avoid unintended consequence of increasing inequalities. And third, the review above indicates substantial variation in the education-health association across different historical and social contexts. Education and health are inextricably embedded in these contexts and analyses should therefore include them as fundamental influences on the education-health association. Research on contextual variation has the potential to identify contextual characteristics and even specific policies that exacerbate or reduce educational disparities in health.

We illustrate the key conceptual components of future research into the education-health relationship in Figure 2 . Important intergenerational and individual socio-demographic factors shape educational opportunities and educational trajectories, which are directly related to and captured in measures of educational attainment. This longitudinal and life course process culminates in educational disparities in adult health and mortality. Importantly, the macro-level context underlies every step of this process, shaping each of the concepts and their relationships.

Enriching the conceptualization of educational attainment

In most studies of the education-health associations, educational attainment is modeled using years of schooling, typically specified as a continuous covariate, effectively constraining each additional year to have the same impact. A growing body of research has substituted earned credentials for years. Few studies, however, have considered how the impact of additional schooling is likely to differ across the educational attainment spectrum. For example, one additional year of education compared to zero years may be life-changing by imparting basic literacy and numeracy skills. The completion of 14 rather than 13 years (without the completion of associated degree) could be associated with better health through the accumulation of additional knowledge and skills as well, or perhaps could be without health returns, if it is associated with poor grades, stigma linked to dropping out of college, or accumulated debt ( 63 ; 76 ). Examining the functional form of the education-health association can shed light on how and why education is beneficial for health ( 70 ). For instance, studies found that mortality gradually declines with years of schooling at low levels of educational attainment, with large discontinuities at high school and college degree attainment ( 56 ; 98 ). Such findings can point to the importance of completing a degree, not just increasing the quantity (years) of education. Examining mortality, however, implicitly focused on cohorts who went to school 50–60 years ago, within very different educational and social contexts. For findings relevant to current education policies, we need to focus on examining more recent birth cohorts.

A particularly provocative and noteworthy aspect of the functional form is the attainment group often identified as “some college:” adults who attended college but did not graduate with a four-year degree. Postsecondary educational experiences are increasingly central to the lives of American adults ( 27 ) and college completion has become the minimum requirement for entry into middle class ( 65 ; 87 ). Among high school graduates, over 70% enroll in college ( 22 ) but the majority never earn a four-year degree ( 113 ). In fact,, the largest education-attainment group among non-elderly US adults comprises the 54 million adults (29% of total) with some college or associate’s degree ( 113 ). However, as in Figure 1 , this group often defies the standard gradient in health. Several recent studies have found that the health returns to their postsecondary investments are marginal at best ( 110 ; 123 ; 142 ; 144 ). This finding should spur new research to understand the outcomes of this large population group, and to glean insights into the health returns to the postsecondary schooling process. For instance, in the absence of earning a degree, is greater exposure to college education in terms of semesters or earned credits associated with better health or not? How do the returns to postsecondary schooling differ across the heterogeneous institutions ranging from selective 4-year to for-profit community colleges? How does accumulated college debt influence both dropout and later health? Can we identify circumstances under which some college education is beneficial for health? Understanding the health outcomes for this attainment group can shed light on the aspects of education that are most important for improving health.

A related point pertains to the reliability and validity of self-reported educational attainment. If a respondent reports 16 completed years of education, for example, are they carefully counting the number of years of enrollment, or is 16 shorthand for “completed college”? And, is 16 years the best indicator of college completion in the current context when the median time to earn a four-year degree exceeds 5 years ( 30 )? And, is longer time in college given a degree beneficial for health or does it signify delayed or disrupted educational pathways linked to weaker health benefits ( 132 )? How should we measure part-time enrollment? As studies begin to adjudicate between the health effects of years versus credentials ( 74 ) in the changing landscape of increasingly ‘nontraditional’ pathways through college ( 132 ), this measurement work will be necessary for unbiased and meaningful analyses. An in-depth understanding may necessitate primary data collection and qualitative studies. A feasible direction available with existing data such as the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) is to assess earned college credits and grades rather than years of education beyond high school.

As indicated in Figure 2 , beyond a more in-depth usage of the attainment information, we argue that more effective conceptualization of the education-health relationship as a developmental life course process will lead to important findings. For instance, two studies published in 2016 used the NLSY97 data to model how gradual increases in education predict within-individual changes in health ( 39 ; 81 ). Both research teams found that gradual accumulation of schooling quantity over time was not associated with gradual improvements in health. The investigators interpreted the null findings as an absence of causal effects of education on health, especially once they included important confounders (defined as cognitive and noncognitive skills and social background). Alternatively, perhaps the within-individual models did not register health because education is a long-term, developing trajectory that cannot be reduced to point-in-time changes in exposure. Criticisms about the technical aspects of theses studies notwithstanding ( 59 ), we believe that these studies and others like them, which wrestle with the question of how to capture education as a long-term process grounded in the broader social context, and how this process is linked to adult health, are desirable and necessary.

Education as (re)producer of inequality

The predominant theoretical framework for studying education and health focuses on how education increases skills, improves problem-solving, enhances employment prospects, and thus opens access to other resources. In sociology, however, education is viewed not (only) as increasing human capital but as a “sieve more than a ladder” ( 126 ), an institution that reproduces inequality across generations ( 54 ; 65 ; 103 ; 114 ). The mechanisms of the reproduction of inequality are multifarious, encompassing systematic differences in school resources, quality of instruction, academic opportunities, peer influences, or teacher expectations ( 54 ; 114 ; 132 ). The dual role of education, both engendering and constraining social opportunities, has been recognized from the discipline’s inception ( 52 ) and has remained the dominant perspective in sociology of education ( 18 ; 126 ). Health disparities research, which has largely dismissed the this perspective as “specious” ( 93 ), could benefit from pivoting toward this complex sociological paradigm.

As demonstrated in Figure 2 , parental SES and other background characteristics are key social determinants that set the stage for one’s educational experiences ( 20 ; 120 ). These characteristics, however, shape not just attainment, but the entire educational and social trajectories that drive and result in particular attainment ( 21 ; 69 ). Their effects range from the differential quality and experiences in daycare or preschool settings ( 6 ), K-12 education ( 24 ; 136 ), as well as postsecondary schooling ( 5 ; 127 ). As a result of systematically different experiences of schooling over the early life course stratified by parental SES, children of low educated parents are unlikely to complete higher education: over half of individuals with college degrees by age 24 came from families in the top quartile of family income compared to just 10% in the bottom quartile ( 23 ).

Unfortunately, prior research has generally operationalized the differences in educational opportunities as confounders of the education-health association or as “selection bias” to be statistically controlled, or best as a moderating influence ( 10 ; 19 ). Rather than remove the important life course effects from the equation, studies that seek to understand how educational and health differences unfold over the life course, and even across generations could yield greater insight ( 50 ; 70 ). A life course, multigenerational approach can provide important recommendations for interventions seeking to avoid the unintended consequence of increasing disparities. Insofar as socially advantaged individuals are generally better positioned to take advantage of interventions, research findings can be used to ensure that policies and programs result in decreasing, rather than unintentionally widening, educational and health disparities.

Education and health in social context

Finally, perhaps the most important and policy-relevant emerging direction to improving our understanding of the education-health relationship is to view both as inextricably embedded within the broad social context. As we highlight in Figure 2 , this context underlies every feature of the development of educational disparities in health. In contrast to the voluminous literature focusing on individual-level schooling and health, there has been a “startling lack of attention to the social/political/economic context” in which the relationships are grounded ( 33 ). By context, we mean the structure of a society that varies across time and place, encompassing all major institutions, policy environments, as well as gender, race/ethnicity, age, and socioeconomic stratification. Under what circumstances, conditions, and policies are the associations between education and health stronger or weaker?

Within the United States, the most relevant units of geo-political boundaries generating distinct policy contexts are states, although smaller geographic units are also pertinent ( 44 ; 100 ). Since the 1980s, the federal government has devolved an increasing range of key socioeconomic, political, and health-care decisions to states. This decentralization has resulted in increasing diversity across states in conditions for a healthy life ( 96 ; 101 ). A recent study demonstrates how different environments across US states yield vastly different health returns to education ( 100 ). State-level characteristics had little impact on adults with high education, whose disability levels were similarly low regardless of their state of residence. In contrast, disability levels of low-educated adults were not only high but also varied substantially across states: disability was particularly high in states that have invested less in the social welfare of its residents, such as Mississippi, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Highly-educated adults, particularly white adults and men who can convert education into other resources most readily, use personal resources to protect their health like a ‘personal firewall’ ( 97 ). Their less-educated peers, meanwhile, are vulnerable without social safety nets. Demonstrating the potential for informing policy in this area, the findings directly identify state policies that influence the extent to which educational attainment matters for health and longevity. These include economic policies including state income tax structures and education expenditures per capita, as well as policies influencing social cohesion in a state, such as income inequality and unemployment rates. Beyond the US, investigators can leverage differences in political systems across countries to assess the impact of different welfare regimes on the education-health associations, as some European researchers began generating ( 41 ; 82 ).

Similar to variation across geo-political boundaries, research on variation across time can highlight policies and conditions that mitigate or inflate health disparities. How has the education-health association changed over time? In recent decades, the association has become increasingly strong, with widening disparities in health outcomes across education ( 53 ; 77 ; 86 ; 116 ; 143 ). These increases started in the 1980s ( 17 ) at the same time that social inequality began rising with the political embrace of pro-market neoliberal policies ( 33 ). Since then, the United States has been increasingly marked by plummeting economic wellbeing (except for the wealthiest Americans), growing economic segregation, emerging mass incarceration, downward social mobility, and despair in many working-class communities ( 17 ; 95 ; 129 ). Conversely, in the two decades prior (1960s and 70s), social disparities in health were decreasing ( 1 ; 72 ). During those decades, many pro-social policies such as Civil rights legislation, War on Poverty programs, and racial desegregation were improving social inequalities. Macro-level political forces, clearly, can influence not only social but also health inequalities ( 104 ). Two facts follow: growing disparities are not inevitable and changes in the education-health relationship may be strongly linked to social policies. While some of the growth in educational inequalities may be attributable to changes in educational composition of the population with increasingly negatively select groups of adults at the lowest levels of schooling, these compositional changes likely play only a minor role in the overall trends ( 38 ; 58 ). Linking education and health to the broader social context brings to the forefront the ways in which we, as individuals and a collective society, produce and maintain health disparities.

Implications for Policy and Practice

Reducing macro-level inequalities in health will require macro-level interventions. Technological progress and educational expansion over the past several decades have not decreased disparities; on the contrary, educational disparities in health and mortality have grown in the US. Moreover, the consistent, durable relationship between education and health and the multitude of mechanisms linking them suggests that programs targeting individual behaviors will have limited impact to counteract disparities. Thus, we argue that future findings from the new research directions proposed here can be used to intervene at the level of social contexts to alter educational trajectories from an early age, with the ultimate goal of reducing health disparities. We note two promising avenues for policy development.

One potential solution may focus on universal federal and state-level investment in the education and well-being of children early in the life course to disrupt the reproduction of social inequalities and change subsequent educational trajectories. Several experimental early-education programs such as the Perry Preschool Project and Carolina Abecedarian Project have demonstrated substantial, lasting, and wide-ranging benefits, including improved adult health ( 25 ; 57 ; 102 ). These programs provided intensive, exceptionally high-quality, and diverse services to children, and it is these characteristics that appear central to their success ( 138 ). Further research on the qualitative and social dimensions of education and their effects on health can inform future model educational programs and interventions across all ages.

Another important issue for both researchers and policymakers pertains to postsecondary enrollment and attrition, and their effects on health. Educational expansion in the college-for-all era has yielded high post-secondary enrollment, but also unacceptable dropout rates with multiple detrimental consequences, including high rates of student debt ( 64 ) and stigma ( 76 ), which may negatively affect health. Emerging studies found that college dropouts fail to benefit from their postsecondary investments. Next we need to understand under what circumstances college goers do reap health benefits, or how their postsecondary experience can be modified to improve their health.

For both of these avenues, effective implementation will need further research on the specific institutional characteristics and social contexts that shape the schooling effects. However, in designing interventions and policies, we need to be aware of the dual role of education as a drive and reproducer of inequality. Individuals from advantaged backgrounds may be better positioned to take advantage of new educational opportunities, and thus any interventions and programs need to ensure that marginalized populations have equal or greater access in order to avoid the unintended consequence of further intensifying disparities. Finally, researchers and policymakers should engage in a dialogue such that researchers effectively communicate their insights and recommendations to policymakers, and policymakers convey the needs and challenges of their practices to researchers.

Education and health are central to individual and population well-being. They are also inextricably embedded in the social context and structure. Future research needs to expand beyond the individual-focused analyses and hypothesize upstream ( 96 ), taking a contextual approach to understanding education and health. Such an approach will require interdisciplinary collaborations, innovations in conceptual models, and rich data sources. The three directions for further research on health returns to education we outlined above can help generate findings that will inform effective educational and health policies and interventions to reduce disparities. During this critical time when health differences are widening and less educated Americans are experiencing social and health declines, research and policy has the opportunity to make a difference and improve the health and well-being of our population.

Contributor Information

Anna Zajacova, Western University.

Elizabeth M. Lawrence, University of North Carolina.

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The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2020

We reviewed hundreds of educational studies in 2020 and then highlighted 10 of the most significant—covering topics from virtual learning to the reading wars and the decline of standardized tests.

In the month of March of 2020, the year suddenly became a whirlwind. With a pandemic disrupting life across the entire globe, teachers scrambled to transform their physical classrooms into virtual—or even hybrid—ones, and researchers slowly began to collect insights into what works, and what doesn’t, in online learning environments around the world.

Meanwhile, neuroscientists made a convincing case for keeping handwriting in schools, and after the closure of several coal-fired power plants in Chicago, researchers reported a drop in pediatric emergency room visits and fewer absences in schools, reminding us that questions of educational equity do not begin and end at the schoolhouse door.

1. To Teach Vocabulary, Let Kids Be Thespians

When students are learning a new language, ask them to act out vocabulary words. It’s fun to unleash a child’s inner thespian, of course, but a 2020 study concluded that it also nearly doubles their ability to remember the words months later.

Researchers asked 8-year-old students to listen to words in another language and then use their hands and bodies to mimic the words—spreading their arms and pretending to fly, for example, when learning the German word flugzeug , which means “airplane.” After two months, these young actors were a remarkable 73 percent more likely to remember the new words than students who had listened without accompanying gestures. Researchers discovered similar, if slightly less dramatic, results when students looked at pictures while listening to the corresponding vocabulary. 

It’s a simple reminder that if you want students to remember something, encourage them to learn it in a variety of ways—by drawing it , acting it out, or pairing it with relevant images , for example.

2. Neuroscientists Defend the Value of Teaching Handwriting—Again

For most kids, typing just doesn’t cut it. In 2012, brain scans of preliterate children revealed crucial reading circuitry flickering to life when kids hand-printed letters and then tried to read them. The effect largely disappeared when the letters were typed or traced.

More recently, in 2020, a team of researchers studied older children—seventh graders—while they handwrote, drew, and typed words, and concluded that handwriting and drawing produced telltale neural tracings indicative of deeper learning.

“Whenever self-generated movements are included as a learning strategy, more of the brain gets stimulated,” the researchers explain, before echoing the 2012 study: “It also appears that the movements related to keyboard typing do not activate these networks the same way that drawing and handwriting do.”

It would be a mistake to replace typing with handwriting, though. All kids need to develop digital skills, and there’s evidence that technology helps children with dyslexia to overcome obstacles like note taking or illegible handwriting, ultimately freeing them to “use their time for all the things in which they are gifted,” says the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity.

3. The ACT Test Just Got a Negative Score (Face Palm)

A 2020 study found that ACT test scores, which are often a key factor in college admissions, showed a weak—or even negative —relationship when it came to predicting how successful students would be in college. “There is little evidence that students will have more college success if they work to improve their ACT score,” the researchers explain, and students with very high ACT scores—but indifferent high school grades—often flamed out in college, overmatched by the rigors of a university’s academic schedule.

Just last year, the SAT—cousin to the ACT—had a similarly dubious public showing. In a major 2019 study of nearly 50,000 students led by researcher Brian Galla, and including Angela Duckworth, researchers found that high school grades were stronger predictors of four-year-college graduation than SAT scores.

The reason? Four-year high school grades, the researchers asserted, are a better indicator of crucial skills like perseverance, time management, and the ability to avoid distractions. It’s most likely those skills, in the end, that keep kids in college.

4. A Rubric Reduces Racial Grading Bias

A simple step might help undercut the pernicious effect of grading bias, a new study found: Articulate your standards clearly before you begin grading, and refer to the standards regularly during the assessment process.

In 2020, more than 1,500 teachers were recruited and asked to grade a writing sample from a fictional second-grade student. All of the sample stories were identical—but in one set, the student mentions a family member named Dashawn, while the other set references a sibling named Connor.

Teachers were 13 percent more likely to give the Connor papers a passing grade, revealing the invisible advantages that many students unknowingly benefit from. When grading criteria are vague, implicit stereotypes can insidiously “fill in the blanks,” explains the study’s author. But when teachers have an explicit set of criteria to evaluate the writing—asking whether the student “provides a well-elaborated recount of an event,” for example—the difference in grades is nearly eliminated.

5. What Do Coal-Fired Power Plants Have to Do With Learning? Plenty

When three coal-fired plants closed in the Chicago area, student absences in nearby schools dropped by 7 percent, a change largely driven by fewer emergency room visits for asthma-related problems. The stunning finding, published in a 2020 study from Duke and Penn State, underscores the role that often-overlooked environmental factors—like air quality, neighborhood crime, and noise pollution—have in keeping our children healthy and ready to learn.

At scale, the opportunity cost is staggering: About 2.3 million children in the United States still attend a public elementary or middle school located within 10 kilometers of a coal-fired plant.

The study builds on a growing body of research that reminds us that questions of educational equity do not begin and end at the schoolhouse door. What we call an achievement gap is often an equity gap, one that “takes root in the earliest years of children’s lives,” according to a 2017 study . We won’t have equal opportunity in our schools, the researchers admonish, until we are diligent about confronting inequality in our cities, our neighborhoods—and ultimately our own backyards.

6. Students Who Generate Good Questions Are Better Learners

Some of the most popular study strategies—highlighting passages, rereading notes, and underlining key sentences—are also among the least effective. A 2020 study highlighted a powerful alternative: Get students to generate questions about their learning, and gradually press them to ask more probing questions.

In the study, students who studied a topic and then generated their own questions scored an average of 14 percentage points higher on a test than students who used passive strategies like studying their notes and rereading classroom material. Creating questions, the researchers found, not only encouraged students to think more deeply about the topic but also strengthened their ability to remember what they were studying.

There are many engaging ways to have students create highly productive questions : When creating a test, you can ask students to submit their own questions, or you can use the Jeopardy! game as a platform for student-created questions.

7. Did a 2020 Study Just End the ‘Reading Wars’?

One of the most widely used reading programs was dealt a severe blow when a panel of reading experts concluded that it “would be unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.”

In the 2020 study , the experts found that the controversial program—called “Units of Study” and developed over the course of four decades by Lucy Calkins at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project—failed to explicitly and systematically teach young readers how to decode and encode written words, and was thus “in direct opposition to an enormous body of settled research.”

The study sounded the death knell for practices that de-emphasize phonics in favor of having children use multiple sources of information—like story events or illustrations—to predict the meaning of unfamiliar words, an approach often associated with “balanced literacy.” In an internal memo obtained by publisher APM, Calkins seemed to concede the point, writing that “aspects of balanced literacy need some ‘rebalancing.’”

8. A Secret to High-Performing Virtual Classrooms

In 2020, a team at Georgia State University compiled a report on virtual learning best practices. While evidence in the field is "sparse" and "inconsistent," the report noted that logistical issues like accessing materials—and not content-specific problems like failures of comprehension—were often among the most significant obstacles to online learning. It wasn’t that students didn’t understand photosynthesis in a virtual setting, in other words—it was that they didn’t find (or simply didn't access) the lesson on photosynthesis at all.

That basic insight echoed a 2019 study that highlighted the crucial need to organize virtual classrooms even more intentionally than physical ones. Remote teachers should use a single, dedicated hub for important documents like assignments; simplify communications and reminders by using one channel like email or text; and reduce visual clutter like hard-to-read fonts and unnecessary decorations throughout their virtual spaces.

Because the tools are new to everyone, regular feedback on topics like accessibility and ease of use is crucial. Teachers should post simple surveys asking questions like “Have you encountered any technical issues?” and “Can you easily locate your assignments?” to ensure that students experience a smooth-running virtual learning space.

9. Love to Learn Languages? Surprisingly, Coding May Be Right for You

Learning how to code more closely resembles learning a language such as Chinese or Spanish than learning math, a 2020 study found—upending the conventional wisdom about what makes a good programmer.

In the study, young adults with no programming experience were asked to learn Python, a popular programming language; they then took a series of tests assessing their problem-solving, math, and language skills. The researchers discovered that mathematical skill accounted for only 2 percent of a person’s ability to learn how to code, while language skills were almost nine times more predictive, accounting for 17 percent of learning ability.

That’s an important insight because all too often, programming classes require that students pass advanced math courses—a hurdle that needlessly excludes students with untapped promise, the researchers claim.

10. Researchers Cast Doubt on Reading Tasks Like ‘Finding the Main Idea’

“Content is comprehension,” declared a 2020 Fordham Institute study , sounding a note of defiance as it staked out a position in the ongoing debate over the teaching of intrinsic reading skills versus the teaching of content knowledge.

While elementary students spend an enormous amount of time working on skills like “finding the main idea” and “summarizing”—tasks born of the belief that reading is a discrete and trainable ability that transfers seamlessly across content areas—these young readers aren’t experiencing “the additional reading gains that well-intentioned educators hoped for,” the study concluded.

So what works? The researchers looked at data from more than 18,000 K–5 students, focusing on the time spent in subject areas like math, social studies, and ELA, and found that “social studies is the only subject with a clear, positive, and statistically significant effect on reading improvement.” In effect, exposing kids to rich content in civics, history, and law appeared to teach reading more effectively than our current methods of teaching reading. Perhaps defiance is no longer needed: Fordham’s conclusions are rapidly becoming conventional wisdom—and they extend beyond the limited claim of reading social studies texts. According to Natalie Wexler, the author of the well-received 2019 book  The Knowledge Gap , content knowledge and reading are intertwined. “Students with more [background] knowledge have a better chance of understanding whatever text they encounter. They’re able to retrieve more information about the topic from long-term memory, leaving more space in working memory for comprehension,” she recently told Edutopia .

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• 13 May 2024
• Research & Ideas

Picture This: Why Online Image Searches Drive Purchases

Smaller sellers' products often get lost on large online marketplaces. However, harnessing images in search can help consumers find these products faster, increasing sales and customer satisfaction, finds research by Chiara Farronato and colleagues.

• 26 Mar 2024

How Humans Outshine AI in Adapting to Change

Could artificial intelligence systems eventually perform surgeries or fly planes? First, AI will have to learn to navigate shifting conditions as well as people do. Julian De Freitas and colleagues pit humans against machines in a video game to study AI's current limits and mine insights for the real world.

• 12 Mar 2024

Publish or Perish: What the Research Says About Productivity in Academia

Universities tend to evaluate professors based on their research output, but does that measure reflect the realities of higher ed? A study of 4,300 professors by Kyle Myers, Karim Lakhani, and colleagues probes the time demands, risk appetite, and compensation of faculty.

• 25 Jan 2024

Being a Team Player: Why College Athletes Succeed in Business

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THE PURPOSE OF EDUCATION

• January 2020
• International Journal of Advanced Research 8(1):983-985
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Is classical education research-based?

Classical education has surged in popularity , with 264 new schools cropping up since 2019, a host of think pieces analyzing its growth , and state-level policy shifts that bolster its expansion. I found myself a proponent of classical education via a roundabout path, backing my way into it after following the research on effective instruction.

In many ways, my discovery of classical education resembles an amusing passage from G.K. Chesterton’s theological classic Orthodoxy . He imagines a seafarer, caught in a storm, who runs aground on England’s shores and mistakenly believes that he has discovered a new land. Each verdant forest and rolling hill appear to him as a new London, when in reality he’s a few miles outside old London. To Chesterton, the story analogizes his conversion. He step by step built what he thought was a unique philosophical framework only to realize he had constructed the outlines of orthodox Christianity.

My discovery of classical education followed a similar trajectory. While teaching, I grew enamored with instructional research and (often in these pages) gradually dismantled my commitment to dubious beliefs, including student-directed curriculum , project based learning , soft-on-consequences theories of discipline , differentiation , and the workshop model for literacy instruction , to name a few. In their place, research led me to such things as knowledge-rich curriculum, worked examples, low-stakes quizzing, direct instruction, and lots of memorization, discussion, and writing.

Lo and behold, I looked around and found myself on the shores of classical education. The research that I thought had led me to novel theories of learning placed me but a few miles outside of old education. That is a long way to the question posed in the title: Yes, classical education has all the elements of a research-based education.

In visiting a number of classical schools and conferences in recent months, I’ve seen many aspects of effective instruction. Elementary teachers practiced phonemes with their charges. Administrators told me about the importance of well-established routines and behavior systems. The Hillsdale Barney School Initiative posts its curriculum online and would make any knowledge-rich or phonics advocate cheer.

The canonical texts of classical education reference many instructional best practices. For example, Mortimer Adler’s The Paideia Proposal emphasizes the importance of didactic instruction (what researchy types call direction instruction). And Susan Wise Bauer’s The Well-Trained Mind discusses the need to furnish the minds of children with facts, pictures, stories, and other such knowledge—which sounds an awful lot like schema theory .

Such similarities between research-backed practices and classical education shouldn’t surprise us. Our institutions and traditions don’t appear ex nihilo . Rather, they emerge from trial and error and from generations of inherited knowledge. “Well, that’s just the way we’ve always done it” might well be a good reason to keep doing something that way.

Each element of a traditional classroom serves a purpose. Raised hands allow classroom discussions to flow without devolving into a cacophony of voices, bells and passing periods allow swift and uniform transitions, while desks in rows keep attention forward and temptations to distraction minimal.

It’s unsurprising then that research confirms that “the way we’ve always done it” actually works pretty well. If it didn’t, people would have started doing it differently!

Accordingly, it amuses me whenever I see supposedly innovative schools try to in fact do things differently, only to revert to traditionalism. As I’ve written about here before , the concept of “open classrooms” crops up every few years, wherein students move from learning station to learning station at their whim in giant rooms with flexible seating. And every time, schools end up rebuilding walls, or failing that, teachers use whiteboards and bookshelves to create makeshift boundaries.

With a foot in both worlds, I’ve noticed that the research-based wing of education reform—such as the systems of “no excuses” charter schools or organizations such as researchEd—and the world of classical education have much in common; they share similar ideas and advocate for similar instructional and curricular norms, even if they use different language. If anything, modern proponents of research-backed instructional practices have merely rediscovered an old-fashioned liberal arts education and rebranded it with philosophically positivist vibes.

That being said, while classical education certainly has all the right ingredients for a research-backed educational initiative, the movement would benefit from studies of their particular systems of schools.

For example, charter schools such as KIPP have opened their doors to researchers, allowing them to run various lottery and comparative studies to see how these schools stack up against traditional public schools. The resulting data have made for some of the most forceful arguments in defense of charter schooling. Were Hillsdale’s Barney Schools or the system of Great Hearts Academies to do the same, I’d wager that such research would find they are indeed quite effective and so provide incontrovertible evidence to bolster, justify, and expand the classical education movement.

And if research vindicates that bet, the classical education movement could prove a powerful force in American education. Where some “no excuses” charter systems have compromised on their core beliefs , classical education’s foundation in objective virtues and the Western tradition could provide it a stronger base upon which it can weather political pressures. Moreover, its popularity could positively influence the broader public school system away from its current obsessions with identity solipsism and politically charged content and back towards a traditional, liberal arts education.

Daniel Buck is an Editorial and Policy Associate at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He is the author of What Is Wrong with Our Schools?  and taught English and English as a second language at the middle and high school levels. He earned his master’s degree in curriculum and instruction from the University of…

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New coffee center in Northern California aims to give a jolt to research and education

The UC Davis Coffee Center is dedicated to the science and art of coffee. The center with state-of-the-art technology provides coffee science research, along with coffee bean roasting and espresso brewing rooms. (AP Video: Haven Daley)

Timothy Styczynski, Head Roaster, UC Davis Coffee Center shows UC Davis Graduating Student Kiara DeGroen, an industrial coffee bean roaster at the Coffee Center at UC Davis in Davis, Calif. on Monday, June 17, 2024. The center which opened last month, is believed to be the first coffee-only research facility opened on any college campus in the U.S. (AP Photo/Haven Daley)

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UC Davis Senior, Shrishti Chezhian, loads an industrial coffee bean roaster at the Coffee Center at UC Davis in Davis, Calif. on Monday, June 17, 2024. The center which opened last month, is believed to be the first coffee-only research facility opened on any college campus in the U.S. (AP Photo/Haven Daley)

Timothy Styczynski, Head Roaster, UC Davis Coffee Center displays a coffee bean roasting machine to Shrishti Chezhian, UC Davis Senior, left and graduating student Kiara DeGroen, at the Coffee Center at UC Davis in Davis, Calif. on Monday, June 17, 2024. The center which opened last month, is believed to be the first coffee-only research facility opened on any college campus in the U.S. (AP Photo/Haven Daley)

Timothy Styczynski, Head Roaster, UC Davis Coffee Center offers a taste of freshly brewed coffee to UC Davis Graduating Student Kiara DeGroen, at the Coffee Center at UC Davisin Davis, Calif. on Monday, June 17, 2024. The center which opened last month, is believed to be the first coffee-only research facility opened on any college campus in the U.S. (AP Photo/Haven Daley)

Timothy Styczynski, Head Roaster, UC Davis Coffee Center offers a smell of freshly ground coffee to Shrishti Chezhian, UC Davis Senior, right and graduating student Kiara DeGroen, at the Coffee Center at UC Davis in Davis, Calif. on Monday, June 17, 2024. The center which opened last month, is believed to be the first coffee-only research facility opened on any college campus in the U.S. (AP Photo/Haven Daley)

The Coffee Center at UC Davis on Monday, June 17, 2024, which opened last month. It’s believed to be the first coffee-only research facility opened on any college campus in the U.S. The new Coffee Center at UC Davis which opened last month. It’s believed to be the first coffee-only research facility opened on any college campus in the U.S. (AP Photo/Haven Daley)

DAVIS, Calif. (AP) — A college in Northern California is now home to a center devoted to educating students and closely studying one of the most consumed beverages in the world known for powering people through their day — coffee.

The University of California, Davis, launched its Coffee Center in May with research focused on providing support for farmers, examining the sustainability of coffee and evaluating food safety issues, among other topics. The launch comes about a decade after the university offered its first course on the science of coffee.

At the center in Davis, which is about 14 miles (22 kilometers) west of Sacramento, Director Bill Ristenpart said historically there has been much more of an emphasis on researching a beverage like wine, and less so on studying coffee.

“We’re trying to elevate coffee and make it a topic of academic research and an academic talent pipeline to help support the industry and help support what’s arguably the world’s most important beverage,” said Ristenpart, a professor of chemical engineering.

Most people in the United States buy coffee that’s imported from places including Brazil, Colombia and Vietnam, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture; however California is one of the few places in the country that grows coffee. The U.S. is the second-largest importer of coffee in the world behind the European Union, the agency says.

UC Davis also has programs focused on researching winemaking and the brewing industries. The 7,000-square-foot (650-square-meter) Coffee Center facility is the first academic building in the nation devoted to coffee research and education, Ristenpart said. It is located in the UC Davis Arboretum near the campus’ Robert Mondavi Institute of Wine and Food Science.

Laudia Anokye-Bempah, a graduate student in biological systems engineering, said she wants to research coffee in part “to be able to control how your roasted beans are going to come out to the roaster.”

“We can control things like its acidity level,” Anokye-Bempah said.

There are other U.S. colleges, including Texas A&M University and Vanderbilt University, that have delved into the study of coffee. But the UC Davis Coffee Center stands out in part because it is focused on many aspects of coffee research including agriculture and chemistry, said Edward Fischer, a professor of anthropology and director of the Institute for Coffee Studies at Vanderbilt.

“Coffee is such a complex compound,” Fischer said. “It’s really important to bring together all of these different aspects, and that’s what Davis is doing.”

Students often come out of Fischer’s coffee class viewing the world differently than it is typically discussed in an academic setting, he said.

“In the Western academic tradition, we divide the world up into all these silos, right — biology and anthropology, economics and all that kind of stuff,” he said. “Coffee is a way of showing how all of those boundaries that we draw in the world are really arbitrary.”

Camilla Yuan, a UC Davis alum and director of coffee and roasting at Camellia Coffee Roasters, a coffee shop in Sacramento, visited the Coffee Center in Davis last week, she said.

“Having a center and having resources for folks who are interested in specialty coffee or just coffee world in general, I think is super fascinating and cool,” Yuan said. “I’m glad that something like this is happening.”

Austin is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Austin on the social platform X: @sophieadanna

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Home / Publications & Research / General Election manifesto analysis / General Election 2024: An analysis of manifesto pledges for education

General Election 2024: An analysis of manifesto pledges for education

Ahead of the general election on 4 th July, the Education Policy Institute (EPI), funded by the Nuffield Foundation, has published an analysis of the plans for education set out in the manifestos of the main political parties in England.

This report provides an independent, evidence-based assessment of the extent to which each of the main parties have committed to addressing the biggest challenges facing education in England.

This is the second report published by EPI on education in the general election, following our report last July in which we set out the challenges facing the education system in England and made a number of calls on any incoming government.

Overall, our analysis finds that:

• There have been proposals put forward by all the main parties that address some of the challenges facing the education system. In particular, pledges by Labour and the Liberal Democrats to reform school accountability and tackle the rising issue of children’s mental health are welcome, as are pledges by the Liberal Democrats to target funding to disadvantaged children in the early years and between the ages of 16-19. A greater focus from all parties on boosting vocational education and skills is also a positive step.
• However, there is a striking lack of clear commitments to school and college funding, with neither of the two main parties committing to increasing school funding over the next Parliament. Coupled with an absence of specific pledges to better target funding towards disadvantaged children and young people, this could lead to rising inequalities.
• Commitments in the early years and in post-16 education also lack a focus on improving quality and targeting support to the most disadvantaged children and young people. All parties have committed to rolling out free early years entitlements (and Labour’s pledge to create 3,000 nurseries in schools could help to raise quality), but there is little focus on improving access for the most disadvantaged and rebuilding early intervention services.
• Overall, the manifesto commitments do not go far enough towards addressing the key challenges facing the education system. All parties should have been clearer on how they would: tackle the soaring costs of provision for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), recruit and retain the education workforce our system needs (beyond headline pledges of commitments to new teachers) and address the widening disadvantage gaps across all phases, through targeted interventions and funding.

We have considered each party’s offer as a whole. We conclude that:

• The Conservative party have few commitments that seek to address the key challenges facing education and have included a number of commitments that are largely unnecessary distractions and unlikely to have any real impact on improving outcomes or tackling inequalities.
• The Labour manifesto seeks to tackle more of the immediate challenges facing the system, including through a more whole-child approach by introducing a child poverty strategy and new Young Futures Hubs. But there are still key omissions from Labour, particularly around school and college funding.
• The Liberal Democrats have the most number of commitments that are rooted in evidence, but lack detailed plans on how these commitments will be funded and delivered.
• The Green Party have made substantial commitments to additional school funding, but their proposals for ending formal assessments and abolishing Ofsted are not supported by research evidence and may lead to falling standards overall and widening attainment gaps.
• The education related commitments from Reform are somewhat limited in nature. They do not address the challenges in the education system today in any substantial way.

You can read the report in full here.

This research has been kindly funded by the Nuffield Foundation. 

The Nuffield Foundation  is an independent charitable trust with a mission to advance social well-being. It funds research that informs social policy, primarily in Education, Welfare, and Justice. The Nuffield Foundation is the founder and co-founder of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, the Ada Lovelace Institute and the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory. The Foundation has funded this project, but the views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily the Foundation. Website:  www.nuffieldfoundation.org  Twitter:  @NuffieldFound

Jon Andrews

Robbie Cruikshanks

Shruti Khandekar

China has become a scientific superpower

From plant biology to superconductor physics the country is at the cutting edge.

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I n the atrium of a research building at the Chinese Academy of Sciences ( CAS ) in Beijing is a wall of patents. Around five metres wide and two storeys high, the wall displays 192 certificates, positioned in neat rows and tastefully lit from behind. At ground level, behind a velvet rope, an array of glass jars contain the innovations that the patents protect: seeds.

CAS —the world’s largest research organisation—and institutions around China produce a huge amount of research into the biology of food crops. In the past few years Chinese scientists have discovered a gene that, when removed, boosts the length and weight of wheat grains, another that improves the ability of crops like sorghum and millet to grow in salty soils and one that can increase the yield of maize by around 10%. In autumn last year, farmers in Guizhou completed the second harvest of genetically modified giant rice that was developed by scientists at CAS .

The Chinese Communist Party ( CCP ) has made agricultural research—which it sees as key to ensuring the country’s food security —a priority for scientists. Over the past decade the quality and the quantity of crop research that China produces has grown immensely, and now the country is widely regarded as a leader in the field. According to an editor of a prestigious European plant-sciences journal, there are some months when half of the submissions can come from China.

A journey of a thousand miles

The rise of plant-science research is not unique in China. In 2019 The Economist surveyed the research landscape in the country and asked whether China could one day become a scientific superpower. Today, that question has been unequivocally answered: “yes”. Chinese scientists recently gained the edge in two closely watched measures of high-quality science, and the country’s growth in top-notch research shows no sign of slowing. The old science world order, dominated by America, Europe and Japan, is coming to an end.

One way to measure the quality of a country’s scientific research is to tally the number of high-impact papers produced each year—that is, publications that are cited most often by other scientists in their own, later work. In 2003 America produced 20 times more of these high-impact papers than China, according to data from Clarivate, a science analytics company (see chart 1). By 2013 America produced about four times the number of top papers and, in the most recent release of data, which examines papers from 2022, China had surpassed both America and the entire European Union ( EU ).

Metrics based on citations can be gamed, of course. Scientists can, and do, find ways to boost the number of times their paper is mentioned in other studies, and a recent working paper, by Qui Shumin, Claudia Steinwender and Pierre Azoulay, three economists, argues that Chinese researchers cite their compatriots far more than Western researchers do theirs. But China now leads the world on other benchmarks that are less prone to being gamed. It tops the Nature Index, created by the publisher of the same name, which counts the contributions to articles that appear in a set of prestigious journals. To be selected for publication, papers must be approved by a panel of peer reviewers who assess the study’s quality, novelty and potential for impact. When the index was first launched, in 2014, China came second, but its contribution to eligible papers was less than a third of America’s. By 2023 China had reached the top spot.

According to the Leiden Ranking of the volume of scientific research output, there are now six Chinese universities or institutions in the world top ten, and seven according to the Nature Index. They may not be household names in the West yet, but get used to hearing about Shanghai Jiao Tong, Zhejiang and Peking (Beida) Universities in the same breath as Cambridge, Harvard and ETH Zurich. “Tsinghua is now the number one science and technology university in the world,” says Simon Marginson, a professor of higher education at Oxford University. “That’s amazing. They’ve done that in a generation.”

Today China leads the world in the physical sciences, chemistry and Earth and environmental sciences, according to both the Nature Index and citation measures (see chart 2). But America and Europe still have substantial leads in both general biology and medical sciences. “Engineering is the ultimate Chinese discipline in the modern period,” says Professor Marginson, “I think that’s partly about military technology and partly because that’s what you need to develop a nation.”

Applied research is a Chinese strength. The country dominates publications on perovskite solar panels, for example, which offer the possibility of being far more efficient than conventional silicon cells at converting sunlight into electricity. Chinese chemists have developed a new way to extract hydrogen from seawater using a specialised membrane to separate out pure water, which can then be split by electrolysis. In May 2023 it was announced that the scientists, in collaboration with a state-owned Chinese energy company, had developed a pilot floating hydrogen farm off the country’s south-eastern coast.

China also now produces more patents than any other country, although many are for incremental tweaks to designs, as opposed to truly original inventions. New developments tend to spread and be adopted more slowly in China than in the West. But its strong industrial base, combined with cheap energy, means that it can quickly spin up large-scale production of physical innovations like materials. “That’s where China really has an advantage on Western countries,” says Jonathan Bean, CEO of Materials Nexus, a British firm that uses AI to discover new materials.

The country is also signalling its scientific prowess in more conspicuous ways. Earlier this month, China’s Chang’e-6 robotic spacecraft touched down in a gigantic crater on the far side of the Moon, scooped up some samples of rock, planted a Chinese flag and set off back towards Earth. If it successfully returns to Earth at the end of the month, it will be the first mission to bring back samples from this hard-to-reach side of the Moon.

First, sharpen your tools

The reshaping of Chinese science has been achieved by focusing on three areas: money, equipment and people. In real terms, China’s spending on research and development ( R & D ) has grown 16-fold since 2000. According to the most recent data from the OECD , from 2021, China still lagged behind America on overall R & D spending, dishing out $668bn, compared with $806bn for America at purchasing-power parity. But in terms of spending by universities and government institutions only, China has nudged ahead. In these places America still spends around 50% more on basic research, accounting for costs, but China is splashing the cash on applied research and experimental development (see chart 3).

Money is meticulously directed into strategic areas. In 2006 the CCP published its vision for how science should develop over the next 15 years. Blueprints for science have since been included in the CCP ’s five-year development plans. The current plan, published in 2021, aims to boost research in quantum technologies, AI , semiconductors, neuroscience, genetics and biotechnology, regenerative medicine, and exploration of “frontier areas” like deep space, deep oceans and Earth’s poles.

Creating world-class universities and government institutions has also been a part of China’s scientific development plan. Initiatives like “Project 211”, the “985 programme” and the “China Nine League” gave money to selected labs to develop their research capabilities. Universities paid staff bonuses—estimated at an average of $44,000 each, and up to a whopping $165,000—if they published in high-impact international journals.

Building the workforce has been a priority. Between 2000 and 2019, more than 6m Chinese students left the country to study abroad, according to China’s education ministry. In recent years they have flooded back, bringing their newly acquired skills and knowledge with them. Data from the OECD suggest that, since the late 2000s, more scientists have been returning to the country than leaving. China now employs more researchers than both America and the entire EU .

Many of China’s returning scientists, often referred to as “sea turtles” (a play on the Chinese homonym haigui , meaning “to return from abroad”) have been drawn home by incentives. One such programme launched in 2010, the “Youth Thousand Talents”, offered researchers under 40 one-off bonuses of up to 500,000 yuan (equivalent to roughly $150,000 at purchasing-power parity) and grants of up to 3m yuan to get labs up and running back home. And it worked. A study published in Science last year found that the scheme brought back high-calibre young researchers—they were, on average, in the most productive 15% of their peers (although the real superstar class tended to turn down offers). Within a few years, thanks to access to more resources and academic manpower, these returnees were lead scientists on 2.5 times more papers than equivalent researchers who had remained in America.

As well as pull, there has been a degree of push. Chinese scientists working abroad have been subject to increased suspicion in recent years. In 2018 America launched the China Initiative, a largely unsuccessful attempt to root out Chinese spies from industry and academia. There have also been reports of students being deported because of their association with China’s “military-civilian fusion strategy”. A recent survey of current and former Chinese students studying in America found that the share who had experienced racial abuse or discrimination was rising.

The availability of scientists in China means that, for example in quantum computing, some of the country’s academic labs are more like commercial labs in the West, in terms of scale. “They have research teams of 20, 30, even 40 people working on the same experiments, and they make really good progress,” says Christian Andersen, a quantum researcher at Delft University. In 2023 researchers working in China broke the record for the number of quantum bits, or qubits, entangled inside a quantum computer.

China has also splurged on scientific kit. In 2019, when The Economist last surveyed the state of the country’s scientific research, it already had an enviable inventory of flashy hardware including supercomputers, the world’s largest filled-aperture radio telescope and an underground dark-matter detector. The list has only grown since then. The country is now home to the world’s most sensitive ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray detector (which has recently been used to test aspects of Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity), the world’s strongest steady-state magnetic field (which can probe the properties of materials) and soon will have one of the world’s most sensitive neutrino detectors (which will be used to work out which type of these fundamental subatomic particles has the highest mass). Europe and America have plenty of cool kit of their own, but China is rapidly adding hardware.

Individual labs in China’s top institutions are also well equipped. Niko McCarty, a journalist and former researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was recently given a tour of synthetic biology labs in China, was struck by how, in academic institutions, “the machines are just more impressive and more expansive” than in America. At the Advanced Biofoundry at the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, which the country hopes will be the centre of China’s answer to Silicon Valley, Mr McCarty described an “amazing building with four floors of robots”. As Chinese universities fill with state-of-the-art equipment and elite researchers, and salaries become increasingly competitive, Western institutions look less appealing to young and ambitious Chinese scientists. “Students in China don’t think about America as some “scientific Mecca” in the same way their advisers might have done,” said Mr McCarty.

Take AI , for example. In 2019 just 34% of Chinese students working in the field stayed in the country for graduate school or work. By 2022 that number was 58%, according to data from the AI talent tracker by MacroPolo, an American think-tank (in America the figure for 2022 was around 98%). China now contributes to around 40% of the world’s research papers on AI , compared with around 10% for America and 15% for the EU and Britain combined. One of the most highly cited research papers of all time, demonstrating how deep neural networks could be trained on image recognition, was written by AI researchers working in China, albeit for Microsoft, an American company. “China’s AI research is world-class,” said Zachary Arnold, an AI analyst at the Georgetown Centre for Emerging Security and Technology. “In areas like computer vision and robotics, they have a significant lead in research publications.”

Growth in the quality and quantity of Chinese science looks unlikely to stop anytime soon. Spending on science and technology research is still increasing—the government has announced a 10% increase in funding in 2024. And the country is training an enormous number of young scientists. In 2020 Chinese universities awarded 1.4m engineering degrees, seven times more than America did. China has now educated, at undergraduate level, 2.5 times more of the top-tier AI researchers than America has. And by 2025, Chinese universities are expected to produce nearly twice as many P h D graduates in science and technology as America.

To see further, ascend another floor

Although China is producing more top-tier work, it still produces a vast amount of lower-quality science too. On average, papers from China tend to have lower impact, as measured by citations, than those from America, Britain or the EU . And while the chosen few universities have advanced, mid-level universities have been left behind. China’s second-tier institutions still produce work that is of relatively poor quality compared with their equivalents in Europe or America. “While China has fantastic quality at the top level, it’s on a weak base,” explains Caroline Wagner, professor of science policy at Ohio State University.

When it comes to basic, curiosity-driven research (rather than applied) China is still playing catch-up—the country publishes far fewer papers than America in the two most prestigious science journals, Nature and Science . This may partly explain why China seems to punch below its weight in the discovery of completely new technologies. Basic research is particularly scant within Chinese companies, creating a gap between the scientists making discoveries and the industries that could end up using them. “For more original innovation, that might be a minus,” says Xu Xixiang, chief scientist at LONG i Green Energy Technology, a Chinese solar company.

Incentives to publish papers have created a market for fake scientific publications. A study published earlier this year in the journal Research Ethics , featured anonymous interviews from Chinese academics, one of whom said he had “no choice but to commit [research] misconduct”, to keep up with pressures to publish and retain his job. “Citation cartels” have emerged, where groups of researchers band together to write low-quality papers that cite each other’s work in an effort to drive up their metrics. In 2020 China’s science agencies announced that such cash-for-publication schemes should end and, in 2021, the country announced a nationwide review of research misconduct. That has led to improvements—the rate at which Chinese researchers cite themselves, for example, is falling, according to research published in 2023. And China’s middle-ranking universities are slowly catching up with their Western equivalents, too.

The areas where America and Europe still hold the lead are, therefore, unlikely to be safe for long. Biological and health sciences rely more heavily on deep subject-specific knowledge and have historically been harder for China to “bring back and accelerate”, says Tim Dafforn, a professor of biotechnology at University of Birmingham and former adviser to Britain’s department for business. But China’s profile is growing in these fields. Although America currently produces roughly four times more highly influential papers in clinical medicine, in many areas China is producing the most papers that cite this core research, a sign of developing interest that presages future expansion. “On the biology side, China is growing remarkably quickly,” says Jonathan Adams, chief scientist at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate. “Its ability to switch focus into a new area is quite remarkable.”

The rise of Chinese science is a double-edged sword for Western governments. China’s science system is inextricably linked with its state and armed forces—many Chinese universities have labs explicitly working on defence and several have been accused of engaging in espionage or cyber-attacks. China has also been accused of intellectual-property theft and increasingly stringent regulations have made it more difficult for international collaborators to take data out of the country; notoriously, in 2019, the country cut off access to American-funded work on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There are also cases of Chinese researchers failing to adhere to the ethical standards expected by Western scientists.

Despite the concerns, Chinese collaborations are common for Western researchers. Roughly a third of papers on telecommunications by American authors involve Chinese collaborators. In imaging science, remote sensing, applied chemistry and geological engineering, the figures are between 25% and 30%. In Europe the numbers are lower, around 10%, but still significant. These partnerships are beneficial for both countries. China tends to collaborate more in areas where it is already strong like materials and physics. A preprint study, released last year, found that for AI research, having a co-author from America or China was equally beneficial to authors from the other country, conferring on average 75% more citations.

Several notable successes have come from working together, too. During the covid-19 pandemic a joint venture between Oxford University’s Engineering Department and the Oxford Suzhou Centre for Advanced Research developed a rapid covid test that was used across British airports. In 2015 researchers at University of Cardiff and South China Agricultural University identified a gene that made bacteria resistant to the antibiotic colistin. Following this, China, the biggest consumer of the drug, banned its use in animal feed, and levels of colistin resistance in both animals and humans declined.

In America and Europe, political pressure is limiting collaborations with China. In March, America’s Science and Technology Agreement with China, which states that scientists from both countries can collaborate on topics of mutual benefit, was quietly renewed for a further six months. Although Beijing appears keen to renew the 45-year-old agreement, many Republicans fear that collaboration with China is helping the country achieve its national-security goals. In Europe, with the exception of environmental and climate projects, Chinese universities have been effectively barred from accessing funding through the Horizon programme, a huge European research initiative.

There are also concerns among scientists that China is turning inwards. The country has explicit aims to become self-reliant in many areas of science and technology and also shift away from international publications as a way of measuring research output. Many researchers cannot talk to the press—finding sources in China for this story was challenging. One Chinese plant scientist, who asked to remain anonymous, said that she had to seek permission a year in advance to attend overseas conferences. “It’s contradictory—on the one hand, they set restrictions so that scientists don’t have freedoms like being able to go abroad to communicate with their colleagues. But on the other hand, they don’t want China to fall behind.”

Live until old, learn until old

The overwhelming opinion of scientists in China and the West is that collaboration must continue or, better, increase. And there is room to do more. Though China’s science output has grown dramatically, the share that is conducted with international collaborators has remained stable at around 20%—Western scientists tend to have far more international collaborations. Western researchers could pay more attention to the newest science from China, too. Data from a study published last year in Nature Human Behaviour showed that, for work of equivalent quality, Chinese scientists cite Western papers far more than vice versa. Western scientists rarely visit, work or study in China, depriving them of opportunities to learn from Chinese colleagues in the way Chinese scientists have done so well in the West.

Closing the door to Chinese students and researchers wishing to come to Western labs would also be disastrous for Western science. Chinese researchers form the backbone of many departments in top American and European universities. In 2022 more of the top-tier AI researchers working in America hailed from China than from America. The West’s model of science currently depends on a huge number of students, often from overseas, to carry out most day-to-day research.

There is little to suggest that the Chinese scientific behemoth will not continue growing stronger. China’s ailing economy may eventually force the CCP to slow spending on research, and if the country were to become completely cut off from the Western science community its research would suffer. But neither of these looks imminent. In 2019 we also asked if research could flourish in an authoritarian system. Perhaps over time its limits will become clear. But for now, and at least for the hard sciences, the answer is that it can thrive. “I think it’d be very unwise to call limits on the Chinese miracle,” says Prof Marginson. “Because it has had no limits up until now.” ■

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This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Soaring dragons”

From the June 15th 2024 edition

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• uno earth and environmental sciences professor is fishing for clues

CAMPUS NEWS: JUNE 21, 2024

Tilapia research, uno earth and environmental sciences professor is fishing for clues in port sulphur waters.

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University of New Orleans earth and environmental sciences professor Martin O’Connell has received a grant to study fish habitat in Port Sulphur for tilapia, considered an invasive fish species in the wild.

University of New Orleans earth and environmental sciences professor Martin O’Connell is fishing for clues in Plaquemines Parish to determine whether tilapia—considered an invasive fish species in the wild—has survived a targeted kill conducted almost 15 years ago.

O’Connell, director of the Nekton Research Laboratory at UNO’s Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Sciences, has received a nearly $50,000 grant from the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program for the project in Port Sulphur, Louisiana.

O’Connell’s research involves studying, managing, and conserving aquatic animals in freshwater, estuarine, and marine habitats. His lab researchers examine long-term changes in fish assemblages, responses of aquatic communities to natural and anthropogenic disturbances, and ecological needs of organisms threatened by changing global conditions. Ann Uzee-O'Connell, a researcher in the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Sciences, is the co-principal investigator for the grant.

“As a scientist who has studied invasive species most of my career, I am curious to see how well the eradication strategy carried out by LDWF worked,” O’Connell said. “I hope that 14 years after all this happened that we don't find any tilapia.”

Tilapia species are probably the worse group of escaped aquaculture species when it comes to causing ecological and economical damage around the world, O’Connell said. When the area ditches were surveyed for tilapia around 2010, it was estimated that they represented 85 percent of the population.

“This type of quick population growth causes local native fishes to lose both food items and habitat,” O’Connell said.

There are important freshwater species, such as largemouth bass, bluegill and estuarine species like red drum and spotted sea trout that use the areas around Port Sulphur as nursery habitats, O’Connell said.

“It’s bad enough that we are losing so much habitat in Plaquemines Parish to coastal erosion,” he said. “Having another stressor like non-native fishes just adds to the threat to both commercially and recreationally important native fishes.”

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