modern education topic

• Our Mission

The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2021

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

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

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

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

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

What gives?

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

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

2. The Secret Management Techniques of Expert Teachers

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

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

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

3. The Surprising Power of Pretesting

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

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

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

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

4. Confronting an Old Myth About Immigrant Students

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Teaching Is Learning

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

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

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

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

7. A Disturbing Strain of Bias in Kids’ Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. New Research Makes a Powerful Case for PBL

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

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

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

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

10. Tracking a Tumultuous Year for Teachers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four of the biggest problems facing education—and four trends that could make a difference

Eduardo velez bustillo, harry a. patrinos.

In 2022, we published, Lessons for the education sector from the COVID-19 pandemic , which was a follow up to,  Four Education Trends that Countries Everywhere Should Know About , which summarized views of education experts around the world on how to handle the most pressing issues facing the education sector then. We focused on neuroscience, the role of the private sector, education technology, inequality, and pedagogy.

Unfortunately, we think the four biggest problems facing education today in developing countries are the same ones we have identified in the last decades .

1. The learning crisis was made worse by COVID-19 school closures

Low quality instruction is a major constraint and prior to COVID-19, the learning poverty rate in low- and middle-income countries was 57% (6 out of 10 children could not read and understand basic texts by age 10). More dramatic is the case of Sub-Saharan Africa with a rate even higher at 86%. Several analyses show that the impact of the pandemic on student learning was significant, leaving students in low- and middle-income countries way behind in mathematics, reading and other subjects.  Some argue that learning poverty may be close to 70% after the pandemic , with a substantial long-term negative effect in future earnings. This generation could lose around $21 trillion in future salaries, with the vulnerable students affected the most.

2. Countries are not paying enough attention to early childhood care and education (ECCE)

At the pre-school level about two-thirds of countries do not have a proper legal framework to provide free and compulsory pre-primary education. According to UNESCO, only a minority of countries, mostly high-income, were making timely progress towards SDG4 benchmarks on early childhood indicators prior to the onset of COVID-19. And remember that ECCE is not only preparation for primary school. It can be the foundation for emotional wellbeing and learning throughout life; one of the best investments a country can make.

3. There is an inadequate supply of high-quality teachers

Low quality teaching is a huge problem and getting worse in many low- and middle-income countries.  In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the percentage of trained teachers fell from 84% in 2000 to 69% in 2019 . In addition, in many countries teachers are formally trained and as such qualified, but do not have the minimum pedagogical training. Globally, teachers for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects are the biggest shortfalls.

4. Decision-makers are not implementing evidence-based or pro-equity policies that guarantee solid foundations

It is difficult to understand the continued focus on non-evidence-based policies when there is so much that we know now about what works. Two factors contribute to this problem. One is the short tenure that top officials have when leading education systems. Examples of countries where ministers last less than one year on average are plentiful. The second and more worrisome deals with the fact that there is little attention given to empirical evidence when designing education policies.

To help improve on these four fronts, we see four supporting trends:

1. Neuroscience should be integrated into education policies

Policies considering neuroscience can help ensure that students get proper attention early to support brain development in the first 2-3 years of life. It can also help ensure that children learn to read at the proper age so that they will be able to acquire foundational skills to learn during the primary education cycle and from there on. Inputs like micronutrients, early child stimulation for gross and fine motor skills, speech and language and playing with other children before the age of three are cost-effective ways to get proper development. Early grade reading, using the pedagogical suggestion by the Early Grade Reading Assessment model, has improved learning outcomes in many low- and middle-income countries. We now have the tools to incorporate these advances into the teaching and learning system with AI , ChatGPT , MOOCs and online tutoring.

2. Reversing learning losses at home and at school

There is a real need to address the remaining and lingering losses due to school closures because of COVID-19.  Most students living in households with incomes under the poverty line in the developing world, roughly the bottom 80% in low-income countries and the bottom 50% in middle-income countries, do not have the minimum conditions to learn at home . These students do not have access to the internet, and, often, their parents or guardians do not have the necessary schooling level or the time to help them in their learning process. Connectivity for poor households is a priority. But learning continuity also requires the presence of an adult as a facilitator—a parent, guardian, instructor, or community worker assisting the student during the learning process while schools are closed or e-learning is used.

To recover from the negative impact of the pandemic, the school system will need to develop at the student level: (i) active and reflective learning; (ii) analytical and applied skills; (iii) strong self-esteem; (iv) attitudes supportive of cooperation and solidarity; and (v) a good knowledge of the curriculum areas. At the teacher (instructor, facilitator, parent) level, the system should aim to develop a new disposition toward the role of teacher as a guide and facilitator. And finally, the system also needs to increase parental involvement in the education of their children and be active part in the solution of the children’s problems. The Escuela Nueva Learning Circles or the Pratham Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) are models that can be used.

3. Use of evidence to improve teaching and learning

We now know more about what works at scale to address the learning crisis. To help countries improve teaching and learning and make teaching an attractive profession, based on available empirical world-wide evidence , we need to improve its status, compensation policies and career progression structures; ensure pre-service education includes a strong practicum component so teachers are well equipped to transition and perform effectively in the classroom; and provide high-quality in-service professional development to ensure they keep teaching in an effective way. We also have the tools to address learning issues cost-effectively. The returns to schooling are high and increasing post-pandemic. But we also have the cost-benefit tools to make good decisions, and these suggest that structured pedagogy, teaching according to learning levels (with and without technology use) are proven effective and cost-effective .

4. The role of the private sector

When properly regulated the private sector can be an effective education provider, and it can help address the specific needs of countries. Most of the pedagogical models that have received international recognition come from the private sector. For example, the recipients of the Yidan Prize on education development are from the non-state sector experiences (Escuela Nueva, BRAC, edX, Pratham, CAMFED and New Education Initiative). In the context of the Artificial Intelligence movement, most of the tools that will revolutionize teaching and learning come from the private sector (i.e., big data, machine learning, electronic pedagogies like OER-Open Educational Resources, MOOCs, etc.). Around the world education technology start-ups are developing AI tools that may have a good potential to help improve quality of education .

After decades asking the same questions on how to improve the education systems of countries, we, finally, are finding answers that are very promising.  Governments need to be aware of this fact.

To receive weekly articles,  sign-up here  

Get updates from Education for Global Development

Thank you for choosing to be part of the Education for Global Development community!

Your subscription is now active. The latest blog posts and blog-related announcements will be delivered directly to your email inbox. You may unsubscribe at any time.

Consultant, Education Sector, World Bank

Senior Adviser, Education

Join the Conversation

• Share on mail
• comments added

What the Future of Education Looks Like from Here

• Posted December 11, 2020
• By Emily Boudreau

After a year that involved a global pandemic, school closures, nationwide remote instruction, protests for racial justice, and an election, the role of education has never been more critical or more uncertain. When the dust settles from this year, what will education look like — and what should it aspire to?

To mark the end of its centennial year, HGSE convened a faculty-led discussion to explore those questions. The Future of Education panel, moderated by Dean Bridget Long and hosted by HGSE’s Askwith Forums , focused on hopes for education going forward, as well as HGSE’s role. “The story of HGSE is the story of pivotal decisions, meeting challenges, and tremendous growth,” Long said. “We have a long history of empowering our students and partners to be innovators in a constantly changing world. And that is needed now more than ever.”

Joining Long were Associate Professor Karen Brennan , Senior Lecturer Jennifer Cheatham , Assistant Professor Anthony Jack, and Professors Adriana Umaña-Taylor and Martin West , as they looked forward to what the future could hold for schools, educators, and communities:

… After the pandemic subsides

The pandemic heightened existing gaps and disparities and exposed a need to rethink how systems leaders design schools, instruction, and who they put at the center of that design. “As a leader, in the years before the pandemic hit, I realized the balance of our work as practitioners was off,” Cheatham said. “If we had been spending time knowing our children and our staff and designing schools for them, we might not be feeling the pain in the way we are. I think we’re learning something about what the real work of school is about.” In the coming years, the panelists hope that a widespread push to recognize the identity and health of the whole-child in K–12 and higher education will help educators design support systems that can reduce inequity on multiple levels.

… For the global community

As much as the pandemic isolated individuals, on the global scale, people have looked to connect with each other to find solutions and share ideas as they faced a common challenge. This year may have brought everyone together and allowed for exchange of ideas, policies, practices, and assessments across boundaries.

… For technological advancements

As educators and leaders create, design, and imagine the future, technology should be used in service of that vision rather than dictating it. As technology becomes a major part of how we communicate and share ideas, educators need to think critically about how to deploy technology strategically. “My stance on technology is that it should always be used in the service of our human purpose and interest,” said Brennan. “We’ve talked about racial equity, building relationships. Our values and purposes and goals need to lead the way, not the tech.”

… For teachers

Human connections and interactions are at the heart of education. At this time, it’s become abundantly clear that the role of the teacher in the school community is irreplaceable. “I think the next few years hinge on how much we’re willing to invest in educators and all of these additional supports in the school which essentially make learning possible,” Umaña-Taylor said, “these are the individuals who are making the future minds of the nation possible.”

Cutting-edge research and new knowledge must become part of the public discussion in order to meaningfully shape the policies and practices that influence the future of education. “I fundamentally believe that we as academics and scholars must be part of the conversation and not limit ourselves to just articles behind paywalls or policy paragraphs at the end of a paper,” Jack said. “We have to engage the larger public.”

… In 25 years

“We shouldn’t underestimate the possibility that the future might look a lot like the present,” West said. “As I think about the potential sources of change in education, and in American education in particular, I tend to think about longer-term trends as the key driver.” Changing student demographics, access to higher education, structural inequality, and the focus of school leaders are all longer-term trends that, according to panelists, will influence the future of education. 

Askwith Education Forum

Bringing innovators and influential leaders to the Harvard Graduate School of Education

Related Articles

Beyond Recovery

Future of Education: Human Development and Psychology – The Long View

Future of Education: Leading for Equity

The World Bank Group is the largest financier of education in the developing world, working in 94 countries and committed to helping them reach SDG4: access to inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030.

Education is a human right, a powerful driver of development, and one of the strongest instruments for reducing poverty and improving health, gender equality, peace, and stability. It delivers large, consistent returns in terms of income, and is the most important factor to ensure equity and inclusion.

For individuals, education promotes employment, earnings, health, and poverty reduction. Globally, there is a  9% increase in hourly earnings for every extra year of schooling . For societies, it drives long-term economic growth, spurs innovation, strengthens institutions, and fosters social cohesion.  Education is further a powerful catalyst to climate action through widespread behavior change and skilling for green transitions.

Developing countries have made tremendous progress in getting children into the classroom and more children worldwide are now in school. But learning is not guaranteed, as the  2018 World Development Report  (WDR) stressed.

Making smart and effective investments in people’s education is critical for developing the human capital that will end extreme poverty. At the core of this strategy is the need to tackle the learning crisis, put an end to  Learning Poverty , and help youth acquire the advanced cognitive, socioemotional, technical and digital skills they need to succeed in today’s world. 

In low- and middle-income countries, the share of children living in  Learning Poverty  (that is, the proportion of 10-year-old children that are unable to read and understand a short age-appropriate text) increased from 57% before the pandemic to an estimated  70%  in 2022.

However, learning is in crisis. More than 70 million more people were pushed into poverty during the COVID pandemic, a billion children lost a year of school , and three years later the learning losses suffered have not been recouped .  If a child cannot read with comprehension by age 10, they are unlikely to become fluent readers. They will fail to thrive later in school and will be unable to power their careers and economies once they leave school.

The effects of the pandemic are expected to be long-lasting. Analysis has already revealed deep losses, with international reading scores declining from 2016 to 2021 by more than a year of schooling.  These losses may translate to a 0.68 percentage point in global GDP growth.  The staggering effects of school closures reach beyond learning. This generation of children could lose a combined total of  US$21 trillion in lifetime earnings  in present value or the equivalent of 17% of today’s global GDP – a sharp rise from the 2021 estimate of a US$17 trillion loss. 

Action is urgently needed now – business as usual will not suffice to heal the scars of the pandemic and will not accelerate progress enough to meet the ambitions of SDG 4. We are urging governments to implement ambitious and aggressive Learning Acceleration Programs to get children back to school, recover lost learning, and advance progress by building better, more equitable and resilient education systems.

Last Updated: Mar 25, 2024

The World Bank’s global education strategy is centered on ensuring learning happens – for everyone, everywhere. Our vision is to ensure that everyone can achieve her or his full potential with access to a quality education and lifelong learning. To reach this, we are helping countries build foundational skills like literacy, numeracy, and socioemotional skills – the building blocks for all other learning. From early childhood to tertiary education and beyond – we help children and youth acquire the skills they need to thrive in school, the labor market and throughout their lives.

Investing in the world’s most precious resource – people – is paramount to ending poverty on a livable planet.  Our experience across more than 100 countries bears out this robust connection between human capital, quality of life, and economic growth: when countries strategically invest in people and the systems designed to protect and build human capital at scale, they unlock the wealth of nations and the potential of everyone.

Building on this, the World Bank supports resilient, equitable, and inclusive education systems that ensure learning happens for everyone. We do this by generating and disseminating evidence, ensuring alignment with policymaking processes, and bridging the gap between research and practice.

The World Bank is the largest source of external financing for education in developing countries, with a portfolio of about $26 billion in 94 countries including IBRD, IDA and Recipient-Executed Trust Funds. IDA operations comprise 62% of the education portfolio.

The investment in FCV settings has increased dramatically and now accounts for 26% of our portfolio.

World Bank projects reach at least 425 million students -one-third of students in low- and middle-income countries.

The World Bank’s Approach to Education

Five interrelated pillars of a well-functioning education system underpin the World Bank’s education policy approach:

• Learners are prepared and motivated to learn;
• Teachers are prepared, skilled, and motivated to facilitate learning and skills acquisition;
• Learning resources (including education technology) are available, relevant, and used to improve teaching and learning;
• Schools are safe and inclusive; and
• Education Systems are well-managed, with good implementation capacity and adequate financing.

The Bank is already helping governments design and implement cost-effective programs and tools to build these pillars.

Our Principles:

• We pursue systemic reform supported by political commitment to learning for all children. 
• We focus on equity and inclusion through a progressive path toward achieving universal access to quality education, including children and young adults in fragile or conflict affected areas , those in marginalized and rural communities,  girls and women , displaced populations,  students with disabilities , and other vulnerable groups.
• We focus on results and use evidence to keep improving policy by using metrics to guide improvements.   
• We want to ensure financial commitment commensurate with what is needed to provide basic services to all. 
• We invest wisely in technology so that education systems embrace and learn to harness technology to support their learning objectives.   

Laying the groundwork for the future

Country challenges vary, but there is a menu of options to build forward better, more resilient, and equitable education systems.

Countries are facing an education crisis that requires a two-pronged approach: first, supporting actions to recover lost time through remedial and accelerated learning; and, second, building on these investments for a more equitable, resilient, and effective system.

Recovering from the learning crisis must be a political priority, backed with adequate financing and the resolve to implement needed reforms.  Domestic financing for education over the last two years has not kept pace with the need to recover and accelerate learning. Across low- and lower-middle-income countries, the  average share of education in government budgets fell during the pandemic , and in 2022 it remained below 2019 levels.

The best chance for a better future is to invest in education and make sure each dollar is put toward improving learning.  In a time of fiscal pressure, protecting spending that yields long-run gains – like spending on education – will maximize impact.  We still need more and better funding for education.  Closing the learning gap will require increasing the level, efficiency, and equity of education spending—spending smarter is an imperative.

• Education technology  can be a powerful tool to implement these actions by supporting teachers, children, principals, and parents; expanding accessible digital learning platforms, including radio/ TV / Online learning resources; and using data to identify and help at-risk children, personalize learning, and improve service delivery.

Looking ahead

We must seize this opportunity  to reimagine education in bold ways. Together, we can build forward better more equitable, effective, and resilient education systems for the world’s children and youth.

Accelerating Improvements

Supporting countries in establishing time-bound learning targets and a focused education investment plan, outlining actions and investments geared to achieve these goals.

Launched in 2020, the  Accelerator Program  works with a set of countries to channel investments in education and to learn from each other. The program coordinates efforts across partners to ensure that the countries in the program show improvements in foundational skills at scale over the next three to five years. These investment plans build on the collective work of multiple partners, and leverage the latest evidence on what works, and how best to plan for implementation.  Countries such as Brazil (the state of Ceará) and Kenya have achieved dramatic reductions in learning poverty over the past decade at scale, providing useful lessons, even as they seek to build on their successes and address remaining and new challenges.  

Universalizing Foundational Literacy

Readying children for the future by supporting acquisition of foundational skills – which are the gateway to other skills and subjects.

The  Literacy Policy Package (LPP)   consists of interventions focused specifically on promoting acquisition of reading proficiency in primary school. These include assuring political and technical commitment to making all children literate; ensuring effective literacy instruction by supporting teachers; providing quality, age-appropriate books; teaching children first in the language they speak and understand best; and fostering children’s oral language abilities and love of books and reading.

Advancing skills through TVET and Tertiary

Ensuring that individuals have access to quality education and training opportunities and supporting links to employment.

Tertiary education and skills systems are a driver of major development agendas, including human capital, climate change, youth and women’s empowerment, and jobs and economic transformation. A comprehensive skill set to succeed in the 21st century labor market consists of foundational and higher order skills, socio-emotional skills, specialized skills, and digital skills. Yet most countries continue to struggle in delivering on the promise of skills development. 

The World Bank is supporting countries through efforts that address key challenges including improving access and completion, adaptability, quality, relevance, and efficiency of skills development programs. Our approach is via multiple channels including projects, global goods, as well as the Tertiary Education and Skills Program . Our recent reports including Building Better Formal TVET Systems and STEERing Tertiary Education provide a way forward for how to improve these critical systems.

Addressing Climate Change

Mainstreaming climate education and investing in green skills, research and innovation, and green infrastructure to spur climate action and foster better preparedness and resilience to climate shocks.

Our approach recognizes that education is critical for achieving effective, sustained climate action. At the same time, climate change is adversely impacting education outcomes. Investments in education can play a huge role in building climate resilience and advancing climate mitigation and adaptation. Climate change education gives young people greater awareness of climate risks and more access to tools and solutions for addressing these risks and managing related shocks. Technical and vocational education and training can also accelerate a green economic transformation by fostering green skills and innovation. Greening education infrastructure can help mitigate the impact of heat, pollution, and extreme weather on learning, while helping address climate change. 

Examples of this work are projects in Nigeria (life skills training for adolescent girls), Vietnam (fostering relevant scientific research) , and Bangladesh (constructing and retrofitting schools to serve as cyclone shelters).

Strengthening Measurement Systems

Enabling countries to gather and evaluate information on learning and its drivers more efficiently and effectively.

The World Bank supports initiatives to help countries effectively build and strengthen their measurement systems to facilitate evidence-based decision-making. Examples of this work include:

(1) The  Global Education Policy Dashboard (GEPD) : This tool offers a strong basis for identifying priorities for investment and policy reforms that are suited to each country context by focusing on the three dimensions of practices, policies, and politics.

• Highlights gaps between what the evidence suggests is effective in promoting learning and what is happening in practice in each system; and
• Allows governments to track progress as they act to close the gaps.

The GEPD has been implemented in 13 education systems already – Peru, Rwanda, Jordan, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Islamabad, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sierra Leone, Niger, Gabon, Jordan and Chad – with more expected by the end of 2024.

(2)  Learning Assessment Platform (LeAP) : LeAP is a one-stop shop for knowledge, capacity-building tools, support for policy dialogue, and technical staff expertise to support student achievement measurement and national assessments for better learning.

Supporting Successful Teachers

Helping systems develop the right selection, incentives, and support to the professional development of teachers.

Currently, the World Bank Education Global Practice has over 160 active projects supporting over 18 million teachers worldwide, about a third of the teacher population in low- and middle-income countries. In 12 countries alone, these projects cover 16 million teachers, including all primary school teachers in Ethiopia and Turkey, and over 80% in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Vietnam.

A World Bank-developed classroom observation tool, Teach, was designed to capture the quality of teaching in low- and middle-income countries. It is now 3.6 million students.

While Teach helps identify patterns in teacher performance, Coach leverages these insights to support teachers to improve their teaching practice through hands-on in-service teacher professional development (TPD).

Our recent report on Making Teacher Policy Work proposes a practical framework to uncover the black box of effective teacher policy and discusses the factors that enable their scalability and sustainability.

 Supporting Education Finance Systems

Strengthening country financing systems to mobilize resources for education and make better use of their investments in education.

Our approach is to bring together multi-sectoral expertise to engage with ministries of education and finance and other stakeholders to develop and implement effective and efficient public financial management systems; build capacity to monitor and evaluate education spending, identify financing bottlenecks, and develop interventions to strengthen financing systems; build the evidence base on global spending patterns and the magnitude and causes of spending inefficiencies; and develop diagnostic tools as public goods to support country efforts.

Working in Fragile, Conflict, and Violent (FCV) Contexts

The massive and growing global challenge of having so many children living in conflict and violent situations requires a response at the same scale and scope. Our education engagement in the Fragility, Conflict and Violence (FCV) context, which stands at US$5.35 billion, has grown rapidly in recent years, reflecting the ever-increasing importance of the FCV agenda in education. Indeed, these projects now account for more than 25% of the World Bank education portfolio.

Education is crucial to minimizing the effects of fragility and displacement on the welfare of youth and children in the short-term and preventing the emergence of violent conflict in the long-term. 

Support to Countries Throughout the Education Cycle

Our support to countries covers the entire learning cycle, to help shape resilient, equitable, and inclusive education systems that ensure learning happens for everyone. 

The ongoing  Supporting  Egypt  Education Reform project , 2018-2025, supports transformational reforms of the Egyptian education system, by improving teaching and learning conditions in public schools. The World Bank has invested $500 million in the project focused on increasing access to quality kindergarten, enhancing the capacity of teachers and education leaders, developing a reliable student assessment system, and introducing the use of modern technology for teaching and learning. Specifically, the share of Egyptian 10-year-old students, who could read and comprehend at the global minimum proficiency level, increased to 45 percent in 2021.

In  Nigeria , the $75 million  Edo  Basic Education Sector and Skills Transformation (EdoBESST)  project, running from 2020-2024, is focused on improving teaching and learning in basic education. Under the project, which covers 97 percent of schools in the state, there is a strong focus on incorporating digital technologies for teachers. They were equipped with handheld tablets with structured lesson plans for their classes. Their coaches use classroom observation tools to provide individualized feedback. Teacher absence has reduced drastically because of the initiative. Over 16,000 teachers were trained through the project, and the introduction of technology has also benefited students.

Through the $235 million  School Sector Development Program  in  Nepal  (2017-2022), the number of children staying in school until Grade 12 nearly tripled, and the number of out-of-school children fell by almost seven percent. During the pandemic, innovative approaches were needed to continue education. Mobile phone penetration is high in the country. More than four in five households in Nepal have mobile phones. The project supported an educational service that made it possible for children with phones to connect to local radio that broadcast learning programs.

From 2017-2023, the $50 million  Strengthening of State Universities  in  Chile  project has made strides to improve quality and equity at state universities. The project helped reduce dropout: the third-year dropout rate fell by almost 10 percent from 2018-2022, keeping more students in school.

The World Bank’s first  Program-for-Results financing in education  was through a $202 million project in  Tanzania , that ran from 2013-2021. The project linked funding to results and aimed to improve education quality. It helped build capacity, and enhanced effectiveness and efficiency in the education sector. Through the project, learning outcomes significantly improved alongside an unprecedented expansion of access to education for children in Tanzania. From 2013-2019, an additional 1.8 million students enrolled in primary schools. In 2019, the average reading speed for Grade 2 students rose to 22.3 words per minute, up from 17.3 in 2017. The project laid the foundation for the ongoing $500 million  BOOST project , which supports over 12 million children to enroll early, develop strong foundational skills, and complete a quality education.

The $40 million  Cambodia  Secondary Education Improvement project , which ran from 2017-2022, focused on strengthening school-based management, upgrading teacher qualifications, and building classrooms in Cambodia, to improve learning outcomes, and reduce student dropout at the secondary school level. The project has directly benefited almost 70,000 students in 100 target schools, and approximately 2,000 teachers and 600 school administrators received training.

The World Bank is co-financing the $152.80 million  Yemen  Restoring Education and Learning Emergency project , running from 2020-2024, which is implemented through UNICEF, WFP, and Save the Children. It is helping to maintain access to basic education for many students, improve learning conditions in schools, and is working to strengthen overall education sector capacity. In the time of crisis, the project is supporting teacher payments and teacher training, school meals, school infrastructure development, and the distribution of learning materials and school supplies. To date, almost 600,000 students have benefited from these interventions.

The $87 million  Providing an Education of Quality in  Haiti  project supported approximately 380 schools in the Southern region of Haiti from 2016-2023. Despite a highly challenging context of political instability and recurrent natural disasters, the project successfully supported access to education for students. The project provided textbooks, fresh meals, and teacher training support to 70,000 students, 3,000 teachers, and 300 school directors. It gave tuition waivers to 35,000 students in 118 non-public schools. The project also repaired 19 national schools damaged by the 2021 earthquake, which gave 5,500 students safe access to their schools again.

In 2013, just 5% of the poorest households in  Uzbekistan  had children enrolled in preschools. Thanks to the  Improving Pre-Primary and General Secondary Education Project , by July 2019, around 100,000 children will have benefitted from the half-day program in 2,420 rural kindergartens, comprising around 49% of all preschool educational institutions, or over 90% of rural kindergartens in the country.

In addition to working closely with governments in our client countries, the World Bank also works at the global, regional, and local levels with a range of technical partners, including foundations, non-profit organizations, bilaterals, and other multilateral organizations. Some examples of our most recent global partnerships include:

UNICEF, UNESCO, FCDO, USAID, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:  Coalition for Foundational Learning

The World Bank is working closely with UNICEF, UNESCO, FCDO, USAID, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as the  Coalition for Foundational Learning  to advocate and provide technical support to ensure foundational learning.  The World Bank works with these partners to promote and endorse the  Commitment to Action on Foundational Learning , a global network of countries committed to halving the global share of children unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10 by 2030.

Australian Aid, Bernard van Leer Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Canada, Echida Giving, FCDO, German Cooperation, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, Conrad Hilton Foundation, LEGO Foundation, Porticus, USAID: Early Learning Partnership

The Early Learning Partnership (ELP) is a multi-donor trust fund, housed at the World Bank.  ELP leverages World Bank strengths—a global presence, access to policymakers and strong technical analysis—to improve early learning opportunities and outcomes for young children around the world.

We help World Bank teams and countries get the information they need to make the case to invest in Early Childhood Development (ECD), design effective policies and deliver impactful programs. At the country level, ELP grants provide teams with resources for early seed investments that can generate large financial commitments through World Bank finance and government resources. At the global level, ELP research and special initiatives work to fill knowledge gaps, build capacity and generate public goods.

UNESCO, UNICEF:  Learning Data Compact

UNESCO, UNICEF, and the World Bank have joined forces to close the learning data gaps that still exist and that preclude many countries from monitoring the quality of their education systems and assessing if their students are learning. The three organizations have agreed to a  Learning Data Compact , a commitment to ensure that all countries, especially low-income countries, have at least one quality measure of learning by 2025, supporting coordinated efforts to strengthen national assessment systems.

UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS):   Learning Poverty Indicator

Aimed at measuring and urging attention to foundational literacy as a prerequisite to achieve SDG4, this partnership was launched in 2019 to help countries strengthen their learning assessment systems, better monitor what students are learning in internationally comparable ways and improve the breadth and quality of global data on education.

FCDO, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:  EdTech Hub

Supported by the UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the EdTech Hub is aimed at improving the quality of ed-tech investments. The Hub launched a rapid response Helpdesk service to provide just-in-time advisory support to 70 low- and middle-income countries planning education technology and remote learning initiatives.

MasterCard Foundation

Our Tertiary Education and Skills  global program, launched with support from the Mastercard Foundation, aims to prepare youth and adults for the future of work and society by improving access to relevant, quality, equitable reskilling and post-secondary education opportunities.  It is designed to reframe, reform, and rebuild tertiary education and skills systems for the digital and green transformation.

Bridging the AI divide: Breaking down barriers to ensure women’s leadership and participation in the Fifth Industrial Revolution

Common challenges and tailored solutions: How policymakers are strengthening early learning systems across the world

Compulsory education boosts learning outcomes and climate action

Areas of focus.

Data & Measurement

Early Childhood Development

Financing Education

Foundational Learning

Fragile, Conflict & Violent Contexts

Girls’ Education

Inclusive Education

Skills Development

Technology (EdTech)  

Tertiary Education

Initiatives

• Show More +
• Invest in Childcare
• Global Education Policy Dashboard
• Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel
• Show Less -

Collapse and Recovery: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Eroded Human Capital and What to Do About It

BROCHURES & FACT SHEETS

Flyer: Education Factsheet - May 2024

Publication: Realizing Education's Promise: A World Bank Retrospective – August 2023

Flyer: Education and Climate Change - November 2022

Brochure: Learning Losses - October 2022

STAY CONNECTED

Human Development Topics

Around the bank group.

Find out what the Bank Group's branches are doing in education

Global Education Newsletter - June 2024

What's happening in the World Bank Education Global Practice? Read to learn more.

Learning Can't Wait: A commitment to education in Latin America and the ...

A new IDB-World Bank report describes challenges and priorities to address the educational crisis.

Human Capital Project

The Human Capital Project is a global effort to accelerate more and better investments in people for greater equity and economic growth.

Impact Evaluations

Research that measures the impact of education policies to improve education in low and middle income countries.

Education Videos

Watch our latest videos featuring our projects across the world

Additional Resources

Education Finance

Higher Education

Digital Technologies

Education Data & Measurement

Education in Fragile, Conflict & Violence Contexts

This site uses cookies to optimize functionality and give you the best possible experience. If you continue to navigate this website beyond this page, cookies will be placed on your browser. To learn more about cookies, click here .

• SDG4 coordination
• Global Education Monitoring Report
• Global Coalition for Education
• UNESCO Chairs and UNITWIN Networks
• Global network of technical and vocational education and training institutions
• Global network of learning cities
• Right to education
• Education in emergencies
• Inclusion in education
• Early childhood care and education
• Higher education
• Literacy and adult learning
• Technical and vocational education and training
• Education and gender equality
• Girls’ and women’s education in science and technology
• Teacher education
• Education policies and strategies
• Education management, monitoring and evaluation
• Assessment for improved learning outcomes
• Curriculum development
• Global citizenship education
• Education about the Holocaust and genocide
• Countering hate speech
• Education for sustainable development
• Health and education
• Digital learning and transformation of education
• Futures of Education
• All UNESCO news on education
• Education stories
• Subscribe to the Education monthly newsletter
• Publications
• Databases and tools
• National education profiles

Transforming lives through education

Transforming education to change our world

UNESCO provides global and regional leadership on all aspects of education from pre-school to higher education and throughout life. It works through its Member States and brings together governments, the private sector and civil society to strengthen education systems worldwide in order to deliver quality education for all. As a thought leader it publishes landmark reports and data for policy-makers, implements programmes on the ground from teacher training to emergency responses and establishes and monitors norms and standards for all to guide educational developments.  

Right to education in a ruined world

Southern Italy, 1950. Three children are huddled around a makeshift desk made out of reclaimed wood, scribbling in their notebooks. The classroom has an earthen floor and roughly clad walls. The children’s clothes are ragged. They are wearing home-made slippers because shoes and the money to buy them are rare commodities in the war-ravaged south. 

Although World War II ended five years earlier, the scars of conflict are still visible in this black and white photo from a report commissioned by UNESCO from legendary photojournalist David Seymour. 

At the time when the photograph was taken, less than half of Italy’s population could read and write and just a third completed primary school. 70 years later, these children’s grandchildren enjoy an over 99% literacy rate. In the wake of the war, UNESCO led a major education campaign in Europe to respond to the education crisis, to rebuild links between people and to strengthen democracy and cultural identities after years of conflict. The emphasis then was on the fundamental learning skill of literacy.  

Immediately after World War two UNESCO led a major education campaign in Europe to respond to the education crisis, fix and rebuild links between people and strengthen cultural identities after years of conflict. David Seymour’s images show the extent of the fight against illiteracy led by the post-war Italian government and non-governmental organisations backed by UNESCO. 

Looking back at the deprived surroundings Seymour captured in his photo essay, one can see the extent of success. Seventy-one years later, those children’s grandchildren enjoy a 99.16 per cent literacy rate. 

Similar programmes were held across the globe, for instance in devastated Korea where UNESCO led a major education textbook production programme in the 1950s. Several decades after, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations and Korean citizen Ban Ki-Moon expressed the importance of such a programme for the country's development: 

The flowering of literacy

In a Korea devastated by war and where UNESCO led a major education textbook production programme in the 1950s, one student, Ban Ki-Moon, now Former Secretary-General of the United Nations, saw the world open up to him through the pages of a UNESCO textbook. Several decades after, he expressed the importance of such a programme for his country's development on the world stage.

Reaching the remote villages perched atop the Andes in Peru during the early 1960s wasn’t without its challenges for UNESCO’s technical assistance programme to bring literacy to disadvantaged communities. While Peru’s economy was experiencing a prolonged period of expansion, not all Peruvians were able to benefit from this growth which was limited to the industrialised coast. Instead, Andes communities were grappling with poverty, illiteracy and depopulation. 

Today, the number of non-literate youths and adults around the world has decreased dramatically, while the global literacy rate for young people aged 15-24 years has reached 92 %. These astonishing successes reflect improved access to schooling for younger generations.

Photojournalist Paul Almasy has left us the poignant image of a barefoot older man while he’s deciphering a newspaper thanks to his newfound literacy skills.

The classroom at the UNESCO mission in Chinchera, in the Andean highlands of Peru, had allowed the old man to discover the world beyond his tiny village.

However, there are still huge obstacles to overcome. Data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics shows that 617 million children and adolescents worldwide are not achieving minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics. Since the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 it is still the case that globally more than 450 million children - six out of 10 - have failed to gain basic literacy skills by the age of 10. And beyond literacy programmes, massive investments in skills for work and life, teacher training, and education policies are needed in a world that is changing ever faster. 

Global priorities

Africa, home to the world’s youngest population, is not on track to achieve the targets of SDG 4. Sub-Saharan Africa alone is expected to account for 25% of the school-age population by 2030, up from 12% in 1990, yet it remains the region with the highest out-of-school rates. Girls are more likely to be permanently excluded from education than boys. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated inequalities, with 89% of learners not having access to computers and 82% lacking internet access to benefit from distance learning. The lack of trained teachers further jeopardizes progress towards SDG4: pre-pandemic only 64% of whom were trained at the primary level and 58% at the lower secondary level.

As part of its Priority Africa Flagship 2022 – 2029 , UNESCO has launched Campus Africa: Reinforcing Higher Education in Africa with the objective to build integrated, inclusive, and quality tertiary education systems and institutions, for the development of inclusive and equitable societies on the continent.

Gender    

There are immense gender gaps when it comes to access, learning achievement and education, most often at the expense of girls and women. It is estimated that some 127 million girls are out of school around the world. For many girls and women around the world, the classroom remains an elusive, often forbidden space. UNESCO monitors the educational rights of girls and women around the world and shares information on the legal progress toward securing the right to education for women in all countries. Despite important progress in recent decades, the right to education is still far from being a reality for many girls and women. Discriminatory practices stand in the way of girls and women fully exercising their right to participate in, complete, and benefit from education. And while girls have difficulty with access, boys face increasing challenges, and particularly disengagement , from education at later stages. Globally only 88 men are enrolled in tertiary education for every 100 women. In 73 countries, fewer boys than girls are enrolled in upper-secondary education.

UNESCO's Her Atlas analyzes the legal frameworks of nearly 200 states to track which laws are enabling---or inhibiting---the right to education for girls and women. This interactive world map uses a color-coded scoring system to monitor 12 indicators of legal progress towards gender equality in the right to education.

Monitoring the right to education for girls and women

What makes me proud is that soon I will finish building a new house. I have already been able to buy a cow and I will soon be able to have another pond

Madagascar’s coastal Atsinanana region is known for its lush rainforests and fish breeding.

The country has a young population, but only one out of three children can complete primary education. Among those who are able to finish primary school, only 17% have minimum reading skills, while just a fifth of them have basic maths competencies. Once they leave school, children face a precarious labour market and unstable jobs, just like their parents.

Natacha Obienne is only 21 years old, but she is already in charge of a small fish farm, a career that is usually pursued by men. As one of the many out-of-school women in her area, she was able to set up her own business after vocational training taught her the basics of financial management and entrepreneurship, as well as the practicalities of breeding fish.

She understood that fish feeding depends on the temperature of the water. If it’s well managed, a higher number of fish is produced. ‘I immediately applied everything I learnt’ she says.

The classroom she attended changed the course of her life and she hopes other young people will follow in her footsteps.

I no longer depend on my parents and I am financially independent

She’s not alone. Around 3,000 youths in Madagascar have been trained since the start of the UNESCO-backed programme, some of whom have set up their own business and achieved financial independence. Education was the best way to ease people's emancipation.

Like Emma Claudia, 25, who after her vocational training started a restaurant with just a baking tray and a saucepan.

What does my family think? They are surprised and amazed by my evolution because I haven’t been able to complete my studies. I don’t have any school diplomas.

While Natacha and Emma Claudia have been able to transform their world through education, millions of children out of school around the world are still denied that dream.

Discrimination against girls remains widespread and nearly one billion adults, mostly women, are illiterate. The lack of qualified teachers and learning materials continues to be the reality in too many schools.

Challenging these obstacles is getting harder as the world grapples with the acceleration of climate change, the emergence of digitization and artificial intelligence, and the increasing exclusion and uncertainty brought by the Covid-19 pandemic.

We resumed school a while ago and it’s been stressful. We are trying to retrieve what we lost during quarantine, the worst thing about not being in school is the number of things you miss. Learning behind a screen and learning in person are incomparable.

Aicha is lucky to be able to continue her education. Her country has the highest rate of out-of-school children in the world – 10.5 million – and nearly two-thirds are women. To compound the problem, Nigeria’s northern states suffer from the violence that targets education.

In Russia, too, Alexander and his school friends had to cope with virtual learning and the lack of interactions.

All Russian students were moved to online studying. Needless to say, it was a rough year for all of us, several friends were struggling with depressive moods. They were missing their friends and teachers. So did I.

To protect their right to education during this unprecedented disruption and beyond, UNESCO has launched the Global Education Coalition , a platform for collaboration and exchange that brings together more than 175 countries from the UN family, civil society, academia and the private sector to ensure that learning never stops.

Building skills where they are most needed

Crouched over a pedal-powered sewing machine, Harikala Buda looks younger than her 30 years. Her slim fingers fold a cut of turquoise brocade before deftly pushing it under the needle mechanism.

Harikala lives in rural Nepal, where many villagers, particularly women, don’t have access to basic education. Women like Harikala rely on local community UNESCO-supported learning centres to receive literacy and tailoring skills. In a country where 32% of people over 15 are illiterate, particularly women and those living in rural areas, education is the only route to becoming self-reliant.

I have saved a small amount. My husband’s income goes towards running the house, mine is saved. We must save today to secure our children’s future

Having access to a classroom is the first step to creating a better world for the student, the student’s children and the student’s community. This is a lesson that matters a lot to

Kalasha Khadka Khatri, a 30-year-old Nepali mother. She grew up in a family of 21, with no option to go to school. Two of her children didn’t survive infancy because she was unable to pay for medical treatment. After acquiring sewing skills at her local community learning centre, Kalasha can now provide for her family.

Harikala and Kalasha were able to learn their skills through the support of the UNESCO’s Capacity Development for Education Programme (CapED), an initiative that operates in some 26 least-developed and fragile countries. 

Reimagining the future of education

As the world slowly recovers after the COVID-19 crisis, 244 million children and youth worldwide are still out of school. And a 2022 survey by UNESCO, UNICEF, World Bank and OECD finds that one quarter of countries have yet to collect information on children who have and have not returned to school since the pandemic started.

Rebuilding how and where we learn requires policy advice, stronger education legislation, funds mobilisation, advocacy, targeted programme implementation based on sound analysis, statistics and global information sharing. Quality education also calls for the teaching of skills far beyond literacy and maths, including critical thinking against fake news in the digital era, living in harmony with nature and the ethics of artificial intelligence, to name a few of the critical skills needed in the 21st century. 

UNESCO  captured the debate around the futures of education in its landmark report from 2022 entitled Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education.

The Transformative Education Summit , that took place during the United Nations General Assembly in September 2022, as well as the Pre-Summit hosted by UNESCO to forge new approaches to education after the COVID-19 crisis, address the toughest bottlenecks to achieving SDG 4 and inspire young people to lead a global movement for education. World leaders committed to put education at the top of the political agenda. UNESCO has been mobilizing and consulting all stakeholders and partners to galvanize the transformation of every aspect of learning. UNESCO launched a number of key initiatives such as expanding public digital learning, making education responsive to the climate and environmental emergency, and improving access for crisis-affected children and youth.

The two children sitting at their makeshift desk in Italy in 1950 could not have imagined what a modern learning space might look like or how a modern curriculum or the tools and teacher training to deliver it might have been thought out and shaped to offer them the most from education. They could not have imagined the global drive to ensure that everyone was given a chance to learn throughout life. The only thing that has not changed since the photo was taken is the fact that education remains a fundamental and universal human right that can change the course of a life. To the millions still living in conditions of poverty, exclusion displacement and violence it opens a door to a better future.

Explore all the work and expertise of UNESCO in education

Related items.

5 Big Challenges Facing K-12 Education Today—And Ideas for Tackling Them

• Share article

Big Ideas is Education Week’s annual special report that brings the expertise of our newsroom to bear on the challenges educators are facing in classrooms, schools, and districts.

In the report , EdWeek reporters ask hard questions about K-12 education’s biggest issues and offer insights based on their extensive coverage and expertise.

The goal is to question the status quo and explore opportunities to help build a better, more just learning environment for all students.

In the 2023 edition , our newsroom sought to dig deeper into new and persistent challenges. Our reporters consider some of the big questions facing the field: Why is teacher pay so stubbornly stalled? What should reading instruction look like? How do we integrate—or even think about—AI? What does it mean for parents to be involved in the decisionmaking around classroom curriculum? And, perhaps the most existential, what does it mean for schools to be “public”?

The reported essays below tackle these vexing and pressing questions. We hope they offer fodder for robust discussions.

To see how your fellow educator peers are feeling about a number of these issues, we invite you to explore the EdWeek Research Center’s survey of more than 1,000 teachers and school and district leaders .

Please connect with us on social media by using #K12BigIdeas or by emailing [email protected].

1. What Does It Actually Mean for Schools to Be Public?

Over years of covering school finance, Mark Lieberman keep running up against one nagging question: Does the way we pay for public schools inherently contradict what we understand the goal of public education to be? Read more →

2. Public Schools Rely on Underpaid Female Labor. It’s Not Sustainable

School districts are still operating largely as if the labor market for women hasn’t changed in the last half century, writes Alyson Klein. Read more →

3. Parents’ Rights Groups Have Mobilized. What Does It Mean for Students?

Libby Stanford has been covering the parents’ rights groups that have led the charge to limit teaching about race, sexuality, and gender. In her essay, she explores what happens to students who miss out on that instruction. Read more→

4. To Move Past the Reading Wars, We Must Understand Where They Started

When it comes to reading instruction, we keep having the same fights over and over again, writes Sarah Schwartz. That’s because, she says, we have a fundamental divide about what reading is and how to study it. Read more→

5. No, AI Won’t Destroy Education. But We Should Be Skeptical

Lauraine Langreo makes the case for using AI to benefit teaching and learning while being aware of its potential downsides. Read more→

Sign Up for The Savvy Principal

Edweek top school jobs.

Sign Up & Sign In

Trade Schools, Colleges and Universities

Join Over 1.5 Million People We've Introduced to Awesome Schools Since 2001

Trade Schools Home > Articles > Issues in Education

Major Issues in Education: 20 Hot Topics (From Grade School to College)

By Publisher | Last Updated August 1, 2023

In America, issues in education are big topics of discussion, both in the news media and among the general public. The current education system is beset by a wide range of challenges, from cuts in government funding to changes in disciplinary policies—and much more. Everyone agrees that providing high-quality education for our citizens is a worthy ideal. However, there are many diverse viewpoints about how that should be accomplished. And that leads to highly charged debates, with passionate advocates on both sides.

Understanding education issues is important for students, parents, and taxpayers. By being well-informed, you can contribute valuable input to the discussion. You can also make better decisions about what causes you will support or what plans you will make for your future.

This article provides detailed information on many of today's most relevant primary, secondary, and post-secondary education issues. It also outlines four emerging trends that have the potential to shake up the education sector. You'll learn about:

• 13 major issues in education at the K-12 level
• 7 big issues in higher education
• 5 emerging trends in education

13 Major Issues in Education at the K-12 Level

1. Government funding for education

School funding is a primary concern when discussing current issues in education. The American public education system, which includes both primary and secondary schools, is primarily funded by tax revenues. For the 2021 school year, state and local governments provided over 89 percent of the funding for public K-12 schools. After the Great Recession, most states reduced their school funding. This reduction makes sense, considering most state funding is sourced from sales and income taxes, which tend to decrease during economic downturns.

However, many states are still giving schools less cash now than they did before the Great Recession. A 2022 article from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) notes that K-12 education is set to receive the largest-ever one-time federal investment. However, the CBPP also predicts this historic funding might fall short due to pandemic-induced education costs. The formulas that states use to fund schools have come under fire in recent years and have even been the subjects of lawsuits. For example, in 2017, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that the legislature's formula for financing schools was unconstitutional because it didn't adequately fund education.

Less funding means that smaller staff, fewer programs, and diminished resources for students are common school problems. In some cases, schools are unable to pay for essential maintenance. A 2021 report noted that close to a quarter of all U.S. public schools are in fair or poor condition and that 53 percent of schools need renovations and repairs. Plus, a 2021 survey discovered that teachers spent an average of $750 of their own money on classroom supplies.

The issue reached a tipping point in 2018, with teachers in Arizona, Colorado, and other states walking off the job to demand additional educational funding. Some of the protests resulted in modest funding increases, but many educators believe that more must be done.

2. School safety

Over the past several years, a string of high-profile mass shootings in U.S. schools have resulted in dozens of deaths and led to debates about the best ways to keep students safe. After 17 people were killed in a shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida in 2018, 57 percent of teenagers said they were worried about the possibility of gun violence at their school.

Figuring out how to prevent such attacks and save students and school personnel's lives are problems faced by teachers all across America.

Former President Trump and other lawmakers suggested that allowing specially trained teachers and other school staff to carry concealed weapons would make schools safer. The idea was that adult volunteers who were already proficient with a firearm could undergo specialized training to deal with an active shooter situation until law enforcement could arrive. Proponents argued that armed staff could intervene to end the threat and save lives. Also, potential attackers might be less likely to target a school if they knew that the school's personnel were carrying weapons.

Critics argue that more guns in schools will lead to more accidents, injuries, and fear. They contend that there is scant evidence supporting the idea that armed school officials would effectively counter attacks. Some data suggests that the opposite may be true: An FBI analysis of active shooter situations between 2000 and 2013 noted that law enforcement personnel who engaged the shooter suffered casualties in 21 out of 45 incidents. And those were highly trained professionals whose primary purpose was to maintain law and order. It's highly unlikely that teachers, whose focus should be on educating children, would do any better in such situations.

According to the National Education Association (NEA), giving teachers guns is not the answer. In a March 2018 survey , 74 percent of NEA members opposed arming school personnel, and two-thirds said they would feel less safe at work if school staff were carrying guns. To counter gun violence in schools, the NEA supports measures like requiring universal background checks, preventing mentally ill people from purchasing guns, and banning assault weapons.

3. Disciplinary policies

Data from the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights in 2021 suggests that black students face disproportionately high rates of suspension and expulsion from school. For instance, in K-12 schools, black male students make up only 7.7 percent of enrollees but account for over 40% percent of suspensions. Many people believe some teachers apply the rules of discipline in a discriminatory way and contribute to what has been termed the "school-to-prison pipeline." That's because research has demonstrated that students who are suspended or expelled are significantly more likely to become involved with the juvenile justice system.

In 2014, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Education issued guidelines for all public schools on developing disciplinary practices that reduce disparities and comply with federal civil rights laws. The guidelines urged schools to limit exclusionary disciplinary tactics such as suspension and expulsion. They also encourage the adoption of more positive interventions such as counseling and restorative justice strategies. In addition, the guidelines specified that schools could face a loss of federal funds if they carried out policies that had a disparate impact on some racial groups.

Opponents argue that banning suspensions and expulsions takes away valuable tools that teachers can use to combat student misbehavior. They maintain that as long as disciplinary policies are applied the same way to every student regardless of race, such policies are not discriminatory. One major 2014 study found that the racial disparities in school suspension rates could be explained by the students' prior behavior rather than by discriminatory tactics on the part of educators.

In 2018, the Federal Commission on School Safety (which was established in the wake of the school shootings in Parkland, Florida) was tasked with reviewing and possibly rescinding the 2014 guidelines. According to an Education Next survey taken shortly after the announced review, only 27 percent of Americans support federal policies that limit racial disparities in school discipline.

4. Technology in education

Technology in education is a powerful movement that is sweeping through schools nationwide. After all, today's students have grown up with digital technology and expect it to be part of their learning experience. But how much of a role should it play in education?

Proponents point out that educational technology offers the potential to engage students in more active learning, as evidenced in flipped classrooms . It can facilitate group collaboration and provide instant access to up-to-date resources. Teachers and instructors can integrate online surveys, interactive case studies, and relevant videos to offer content tailored to different learning styles. Indeed, students with special needs frequently rely on assistive technology to communicate and access course materials.

But there are downsides as well. For instance, technology can be a distraction. Some students tune out of lessons and spend time checking social media, playing games, or shopping online. One research study revealed that students who multitasked on laptops during class scored 11 percent lower on an exam that tested their knowledge of the lecture. Students who sat behind those multitaskers scored 17 percent lower. In the fall of 2017, University of Michigan professor Susan Dynarski cited such research as one of the main reasons she bans electronics in her classes.

More disturbingly, technology can pose a real threat to student privacy and security. The collection of sensitive student data by education technology companies can lead to serious problems. In 2017, a group called Dark Overlord hacked into school district servers in several states and obtained access to students' personal information, including counselor reports and medical records. The group used the data to threaten students and their families with physical violence.

5. Charter schools and voucher programs

School choice is definitely among the hot topics in education these days. Former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was a vocal supporter of various forms of parental choice, including charter schools and school vouchers.

Charter schools are funded through a combination of public and private money and operate independently of the public system. They have charters (i.e., contracts) with school districts, states, or private organizations. These charters outline the academic outcomes that the schools agree to achieve. Like mainstream public schools, charter schools cannot teach religion or charge tuition, and their students must complete standardized testing . However, charter schools are not limited to taking students in a certain geographic area. They have more autonomy to choose their teaching methods. Charter schools are also subject to less oversight and fewer regulations.

School vouchers are like coupons that allow parents to use public funds to send their child to the school of their choice, which can be private and may be either secular or religious. In many cases, vouchers are reserved for low-income students or students with disabilities.

Advocates argue that charter schools and school vouchers offer parents a greater range of educational options. Opponents say that they privatize education and siphon funding away from regular public schools that are already financially strapped. The 2018 Education Next survey found that 44 percent of the general public supports charter schools' expansion, while 35 percent oppose such a move. The same poll found that 54 percent of people support vouchers.

6. Common Core

The Common Core State Standards is a set of academic standards for math and language arts that specify what public school students are expected to learn by the end of each year from kindergarten through 12th grade. Developed in 2009, the standards were designed to promote equity among public K-12 students. All students would take standardized end-of-year tests and be held to the same internationally benchmarked standards. The idea was to institute a system that brought all schools up to the same level and allowed for comparison of student performance in different regions. Such standards would help all students with college and career readiness.

Some opponents see the standards as an unwelcome federal intrusion into state control of education. Others are critical of the way the standards were developed with little input from experienced educators. Many teachers argue that the standards result in inflexible lesson plans that allow for less creativity and fun in the learning process.

Some critics also take issue with the lack of accommodation for non-traditional learners. The Common Core prescribes standards for each grade level, but students with disabilities or language barriers often need more time to fully learn the material.

The vast majority of states adopted the Common Core State Standards when they were first introduced. Since then, more than a dozen states have either repealed the standards or revised them to align better with local needs. In many cases, the standards themselves have remained virtually the same but given a different name.

And a name can be significant. In the Education Next 2018 survey, a group of American adults was asked whether they supported common standards across states. About 61 percent replied that they did. But when another group was polled about Common Core specifically, only 45 percent said they supported it.

7. Standardized testing

During the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) years, schools—and teachers—were judged by how well students scored on such tests. Schools whose results weren't up to par faced intense scrutiny, and in some cases, state takeover or closure. Teachers' effectiveness was rated by how much improvement their students showed on standardized exams. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which took effect in 2016, removed NCLB's most punitive aspects. Still, it maintained the requirement to test students every year in Grades 3 to 8, and once in high school.

But many critics say that rampant standardized testing is one of the biggest problems in education. They argue that the pressure to produce high test scores has resulted in a teach-to-the-test approach to instruction in which other non-tested subjects (such as art, music, and physical education) have been given short shrift to devote more time to test preparation. And they contend that policymakers overemphasize the meaning of standardized test results, which don't present a clear or complete picture of overall student learning.

8. Teacher salaries

According to 2021-22 data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), in most states, teacher pay has decreased over the last several years. However, in some states average salaries went up. It's also important to note that public school teachers generally enjoy pensions and other benefits that make up a large share of their compensation.

But the growth in benefits has not been enough to balance out the overall low wages. An Economic Policy Institute report found that even after factoring in benefits, public-sector teachers faced a compensation penalty of 14.2 percent in 2021 relative to other college graduates.

9. The teaching of evolution

In the U.S., public school originated to spread religious ideals, but it has since become a strictly secular institution. And the debate over how to teach public school students about the origins of life has gone on for almost a century.

Today, Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection is accepted by virtually the entire scientific community. However, it is still controversial among many Americans who maintain that living things were guided into existence. A pair of surveys from 2014 revealed that 98 percent of scientists aligned with the American Association for the Advancement of Science believed that humans evolved. But it also revealed that, overall, only 52 percent of American adults agreed.

Over the years, some states have outright banned teachers from discussing evolution in the classroom. Others have mandated that students be allowed to question the scientific soundness of evolution, or that equal time be given to consideration of the Judeo-Christian notion of divine creation (i.e., creationism).

Some people argue that the theory of intelligent design—which posits that the complexities of living things cannot be explained by natural selection and can best be explained as resulting from an intelligent cause—is a legitimate scientific theory that should be allowed in public school curricula. They say it differs from creationism because it doesn't necessarily ascribe life's design to a supernatural deity or supreme being.

Opponents contend that intelligent design is creationism in disguise. They think it should not be taught in public schools because it is religiously motivated and has no credible scientific basis. And the courts have consistently held that the teaching of creationism and intelligent design promotes religious beliefs and therefore violates the Constitution's prohibition against the government establishment of religion. Still, the debate continues.

10. Teacher tenure

Having tenure means that a teacher cannot be let go unless their school district demonstrates just cause. Many states grant tenure to public school teachers who have received satisfactory evaluations for a specified period of time (which ranges from one to five years, depending on the state). A few states do not grant tenure at all. And the issue has long been mired in controversy.

Proponents argue that tenure protects teachers from being dismissed for personal or political reasons, such as disagreeing with administrators or teaching contentious subjects such as evolution. Tenured educators can advocate for students without fear of reprisal. Supporters also say that tenure gives teachers the freedom to try innovative instruction methods to deliver more engaging educational experiences. Tenure also protects more experienced (and more expensive) teachers from being arbitrarily replaced with new graduates who earn lower salaries.

Critics contend that tenure makes it difficult to dismiss ineffectual teachers because going through the legal process of doing so is extremely costly and time-consuming. They say that tenure can encourage complacency since teachers' jobs are secure whether they exceed expectations or just do the bare minimum. Plus, while the granting of tenure often hinges on teacher evaluations, 2017 research found that, in practice, more than 99 percent of teachers receive ratings of satisfactory or better. Some administrators admit to being reluctant to give low ratings because of the time and effort required to document teachers' performance and provide support for improvement.

11. Bullying

Bullying continues to be a major issue in schools all across the U.S. According to a National Center for Education Statistics study , around 22 percent of students in Grades 6 through 12 reported having been bullied at school, or on their way to or from school, in 2019. That figure was down from 28 percent in 2009, but it is still far too high.

The same study revealed that over 22 percent of students reported being bullied once a day, and 6.3 percent reported experiencing bullying two to ten times in a day. In addition, the percentage of students who reported the bullying to an adult was over 45 percent in 2019.

But that still means that almost 60 percent of students are not reporting bullying. And that means children are suffering.

Bullied students experience a range of emotional, physical, and behavioral problems. They often feel angry, anxious, lonely, and helpless. They are frequently scared to go to school, leading them to suffer academically and develop a low sense of self-worth. They are also at greater risk of engaging in violent acts or suicidal behaviors.

Every state has anti-bullying legislation in place, and schools are expected to develop policies to address the problem. However, there are differences in how each state defines bullying and what procedures it mandates when bullying is reported. And only about one-third of states call for school districts to include provisions for support services such as counseling for students who are victims of bullying (or are bullies themselves).

12. Poverty

Student poverty is a growing problem. Data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that as of the 2019-2020 school year, low-income students comprised a majority (52 percent) of public school students in the U.S. That represented a significant increase from 2000-2001, when only 38 percent of students were considered low-income (meaning they qualified for free or discounted school lunches).

The numbers are truly alarming: In 39 states, at least 40 percent of public school enrollees were eligible to receive free or reduced-price lunches, and 22 of those states had student poverty rates of 50 percent or more.

Low-income students tend to perform worse in school than their more affluent peers. Studies have shown that family income strongly correlates to student achievement on standardized tests. That may be partly because parents with fewer financial resources generally can't afford tutoring and other enrichment experiences to boost student achievement. In addition, low-income children are much more likely to experience food instability, family turmoil, and other stressors that can negatively affect their academic success.

All of this means that teachers face instructional challenges that go beyond students' desires to learn.

13. Class size

According to NCES data , in the 2017-2018 school year, the average class size in U.S. public schools was 26.2 students at the elementary level and 23.3 students at the secondary level.

But anecdotal reports suggest that today, classrooms commonly have more than 30 students—sometimes as many as 40.

Conventional wisdom holds that smaller classes are beneficial to student learning. Teachers often argue that the size of a class greatly influences the quality of the instruction they are able to provide. Research from the National Education Policy Center in 2016 showed smaller classes improve student outcomes, particularly for early elementary, low-income, and minority students.

Many (but not all) states have regulations in place that impose limits on class sizes. However, those limits become increasingly difficult to maintain in an era of budget constraints. Reducing class sizes requires hiring more teachers and constructing new classrooms. Arguably, allowing class sizes to expand can enable districts to absorb funding cuts without making reductions to other programs such as art and physical education.

7 Big Issues in Higher Education

1. Student loan forgiveness

Here's how the American public education system works: Students attend primary and secondary school at no cost. They have the option of going on to post-secondary training (which, for most students, is not free). So with costs rising at both public and private institutions of higher learning, student loan debt is one of the most prominent issues in education today. Students who graduated from college in 2022 came out with an average debt load of $37,338. As a whole, Americans owe over $1.7 trillion in student loans.

Currently, students who have received certain federal student loans and are on income-driven repayment plans can qualify to have their remaining balance forgiven if they haven't repaid the loan in full after 20 to 25 years, depending on the plan. Additionally, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program allows qualified borrowers who go into public service careers (such as teaching, government service, social work, or law enforcement) to have their student debt canceled after ten years.

However, potential changes are in the works. The Biden-Harris Administration is working to support students and make getting a post-secondary education more affordable. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Education provided more than $17 billion in loan relief to over 700,000 borrowers. Meanwhile, a growing number of Democrats are advocating for free college as an alternative to student loans.

2. Completion rates

The large number of students who begin post-secondary studies but do not graduate continues to be an issue. According to a National Student Clearinghouse Research Center report , the overall six-year college completion rate for the cohort entering college in 2015 was 62.2 percent. Around 58 percent of students completed a credential at the same institution where they started their studies, and about another 8 percent finished at a different institution.

Completion rates are increasing, but there is still concern over the significant percentage of college students who do not graduate. Almost 9 percent of students who began college in 2015 had still not completed a degree or certificate six years later. Over 22 percent of them had dropped out entirely.

Significant costs are associated with starting college but not completing it. Many students end up weighed down by debt, and those who do not complete their higher education are less able to repay loans. Plus, students miss out on formal credentials that could lead to higher earnings. Numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that in 2021 students who begin college but do not complete a degree have median weekly earnings of $899. By contrast, associate degree holders have median weekly wages of $963, and bachelor's degree recipients have median weekly earnings of $1,334.

Students leave college for many reasons, but chief among them is money. To mitigate that, some institutions have implemented small retention or completion grants. Such grants are for students who are close to graduating, have financial need, have used up all other sources of aid, owe a modest amount, and are at risk of dropping out due to lack of funds. One study found that around a third of the institutions who implemented such grants noted higher graduation rates among grant recipients.

3. Student mental health

Mental health challenges among students are a growing concern. A survey by the American College Health Association in the spring of 2019 found that over two-thirds of college students had experienced "overwhelming anxiety" within the previous 12 months. Almost 45 percent reported higher-than-average stress levels.

Anxiety, stress, and depression were the most common concerns among students who sought treatment. The 2021 report by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH) noted the average number of appointments students needed has increased by 20 percent.

And some schools are struggling to keep up. A 2020 report found that the average student-to-clinician ratio on U.S. campuses was 1,411 to 1. So, in some cases, suffering students face long waits for treatment.

4. Sexual assault

The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that more than 75 percent of sexual assaults are not reported to law enforcement, so the actual number of incidents could be much higher.

And the way that colleges and universities deal with sexual assault is undergoing changes. Title IX rules makes sure that complaints of sexual assault or harassment are taken seriously and ensuring the accused person is treated fairly.

Administrators were also required to adjudicate such cases based on a preponderance of evidence, meaning that they had to believe that it was more likely than not that an accused was guilty in order to proceed with disciplinary action. The "clear and convincing" evidentiary standard, which required that administrators be reasonably certain that sexual violence or harassment occurred, was deemed unacceptable.

Critics argued that the guidelines failed to respect the due process rights of those accused of sexual misconduct. Research has found that the frequency of false sexual assault allegations is between two and 10 percent.

In 2017, the Trump administration rescinded the Obama-era guidelines. The intent was to institute new regulations on how schools should handle sexual assault allegations. The changes went into effect on August 14, 2020, defining sexual harassment more narrowly and only requiring schools to investigate formal complaints about on-campus incidents officially filed with designated authorities, such as Title IX coordinators. The updated guidelines also allow schools to use the clear and convincing standard for conviction.

Victims' rights advocates were concerned this approach would deter victims from coming forward and hinder efforts to create safe learning environments.

The Biden administration is expected to release their proposed revisions to Title IX in October 2023 which could see many of the Trump administration changes rescinded.

5. Trigger warnings

The use of trigger warnings in academia is a highly contentious issue. Trigger warnings alert students that upcoming course material contains concepts or images that may invoke psychological or physiological reactions in people who have experienced trauma. Some college instructors provide such warnings before introducing films, texts, or other content involving things like violence or sexual abuse. The idea is to give students advance notice so that they can psychologically prepare themselves.

Some believe that trigger warnings are essential because they allow vulnerable people to prepare for and navigate difficult content. Having trigger warnings allows students with post-traumatic stress to decide whether they will engage with the material or find an alternative way to acquire the necessary information.

Critics argue that trigger warnings constrain free speech and academic freedom by discouraging the discussion of topics that might trigger distressing reactions in some students. They point out that college faculty already provide detailed course syllabi and that it's impossible to anticipate and acknowledge every potential trigger.

In 2015, NPR Ed surveyed more than 800 faculty members at higher education institutions across the U.S. and found that around half had given trigger warnings before bringing up potentially disturbing course material. Most did so on their own initiative, not in response to administrative policy or student requests. Few schools either mandate or prohibit trigger warnings. One notable exception is the University of Chicago, which in 2016 informed all incoming first-year students that it did not support such warnings.

6. College accreditation

In order to participate in federal student financial aid programs, institutions of higher education must be accredited by an agency that is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education. By law, accreditors must consider factors such as an institution's facilities, equipment, curricula, admission practices, faculty, and support services. The idea is to enforce an acceptable standard of quality.

But while federal regulations require accreditors to assess each institution's "success with respect to student achievement," they don't specify how to measure such achievement. Accreditors are free to define that for themselves. Unfortunately, some colleges with questionable practices, low graduation rates, and high student loan default rates continue to be accredited. Critics argue that accreditors are not doing enough to ensure that students receive good value for their money.

7. College rankings

Every year, prospective college students and their families turn to rankings like the ones produced by U.S. News & World Report to compare different institutions of higher education. Many people accept such rankings as authoritative without truly understanding how they are calculated or what they measure.

It's common for ranking organizations to refine their methodologies from year to year and change how they weigh various factors—which means it's possible for colleges to rise or fall in the rankings despite making no substantive changes to their programs or institutional policies. That makes it difficult to compare rankings from one year to the next, since things are often measured differently.

For colleges, a higher ranking can lead to more visibility, more qualified applicants, and more alumni donations (in short: more money). And the unfortunate reality is that some schools outright lie about test scores, graduation rates, or financial information in their quest to outrank their competitors.

Others take advantage of creative ways to game the system. For example, U.S. News looks at the test scores of incoming students at each institution, but it only looks at students who begin in the fall semester. One school instituted a program where students with lower test scores could spend their first semester in a foreign country and return to the school in the spring, thus excluding them from the U.S. News calculations.

Rankings do make useful information about U.S. colleges and universities available to all students and their families. But consumers should be cautious about blindly accepting such rankings as true measures of educational quality.

5 Emerging Trends in Education

1. Maker learning

The maker movement is rapidly gaining traction in K-12 schools across America. Maker learning is based on the idea that you will engage students in learning by encouraging interest-driven problem solving and hands-on activities (i.e., learning by doing). In collaborative spaces, students identify problems, dream up inventions, make prototypes, and keep tinkering until they develop something that makes sense. It's a do-it-yourself educational approach that focuses on iterative trial and error and views failure as an opportunity to refine and improve.

Maker education focuses on learning rather than teaching. Students follow their interests and test their own solutions. For example, that might mean creating a video game, building a rocket, designing historical costumes, or 3D-printing an irrigation system for a garden. It can involve high-tech equipment, but it doesn't have to. Repurposing whatever materials are on hand is an important ideal of the maker philosophy.

There is little hard data available on the maker trend. However, researchers at Rutgers University are currently studying the cognitive basis for maker education and investigating its connection to meaningful learning.

2. Moving away from letter grades

Many education advocates believe that the traditional student assessment models place too much emphasis on standardization and testing. They feel that traditional grading models do not sufficiently measure many of the most prized skills in the 21st-century workforce, such as problem-solving, self-advocacy, and creativity. As a result, a growing number of schools around the U.S. are replacing A-F letter grades with new assessment systems.

Formed in 2017, the Mastery Transcript Consortium is a group of more than 150 private high schools that have pledged to get rid of grade-based transcripts in favor of digital ones that provide qualitative descriptions of student learning as well as samples of student work. Some of the most famous private institutions in America have signed on, including Dalton and Phillips Exeter.

The no-more-grades movement is taking hold in public schools as well. Many states have enacted policies to encourage public schools to use something other than grades to assess students' abilities. It's part of a larger shift toward what's commonly known as mastery-based or competency-based learning, which strives to ensure that students become proficient in defined areas of skill.

Instead of letter grades, report cards may feature phrases like "partially meets the standard" or "exceeds the standard." Some schools also include portfolios, capstone projects, or other demonstrations of student learning.

But what happens when it's time to apply to college? It seems that even colleges and universities are getting on board. At least 85 higher education institutions across New England (including Dartmouth and Harvard) have said that students with competency-based transcripts will not be disadvantaged during the admission process.

3. The rise of micro-credentials

Micro-credentials, also known as digital badges or nanodegrees, are mini qualifications that demonstrate a student's knowledge or skills in a given area. Unlike traditional college degrees that require studying a range of different subjects over a multi-year span, micro-credentials are earned through short, targeted education focused on specific skills in particular fields. They tend to be inexpensive (sometimes even free) and are typically taken online.

Some post-secondary schools are developing micro-credentialing partnerships with third-party learning providers, while other schools offer such solutions on their own. A 2020 Campus Technology article stated 70 percent of higher education institutions offer some type of alternative credentialing.

Micro-credentials can serve as evidence that students have mastered particular skills, but the rigor and market worth of such credentials can vary significantly. Still, they are an increasingly popular way of unbundling content and providing it on demand.

4. Flipped classrooms

A growing number of schools are embracing the notion of flipped learning. It's an instructional approach that reverses the traditional model of the teacher giving a lecture in front of the class, then sending students home to work through assignments that enhance their understanding of the concepts. In flipped learning, students watch lecture videos or read relevant course content on their own before class. Class time is devoted to expanding on the material through group discussions and collaborative learning projects (i.e., doing what was traditionally meant as homework). The instructor is there to guide students when questions or problems arise.

Provided that all students have access to the appropriate technology and are motivated to prepare for each class session, flipped learning can bring a wide range of benefits. For example, it allows students to control their own learning by watching lecture videos at their own pace; they can pause, jot down questions, or re-watch parts they find confusing. The model also encourages students to learn from each other and explore subjects more deeply.

Flipped learning is becoming widespread in all education levels, but it is especially prevalent at the college level. In a 2017 survey , 61 percent of college faculty had used the flipped model in some or all of their classes and another 24% of instructors were considering trying it.

5. Social-emotional learning

There is a growing consensus that schools are responsible for fostering students' social and emotional development and their cognitive skills. Social-emotional learning (SEL) focuses on helping students develop the abilities to identify their strengths, manage their emotions, set goals, show empathy, make responsible decisions, and build and maintain healthy relationships. Research has shown that such skills play a key role in reducing anti-social behavior, boosting academic achievement, and improving long-term health.

Every state has developed SEL competencies at the preschool level. The number of states with such competencies for higher grades is growing.

Explore Your Educational Options

Learning about current issues in education may have brought up some questions that could hold the key to the future you want to build. How do I get the skills I need for my chosen career? How can I learn more about the programs offered at trade schools near me ?

You can get started right here, right now. You can get started right here, right now. The search tool below will narrow down the best options based on your zip code. And these vocational schools are eager to provide the information you need to decide on the right fit for you.

Related Articles

Where do you want to study?

What do you want to study?

What's your {{waterMark}} code?

"I recommend using Trade-Schools.net because you can find the program that you are interested in nearby or online. " Trade-Schools.net User

• My Favorites

You have successfully logged in but...

... your login credentials do not authorize you to access this content in the selected format. Access to this content in this format requires a current subscription or a prior purchase. Please select the WEB or READ option instead (if available). Or consider purchasing the publication.

Sorry. We are unable to display the page you requested at this time.

12 Emerging Education Trends (2024 & 2025)

You may also like:

• Key Business Trends
• Fast-Growing Edtech Startups
• Important Technology Trends

The education world is changing faster than ever.

Thanks in large part to improving technology and new research-led learning approaches, the education space was seeing a rapid shift towards high-tech approaches.

Here is a list of the top 12 trends in education happening right now:

1. AI Creates New Learning Opportunities 

AI has the potential to completely transform the education space.

That's because AI chatbots ( like ChatGPT ) can serve as personalized tutors, offering 24/7 support.

For example, a student struggling with a coding problem can upload the code to an LLM. The AI can generate personalized feedback. And then tailor future lessons to that student's strengths and weaknesses.

To be clear: AI isn't likely to replace teachers or tutors. 

Instead, AI will serve as a co-pilot that helps educators get more done in less time.

Besides personalized instruction, other ways AI can aid in education include:

• Analyzing student data:  AI can quickly analyze large amounts of student data to figure out where entire classrooms or specific students need more guidance.
• Lesson creation: Generative AI tools can help teachers quickly generate lesson plans, visuals and even lecture slides. 
• Note taking and action plans:  Students may not need to worry about taking notes. AI can turn lesson transcriptions into summaries that highlight key points.
• Automatic grading:  When properly trained with examples and detailed criteria, AI tools can evaluate homework, essays and tests.
• Improved accessibility: AI can provide targeted assistance to students that struggle with learning disabilities. 

2. Neuroeducation Makes Inroads

The emerging field of  educational neuroscience is shedding light on what works best when it comes to learning new concepts and skills.

And the field is quickly discovering that many mainstream education practices aren’t supported by research.

For example, these common teaching methods have all been called into question lately:

• In-person lectures
• One-size-fits-all lessons
• Memorization-based testing
• Unguided homework

While new approaches have been introduced to deal with timeless challenges like maintaining students’ attention . And encouraging critical thinking.

Neuroeducation is a subfield where teaching approaches are backed by the principles of neuroscience.

And as you can see below, interest has shown strong long-term growth.

One of the pillars of this field is personalizing the learning process for each student.

Either by teaching in small groups. Or by using artificial intelligence to cater lessons to each student's learning needs.

3. Microlearning Gains Traction

It’s no secret that humans have an inherent limit to how much information they can retain from a single learning session.

Especially when the subject matter is not covered again later.

But traditional education tends to overload students with long lectures…and expect them to remember everything they just learned.

(Or to study it on their own, which is a skill many students don't have .)

Enter: the emerging microlearning trend.

Microlearning is a form of spaced repetition learning, in which lessons are broken up into bite-sized chunks and repeated over time.

This is said to help new concepts and skills sink in for the long term.

According to microlearning proponents, short, spaced bursts of learning can significantly boost retention .

That’s probably why searches for "microlearning" have increased over the past five years.

4. Online Learning Gains Ground

According to Research and Markets, the online education landscape is set to become a $319 billion industry by 2025.

The three major benefits of online learning compared to offline are: cost, convenience, and scale.

And scale - the ability of one incredible educator to reach an unlimited number of students - has massive potential for raising the quality of education as well.

But as often happens in the education space, cost may end up being the deciding factor.

It’s significantly cheaper to take an online course than it is to enroll in a traditional four-year college.

Also, satisfaction rates for people that take online courses are high.

In fact, BestColleges.com’s Online Education Trends Report states that 94% of students who take online courses are satisfied with the experience.

This is why the "classroom" of the 21st century may be 100% online (via virtual reality or augmented reality).

Or a form of blended learning that's primarily done online.

One clear example of the online learning trend is the online course platform Udemy .

Udemy is an online platform geared toward professionals who want to improve their skills.

It hosts thousands of courses across hundreds of different topics. 

And as a business, it has a market cap of $1.3 billion .

Its growth has been meteoric.

More and more traditional accredited universities are offering online curricula as well.

MIT was a trailblazer here, offering pre-recorded world-class courses online for free with the MITx program.

But lots of other colleges have now entered the online education space, including offering fully online bachelor’s degrees .

Still, more universities started offering live online courses as an emergency measure during the coronavirus crisis.

It’s only natural that a good portion of them will continue to offer the same in the future as well.

And because some of the most popular tools being used to conduct live online courses weren’t specifically designed for education - for example, Zoom - you can bet that there will be many more purpose-built tools available to educators soon.

In fact, there are dozens of edtech startups aiming to fill this gap in the market.

5. Instructors with Star Power

Yes, Udemy is a top player in the online education space.

But there’s another platform that’s taking a different approach to elearning: MasterClass .

MasterClass has taken a unique spin on online training. Instead of hiring professional teachers (like college professors), their courses are taught by practitioners in the field (often celebrities).

For example, you can learn about filmmaking from Martin Scorsese.

Or business from former Disney CEO Bob Iger.

This unconventional approach has paid off big time for MasterClass. They've raised over $400 million to date . With MasterClass seeing unprecedented success, expect to see more education platforms tap into big-name instructors for their courses in the coming years.

6. Independent Entrepreneurs Launch More Online Courses

Udemy made it so anyone with a camera could launch their own online course.

Just one problem: Udemy keeps a hefty cut of the revenue.

So many course creators and “infopreneurs” are now choosing to sell courses from their own websites, cutting out the middleman.

Until recently, this could be a real challenge.

Between creating a course members’ area on your website to setting up payment processing and video hosting, a lot of administration time and technical skills were required to offer a course by yourself.

But a number of new players in the "learning management system" (LMS) space have made launching a course a lot easier.

For example, Thinkific .

Thinkific is an all-in-one tool for online course creation, promotion and hosting.

Like other learning management systems, Thinkific has made it super easy for entrepreneurs, bloggers, and YouTubers to host and manage courses on their own sites.

And to keep the vast majority of revenue for themselves.

It's been exploding in popularity:

Teachable is another education technology company in this space.

Similar to Thinkific, Teachable offers software and cloud hosting for course creation and management, as well as payment processing.

In fact, Teachable boasts that course creators on its platform have earned over $500 million .

If that's the case, maybe the teachers of the future won't be so underpaid.

7. Niche Education Platforms Take Off

General platforms like Udemy and MasterClass are great if you want to learn how to write a screenplay or cook a great meal.

But they’re lacking when it comes to advanced courses that professionals in technical fields need to advance their careers.

This is why niche platforms for specific groups are starting to pop up.

These platforms provide the kind of deep, advanced training that isn’t broadly available elsewhere.

For example, Cybrary provides courses for people in IT.

They even design their courses around tests that IT professionals need to pass in order to get important certifications.

Another example of a technically-minded niche education is  Hack The Box .

This online school offers training solutions for cybersecurity professionals (and students who want to enter the field).

It also uses gamification techniques to run in-depth competitions - complete with a scoring system and global leaderboard.

8. New Startups Offer More Homeschooling Options

About 3.4% of school-aged children in the US are homeschooled each year.

Lately, a variety of education startups have entered the homeschooling space.

One example is Outschool . 

Started by former employees of Google, Square, and Airbnb, this edtech startup matches students with teachers online for a live small-group, virtual learning experience.

Another example is Prenda .

Prenda's approach is different.

Rather than being online, Prenda's focus is "microschools": small groups of students who meet in person, outside of a traditional learning environment.

9. Higher Education Adopts Extended Reality

Extended reality (XR), which includes technology such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR), is transforming the education landscape by providing innovative ways to learn.

Overall, the XR market is predicted to grow at a CAGR of nearly 35% through 2028, according to data from Mordor Intelligence. A generous portion of that growth will come from the education sector.

A survey from EDUCAUSE reported that nearly  40% of higher education institutions have adopted XR for at least a few projects and 12% are using XR across multiple departments.

An overwhelming majority of respondents (90%) said their adoption of XR will somewhat or significantly increase in the next five years.

A number of colleges and universities are already using XR to facilitate learning.

At Colorado State University, medical school students use VR to dissect human cadavers.

Nearly 90% of the students who have used this technology say VR has helped them to understand spatial relationships, which is a crucial skill for potential physicians.

The University of Michigan announced its “ XR Initiative ,” and offered several XR courses last year . 

In their latest announcement, the university said they have plans to partner with Coursera in launching 10 new XR courses in 2023 .

The courses cover AR/VR design, entrepreneurship, and specialized content for growing industries all aimed at bringing online learning to the next level, according to the university.

10. A Renewed Emphasis on Soft Skills

More than 90% of HR professionals agree that soft skills are very important to the future of recruiting, according to a report from LinkedIn.

In fact, the importance of soft skills ranked higher than work flexibility, anti-harassment, and pay transparency.

Monster’s Future of Work Global Survey identified the most important soft skills as teamwork, communication, and problem-solving. However, businesses report that the top two soft-skill gaps they’re seeing are in teamwork and communication.

This disconnect is leading many educational institutions and employers to place a renewed emphasis on soft-skills training.

In fact, a study of more than 150k students in Chicago public high schools found that building social-emotional qualities , such as how to resolve conflict and how to stay motivated to work hard, achieved better results for students than schools that focused solely on test scores.

In another example, some schools have suggested modifying traditional grading so that soft skills like communication, determination, and participation would be taken into account instead of just skill mastery.

When it comes to employees, companies are looking for innovative ways to close the soft skills gap.

Virtual reality (VR) is one way they’re doing it.

H&R Block recently started using VR training to teach their new employees the soft skills they need in order to handle angry customers.

More than two-thirds of the employees enjoyed this learning as compared to traditional methods and the company saw a 50% reduction in dissatisfied customers.

Murison is an industry-leading platform that’s enabling companies to create these VR training opportunities.

Their platform blends AI and live human interaction to create authentic training simulations specifically aimed at improving employees’ soft skills related to sales, customer service, DEI topics, and leadership.

11. Educators Considering Alternative Assessments

While some educational professionals have always doubted schools’ reliance on testing , the pandemic made many more question the validity and usefulness of summative assessments.

The State of Teaching and Learning survey from Instructure showed that fewer than 30% of parents and teachers felt that high-stakes testing was an important measurement of students’ learning.

The survey showed that 50% of administrators and 58% of teachers feel this way of testing is outdated and needs overhauling.

One reason for this is called Campbell’s Law . It’s the general idea that once schools tie test scores to a teacher’s pay, the teacher begins teaching to the test rather than making sure children get a well-rounded education.

Another reason for the distrust of traditional high-stakes assessments is that many believe they are classist and racist.

Several analyses have found that students from higher-income households perform better on standardized tests like the SAT and ACT.

Some accuse the test questions themselves of being skewed toward upper-class and White students.

These assessments are also proving to be an unreliable predictor of future success.

A study published in Educational Researcher showed that students’ GPA was a 5x stronger predictor of college graduation than their ACT scores.

Spurred on by complications associated with the pandemic, a few institutions removed their SAT/ACT requirements for admissions.

At Harvard, standardized tests are optional through 2026. The University of Wisconsin, Stanford University, and Miami University in Ohio—just to name a few—have adopted similar policies.

If institutions are no longer going to rely on standardized testing, what will they do instead?

The Mastery Transcript is one option.

Like the name suggests, it’s a transcript that records a student’s mastery of subjects and topics. There aren’t any traditional letter grades and it’s not a one-time view of what the student knows and is able to do.

Students earn “mastery credits” and the transcript serves as an evolving sample of their work. Evidence and abilities from inside and outside the classroom is included.

This transcript is currently accepted by 250 colleges in the United States.

As for testing elementary students , public schools in New Mexico tried a variety of strategies in 2022.

The New Mexico Measures of Student Success and Achievement debuted this year with shorter tests and questions that were deemed culturally appropriate for children in New Mexico.

There were also short-cycle tests. These were assessments at the beginning, middle, and end of the year.

12. Teacher Shortage Worsens

Rand Corporation’s most recent State of the US Teacher Survey found that  23% of teachers said they were likely to leave their current job at the end of the school year.

Research from EdWeek shows that 54% of teachers say they’re somewhat or very likely to leave their jobs within the next two years.

In a normal year, about 8% of teachers leave the profession.

Teacher shortages are already being felt across the country.

The US Department of Education reports that nearly every state suffers from a shortage of special education teachers. In addition, 44 states have math teacher shortages and 42 states have science teacher shortages.

Aside from the pandemic, a lack of pay is one of the top reasons why teachers leave their jobs.

Teachers are now paid significantly less when compared to other college-educated workers who had similar education and experience.

The average hourly wage for a substitute teacher currently hovers between $13 and $18 .

Several states are working to raise teacher salaries in order to entice new teachers to join the field and keep seasoned professionals from retiring early.

New Mexico, a state that is short 1,000 teaching staff members, enacted legislation in early 2022 that will increase teacher salaries by at least $10k.

Many other states are looking to ease their standards for teachers in order to attract professionals from different industries.

For example, the Florida legislature recently passed a bill that allows military members, even those without bachelor’s degrees, to teach in a classroom for up to five years.

Missouri, which ranks 50th in the nation in teacher pay, recently announced that the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education will license teachers who score below a passing grade as long as they’ve maintained a 3.0 GPA in college and completed student teaching.

Some education professionals warn against strategies like these.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said, “It’s very dangerous. It’s a good and dangerous example of the disrespect for knowledge in this country”.

That wraps up our list of the top education trends to watch in over the next year.

It's exciting to see where the education space is headed.

While some approaches may remain constant, new technology (specifically AI) is expanding educational abilities without increasing costs.

At the same time, new science-based approaches to teaching are improving the learning experience for students of all ages.

Find Thousands of Trending Topics With Our Platform

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• Review Article
• Open access
• Published: 12 February 2024

Education reform and change driven by digital technology: a bibliometric study from a global perspective

• Chengliang Wang 1 ,
• Xiaojiao Chen 1 ,
• Teng Yu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5198-7261 2 , 3 ,
• Yidan Liu 1 , 4 &
• Yuhui Jing 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  256 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

10k Accesses

1 Altmetric

Metrics details

• Development studies
• Science, technology and society

Amidst the global digital transformation of educational institutions, digital technology has emerged as a significant area of interest among scholars. Such technologies have played an instrumental role in enhancing learner performance and improving the effectiveness of teaching and learning. These digital technologies also ensure the sustainability and stability of education during the epidemic. Despite this, a dearth of systematic reviews exists regarding the current state of digital technology application in education. To address this gap, this study utilized the Web of Science Core Collection as a data source (specifically selecting the high-quality SSCI and SCIE) and implemented a topic search by setting keywords, yielding 1849 initial publications. Furthermore, following the PRISMA guidelines, we refined the selection to 588 high-quality articles. Using software tools such as CiteSpace, VOSviewer, and Charticulator, we reviewed these 588 publications to identify core authors (such as Selwyn, Henderson, Edwards), highly productive countries/regions (England, Australia, USA), key institutions (Monash University, Australian Catholic University), and crucial journals in the field ( Education and Information Technologies , Computers & Education , British Journal of Educational Technology ). Evolutionary analysis reveals four developmental periods in the research field of digital technology education application: the embryonic period, the preliminary development period, the key exploration, and the acceleration period of change. The study highlights the dual influence of technological factors and historical context on the research topic. Technology is a key factor in enabling education to transform and upgrade, and the context of the times is an important driving force in promoting the adoption of new technologies in the education system and the transformation and upgrading of education. Additionally, the study identifies three frontier hotspots in the field: physical education, digital transformation, and professional development under the promotion of digital technology. This study presents a clear framework for digital technology application in education, which can serve as a valuable reference for researchers and educational practitioners concerned with digital technology education application in theory and practice.

Similar content being viewed by others

A bibliometric analysis of knowledge mapping in Chinese education digitalization research from 2012 to 2022

Digital transformation and digital literacy in the context of complexity within higher education institutions: a systematic literature review

Education big data and learning analytics: a bibliometric analysis

Introduction.

Digital technology has become an essential component of modern education, facilitating the extension of temporal and spatial boundaries and enriching the pedagogical contexts (Selwyn and Facer, 2014 ). The advent of mobile communication technology has enabled learning through social media platforms (Szeto et al. 2015 ; Pires et al. 2022 ), while the advancement of augmented reality technology has disrupted traditional conceptions of learning environments and spaces (Perez-Sanagustin et al., 2014 ; Kyza and Georgiou, 2018 ). A wide range of digital technologies has enabled learning to become a norm in various settings, including the workplace (Sjöberg and Holmgren, 2021 ), home (Nazare et al. 2022 ), and online communities (Tang and Lam, 2014 ). Education is no longer limited to fixed locations and schedules, but has permeated all aspects of life, allowing learning to continue at any time and any place (Camilleri and Camilleri, 2016 ; Selwyn and Facer, 2014 ).

The advent of digital technology has led to the creation of several informal learning environments (Greenhow and Lewin, 2015 ) that exhibit divergent form, function, features, and patterns in comparison to conventional learning environments (Nygren et al. 2019 ). Consequently, the associated teaching and learning processes, as well as the strategies for the creation, dissemination, and acquisition of learning resources, have undergone a complete overhaul. The ensuing transformations have posed a myriad of novel issues, such as the optimal structuring of teaching methods by instructors and the adoption of appropriate learning strategies by students in the new digital technology environment. Consequently, an examination of the principles that underpin effective teaching and learning in this environment is a topic of significant interest to numerous scholars engaged in digital technology education research.

Over the course of the last two decades, digital technology has made significant strides in the field of education, notably in extending education time and space and creating novel educational contexts with sustainability. Despite research attempts to consolidate the application of digital technology in education, previous studies have only focused on specific aspects of digital technology, such as Pinto and Leite’s ( 2020 ) investigation into digital technology in higher education and Mustapha et al.’s ( 2021 ) examination of the role and value of digital technology in education during the pandemic. While these studies have provided valuable insights into the practical applications of digital technology in particular educational domains, they have not comprehensively explored the macro-mechanisms and internal logic of digital technology implementation in education. Additionally, these studies were conducted over a relatively brief period, making it challenging to gain a comprehensive understanding of the macro-dynamics and evolutionary process of digital technology in education. Some studies have provided an overview of digital education from an educational perspective but lack a precise understanding of technological advancement and change (Yang et al. 2022 ). Therefore, this study seeks to employ a systematic scientific approach to collate relevant research from 2000 to 2022, comprehend the internal logic and development trends of digital technology in education, and grasp the outstanding contribution of digital technology in promoting the sustainability of education in time and space. In summary, this study aims to address the following questions:

RQ1: Since the turn of the century, what is the productivity distribution of the field of digital technology education application research in terms of authorship, country/region, institutional and journal level?

RQ2: What is the development trend of research on the application of digital technology in education in the past two decades?

RQ3: What are the current frontiers of research on the application of digital technology in education?

Literature review

Although the term “digital technology” has become ubiquitous, a unified definition has yet to be agreed upon by scholars. Because the meaning of the word digital technology is closely related to the specific context. Within the educational research domain, Selwyn’s ( 2016 ) definition is widely favored by scholars (Pinto and Leite, 2020 ). Selwyn ( 2016 ) provides a comprehensive view of various concrete digital technologies and their applications in education through ten specific cases, such as immediate feedback in classes, orchestrating teaching, and community learning. Through these specific application scenarios, Selwyn ( 2016 ) argues that digital technology encompasses technologies associated with digital devices, including but not limited to tablets, smartphones, computers, and social media platforms (such as Facebook and YouTube). Furthermore, Further, the behavior of accessing the internet at any location through portable devices can be taken as an extension of the behavior of applying digital technology.

The evolving nature of digital technology has significant implications in the field of education. In the 1890s, the focus of digital technology in education was on comprehending the nuances of digital space, digital culture, and educational methodologies, with its connotations aligned more towards the idea of e-learning. The advent and subsequent widespread usage of mobile devices since the dawn of the new millennium have been instrumental in the rapid expansion of the concept of digital technology. Notably, mobile learning devices such as smartphones and tablets, along with social media platforms, have become integral components of digital technology (Conole and Alevizou, 2010 ; Batista et al. 2016 ). In recent times, the burgeoning application of AI technology in the education sector has played a vital role in enriching the digital technology lexicon (Banerjee et al. 2021 ). ChatGPT, for instance, is identified as a novel educational technology that has immense potential to revolutionize future education (Rospigliosi, 2023 ; Arif, Munaf and Ul-Haque, 2023 ).

Pinto and Leite ( 2020 ) conducted a comprehensive macroscopic survey of the use of digital technologies in the education sector and identified three distinct categories, namely technologies for assessment and feedback, mobile technologies, and Information Communication Technologies (ICT). This classification criterion is both macroscopic and highly condensed. In light of the established concept definitions of digital technology in the educational research literature, this study has adopted the characterizations of digital technology proposed by Selwyn ( 2016 ) and Pinto and Leite ( 2020 ) as crucial criteria for analysis and research inclusion. Specifically, this criterion encompasses several distinct types of digital technologies, including Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), Mobile tools, eXtended Reality (XR) Technologies, Assessment and Feedback systems, Learning Management Systems (LMS), Publish and Share tools, Collaborative systems, Social media, Interpersonal Communication tools, and Content Aggregation tools.

Methodology and materials

Research method: bibliometric.

The research on econometric properties has been present in various aspects of human production and life, yet systematic scientific theoretical guidance has been lacking, resulting in disorganization. In 1969, British scholar Pritchard ( 1969 ) proposed “bibliometrics,” which subsequently emerged as an independent discipline in scientific quantification research. Initially, Pritchard defined bibliometrics as “the application of mathematical and statistical methods to books and other media of communication,” however, the definition was not entirely rigorous. To remedy this, Hawkins ( 2001 ) expanded Pritchard’s definition to “the quantitative analysis of the bibliographic features of a body of literature.” De Bellis further clarified the objectives of bibliometrics, stating that it aims to analyze and identify patterns in literature, such as the most productive authors, institutions, countries, and journals in scientific disciplines, trends in literary production over time, and collaboration networks (De Bellis, 2009 ). According to Garfield ( 2006 ), bibliometric research enables the examination of the history and structure of a field, the flow of information within the field, the impact of journals, and the citation status of publications over a longer time scale. All of these definitions illustrate the unique role of bibliometrics as a research method for evaluating specific research fields.

This study uses CiteSpace, VOSviewer, and Charticulator to analyze data and create visualizations. Each of these three tools has its own strengths and can complement each other. CiteSpace and VOSviewer use set theory and probability theory to provide various visualization views in fields such as keywords, co-occurrence, and co-authors. They are easy to use and produce visually appealing graphics (Chen, 2006 ; van Eck and Waltman, 2009 ) and are currently the two most widely used bibliometric tools in the field of visualization (Pan et al. 2018 ). In this study, VOSviewer provided the data necessary for the Performance Analysis; Charticulator was then used to redraw using the tabular data exported from VOSviewer (for creating the chord diagram of country collaboration); this was to complement the mapping process, while CiteSpace was primarily utilized to generate keyword maps and conduct burst word analysis.

Data retrieval

This study selected documents from the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) in the Web of Science Core Collection as the data source, for the following reasons:

(1) The Web of Science Core Collection, as a high-quality digital literature resource database, has been widely accepted by many researchers and is currently considered the most suitable database for bibliometric analysis (Jing et al. 2023a ). Compared to other databases, Web of Science provides more comprehensive data information (Chen et al. 2022a ), and also provides data formats suitable for analysis using VOSviewer and CiteSpace (Gaviria-Marin et al. 2019 ).

(2) The application of digital technology in the field of education is an interdisciplinary research topic, involving technical knowledge literature belonging to the natural sciences and education-related literature belonging to the social sciences. Therefore, it is necessary to select Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) as the sources of research data, ensuring the comprehensiveness of data while ensuring the reliability and persuasiveness of bibliometric research (Hwang and Tsai, 2011 ; Wang et al. 2022 ).

After establishing the source of research data, it is necessary to determine a retrieval strategy (Jing et al. 2023b ). The choice of a retrieval strategy should consider a balance between the breadth and precision of the search formula. That is to say, it should encompass all the literature pertaining to the research topic while excluding irrelevant documents as much as possible. In light of this, this study has set a retrieval strategy informed by multiple related papers (Mustapha et al. 2021 ; Luo et al. 2021 ). The research by Mustapha et al. ( 2021 ) guided us in selecting keywords (“digital” AND “technolog*”) to target digital technology, while Luo et al. ( 2021 ) informed the selection of terms (such as “instruct*,” “teach*,” and “education”) to establish links with the field of education. Then, based on the current application of digital technology in the educational domain and the scope of selection criteria, we constructed the final retrieval strategy. Following the general patterns of past research (Jing et al. 2023a , 2023b ), we conducted a specific screening using the topic search (Topics, TS) function in Web of Science. For the specific criteria used in the screening for this study, please refer to Table 1 .

Literature screening

Literature acquired through keyword searches may contain ostensibly related yet actually unrelated works. Therefore, to ensure the close relevance of literature included in the analysis to the research topic, it is often necessary to perform a manual screening process to identify the final literature to be analyzed, subsequent to completing the initial literature search.

The manual screening process consists of two steps. Initially, irrelevant literature is weeded out based on the title and abstract, with two members of the research team involved in this phase. This stage lasted about one week, resulting in 1106 articles being retained. Subsequently, a comprehensive review of the full text is conducted to accurately identify the literature required for the study. To carry out the second phase of manual screening effectively and scientifically, and to minimize the potential for researcher bias, the research team established the inclusion criteria presented in Table 2 . Three members were engaged in this phase, which took approximately 2 weeks, culminating in the retention of 588 articles after meticulous screening. The entire screening process is depicted in Fig. 1 , adhering to the PRISMA guidelines (Page et al. 2021 ).

The process of obtaining and filtering the necessary literature data for research.

Data standardization

Nguyen and Hallinger ( 2020 ) pointed out that raw data extracted from scientific databases often contains multiple expressions of the same term, and not addressing these synonymous expressions could affect research results in bibliometric analysis. For instance, in the original data, the author list may include “Tsai, C. C.” and “Tsai, C.-C.”, while the keyword list may include “professional-development” and “professional development,” which often require merging. Therefore, before analyzing the selected literature, a data disambiguation process is necessary to standardize the data (Strotmann and Zhao, 2012 ; Van Eck and Waltman, 2019 ). This study adopted the data standardization process proposed by Taskin and Al ( 2019 ), mainly including the following standardization operations:

Firstly, the author and source fields in the data are corrected and standardized to differentiate authors with similar names.

Secondly, the study checks whether the journals to which the literature belongs have been renamed in the past over 20 years, so as to avoid the influence of periodical name change on the analysis results.

Finally, the keyword field is standardized by unifying parts of speech and singular/plural forms of keywords, which can help eliminate redundant entries in the knowledge graph.

Performance analysis (RQ1)

This section offers a thorough and detailed analysis of the state of research in the field of digital technology education. By utilizing descriptive statistics and visual maps, it provides a comprehensive overview of the development trends, authors, countries, institutions, and journal distribution within the field. The insights presented in this section are of great significance in advancing our understanding of the current state of research in this field and identifying areas for further investigation. The use of visual aids to display inter-country cooperation and the evolution of the field adds to the clarity and coherence of the analysis.

Time trend of the publications

To understand a research field, it is first necessary to understand the most basic quantitative information, among which the change in the number of publications per year best reflects the development trend of a research field. Figure 2 shows the distribution of publication dates.

Time trend of the publications on application of digital technology in education.

From the Fig. 2 , it can be seen that the development of this field over the past over 20 years can be roughly divided into three stages. The first stage was from 2000 to 2007, during which the number of publications was relatively low. Due to various factors such as technological maturity, the academic community did not pay widespread attention to the role of digital technology in expanding the scope of teaching and learning. The second stage was from 2008 to 2019, during which the overall number of publications showed an upward trend, and the development of the field entered an accelerated period, attracting more and more scholars’ attention. The third stage was from 2020 to 2022, during which the number of publications stabilized at around 100. During this period, the impact of the pandemic led to a large number of scholars focusing on the role of digital technology in education during the pandemic, and research on the application of digital technology in education became a core topic in social science research.

Analysis of authors

An analysis of the author’s publication volume provides information about the representative scholars and core research strengths of a research area. Table 3 presents information on the core authors in adaptive learning research, including name, publication number, and average number of citations per article (based on the analysis and statistics from VOSviewer).

Variations in research foci among scholars abound. Within the field of digital technology education application research over the past two decades, Neil Selwyn stands as the most productive author, having published 15 papers garnering a total of 1027 citations, resulting in an average of 68.47 citations per paper. As a Professor at the Faculty of Education at Monash University, Selwyn concentrates on exploring the application of digital technology in higher education contexts (Selwyn et al. 2021 ), as well as related products in higher education such as Coursera, edX, and Udacity MOOC platforms (Bulfin et al. 2014 ). Selwyn’s contributions to the educational sociology perspective include extensive research on the impact of digital technology on education, highlighting the spatiotemporal extension of educational processes and practices through technological means as the greatest value of educational technology (Selwyn, 2012 ; Selwyn and Facer, 2014 ). In addition, he provides a blueprint for the development of future schools in 2030 based on the present impact of digital technology on education (Selwyn et al. 2019 ). The second most productive author in this field, Henderson, also offers significant contributions to the understanding of the important value of digital technology in education, specifically in the higher education setting, with a focus on the impact of the pandemic (Henderson et al. 2015 ; Cohen et al. 2022 ). In contrast, Edwards’ research interests focus on early childhood education, particularly the application of digital technology in this context (Edwards, 2013 ; Bird and Edwards, 2015 ). Additionally, on the technical level, Edwards also mainly prefers digital game technology, because it is a digital technology that children are relatively easy to accept (Edwards, 2015 ).

Analysis of countries/regions and organization

The present study aimed to ascertain the leading countries in digital technology education application research by analyzing 75 countries related to 558 works of literature. Table 4 depicts the top ten countries that have contributed significantly to this field in terms of publication count (based on the analysis and statistics from VOSviewer). Our analysis of Table 4 data shows that England emerged as the most influential country/region, with 92 published papers and 2401 citations. Australia and the United States secured the second and third ranks, respectively, with 90 papers (2187 citations) and 70 papers (1331 citations) published. Geographically, most of the countries featured in the top ten publication volumes are situated in Australia, North America, and Europe, with China being the only exception. Notably, all these countries, except China, belong to the group of developed nations, suggesting that economic strength is a prerequisite for fostering research in the digital technology education application field.

This study presents a visual representation of the publication output and cooperation relationships among different countries in the field of digital technology education application research. Specifically, a chord diagram is employed to display the top 30 countries in terms of publication output, as depicted in Fig. 3 . The chord diagram is composed of nodes and chords, where the nodes are positioned as scattered points along the circumference, and the length of each node corresponds to the publication output, with longer lengths indicating higher publication output. The chords, on the other hand, represent the cooperation relationships between any two countries, and are weighted based on the degree of closeness of the cooperation, with wider chords indicating closer cooperation. Through the analysis of the cooperation relationships, the findings suggest that the main publishing countries in this field are engaged in cooperative relationships with each other, indicating a relatively high level of international academic exchange and research internationalization.

In the diagram, nodes are scattered along the circumference of a circle, with the length of each node representing the volume of publications. The weighted arcs connecting any two points on the circle are known as chords, representing the collaborative relationship between the two, with the width of the arc indicating the closeness of the collaboration.

Further analyzing Fig. 3 , we can extract more valuable information, enabling a deeper understanding of the connections between countries in the research field of digital technology in educational applications. It is evident that certain countries, such as the United States, China, and England, display thicker connections, indicating robust collaborative relationships in terms of productivity. These thicker lines signify substantial mutual contributions and shared objectives in certain sectors or fields, highlighting the interconnectedness and global integration in these areas. By delving deeper, we can also explore potential future collaboration opportunities through the chord diagram, identifying possible partners to propel research and development in this field. In essence, the chord diagram successfully encapsulates and conveys the multi-dimensionality of global productivity and cooperation, allowing for a comprehensive understanding of the intricate inter-country relationships and networks in a global context, providing valuable guidance and insights for future research and collaborations.

An in-depth examination of the publishing institutions is provided in Table 5 , showcasing the foremost 10 institutions ranked by their publication volume. Notably, Monash University and Australian Catholic University, situated in Australia, have recorded the most prolific publications within the digital technology education application realm, with 22 and 10 publications respectively. Moreover, the University of Oslo from Norway is featured among the top 10 publishing institutions, with an impressive average citation count of 64 per publication. It is worth highlighting that six institutions based in the United Kingdom were also ranked within the top 10 publishing institutions, signifying their leading position in this area of research.

Analysis of journals

Journals are the main carriers for publishing high-quality papers. Some scholars point out that the two key factors to measure the influence of journals in the specified field are the number of articles published and the number of citations. The more papers published in a magazine and the more citations, the greater its influence (Dzikowski, 2018 ). Therefore, this study utilized VOSviewer to statistically analyze the top 10 journals with the most publications in the field of digital technology in education and calculated the average citations per article (see Table 6 ).

Based on Table 6 , it is apparent that the highest number of articles in the domain of digital technology in education research were published in Education and Information Technologies (47 articles), Computers & Education (34 articles), and British Journal of Educational Technology (32 articles), indicating a higher article output compared to other journals. This underscores the fact that these three journals concentrate more on the application of digital technology in education. Furthermore, several other journals, such as Technology Pedagogy and Education and Sustainability, have published more than 15 articles in this domain. Sustainability represents the open access movement, which has notably facilitated research progress in this field, indicating that the development of open access journals in recent years has had a significant impact. Although there is still considerable disagreement among scholars on the optimal approach to achieve open access, the notion that research outcomes should be accessible to all is widely recognized (Huang et al. 2020 ). On further analysis of the research fields to which these journals belong, except for Sustainability, it is evident that they all pertain to educational technology, thus providing a qualitative definition of the research area of digital technology education from the perspective of journals.

Temporal keyword analysis: thematic evolution (RQ2)

The evolution of research themes is a dynamic process, and previous studies have attempted to present the developmental trajectory of fields by drawing keyword networks in phases (Kumar et al. 2021 ; Chen et al. 2022b ). To understand the shifts in research topics across different periods, this study follows past research and, based on the significant changes in the research field and corresponding technological advancements during the outlined periods, divides the timeline into four stages (the first stage from January 2000 to December 2005, the second stage from January 2006 to December 2011, the third stage from January 2012 to December 2017; and the fourth stage from January 2018 to December 2022). The division into these four stages was determined through a combination of bibliometric analysis and literature review, which presented a clear trajectory of the field’s development. The research analyzes the keyword networks for each time period (as there are only three articles in the first stage, it was not possible to generate an appropriate keyword co-occurrence map, hence only the keyword co-occurrence maps from the second to the fourth stages are provided), to understand the evolutionary track of the digital technology education application research field over time.

2000.1–2005.12: germination period

From January 2000 to December 2005, digital technology education application research was in its infancy. Only three studies focused on digital technology, all of which were related to computers. Due to the popularity of computers, the home became a new learning environment, highlighting the important role of digital technology in expanding the scope of learning spaces (Sutherland et al. 2000 ). In specific disciplines and contexts, digital technology was first favored in medical clinical practice, becoming an important tool for supporting the learning of clinical knowledge and practice (Tegtmeyer et al. 2001 ; Durfee et al. 2003 ).

2006.1–2011.12: initial development period

Between January 2006 and December 2011, it was the initial development period of digital technology education research. Significant growth was observed in research related to digital technology, and discussions and theoretical analyses about “digital natives” emerged. During this phase, scholars focused on the debate about “how to use digital technology reasonably” and “whether current educational models and school curriculum design need to be adjusted on a large scale” (Bennett and Maton, 2010 ; Selwyn, 2009 ; Margaryan et al. 2011 ). These theoretical and speculative arguments provided a unique perspective on the impact of cognitive digital technology on education and teaching. As can be seen from the vocabulary such as “rethinking”, “disruptive pedagogy”, and “attitude” in Fig. 4 , many scholars joined the calm reflection and analysis under the trend of digital technology (Laurillard, 2008 ; Vratulis et al. 2011 ). During this phase, technology was still undergoing dramatic changes. The development of mobile technology had already caught the attention of many scholars (Wong et al. 2011 ), but digital technology represented by computers was still very active (Selwyn et al. 2011 ). The change in technological form would inevitably lead to educational transformation. Collins and Halverson ( 2010 ) summarized the prospects and challenges of using digital technology for learning and educational practices, believing that digital technology would bring a disruptive revolution to the education field and bring about a new educational system. In addition, the term “teacher education” in Fig. 4 reflects the impact of digital technology development on teachers. The rapid development of technology has widened the generation gap between teachers and students. To ensure smooth communication between teachers and students, teachers must keep up with the trend of technological development and establish a lifelong learning concept (Donnison, 2009 ).

In the diagram, each node represents a keyword, with the size of the node indicating the frequency of occurrence of the keyword. The connections represent the co-occurrence relationships between keywords, with a higher frequency of co-occurrence resulting in tighter connections.

2012.1–2017.12: critical exploration period

During the period spanning January 2012 to December 2017, the application of digital technology in education research underwent a significant exploration phase. As can be seen from Fig. 5 , different from the previous stage, the specific elements of specific digital technology have started to increase significantly, including the enrichment of technological contexts, the greater variety of research methods, and the diversification of learning modes. Moreover, the temporal and spatial dimensions of the learning environment were further de-emphasized, as noted in previous literature (Za et al. 2014 ). Given the rapidly accelerating pace of technological development, the education system in the digital era is in urgent need of collaborative evolution and reconstruction, as argued by Davis, Eickelmann, and Zaka ( 2013 ).

In the domain of digital technology, social media has garnered substantial scholarly attention as a promising avenue for learning, as noted by Pasquini and Evangelopoulos ( 2016 ). The implementation of social media in education presents several benefits, including the liberation of education from the restrictions of physical distance and time, as well as the erasure of conventional educational boundaries. The user-generated content (UGC) model in social media has emerged as a crucial source for knowledge creation and distribution, with the widespread adoption of mobile devices. Moreover, social networks have become an integral component of ubiquitous learning environments (Hwang et al. 2013 ). The utilization of social media allows individuals to function as both knowledge producers and recipients, which leads to a blurring of the conventional roles of learners and teachers. On mobile platforms, the roles of learners and teachers are not fixed, but instead interchangeable.

In terms of research methodology, the prevalence of empirical studies with survey designs in the field of educational technology during this period is evident from the vocabulary used, such as “achievement,” “acceptance,” “attitude,” and “ict.” in Fig. 5 . These studies aim to understand learners’ willingness to adopt and attitudes towards new technologies, and some seek to investigate the impact of digital technologies on learning outcomes through quasi-experimental designs (Domínguez et al. 2013 ). Among these empirical studies, mobile learning emerged as a hot topic, and this is not surprising. First, the advantages of mobile learning environments over traditional ones have been empirically demonstrated (Hwang et al. 2013 ). Second, learners born around the turn of the century have been heavily influenced by digital technologies and have developed their own learning styles that are more open to mobile devices as a means of learning. Consequently, analyzing mobile learning as a relatively novel mode of learning has become an important issue for scholars in the field of educational technology.

The intervention of technology has led to the emergence of several novel learning modes, with the blended learning model being the most representative one in the current phase. Blended learning, a novel concept introduced in the information age, emphasizes the integration of the benefits of traditional learning methods and online learning. This learning mode not only highlights the prominent role of teachers in guiding, inspiring, and monitoring the learning process but also underlines the importance of learners’ initiative, enthusiasm, and creativity in the learning process. Despite being an early conceptualization, blended learning’s meaning has been expanded by the widespread use of mobile technology and social media in education. The implementation of new technologies, particularly mobile devices, has resulted in the transformation of curriculum design and increased flexibility and autonomy in students’ learning processes (Trujillo Maza et al. 2016 ), rekindling scholarly attention to this learning mode. However, some scholars have raised concerns about the potential drawbacks of the blended learning model, such as its significant impact on the traditional teaching system, the lack of systematic coping strategies and relevant policies in several schools and regions (Moskal et al. 2013 ).

2018.1–2022.12: accelerated transformation period

The period spanning from January 2018 to December 2022 witnessed a rapid transformation in the application of digital technology in education research. The field of digital technology education research reached a peak period of publication, largely influenced by factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic (Yu et al. 2023 ). Research during this period was built upon the achievements, attitudes, and social media of the previous phase, and included more elements that reflect the characteristics of this research field, such as digital literacy, digital competence, and professional development, as depicted in Fig. 6 . Alongside this, scholars’ expectations for the value of digital technology have expanded, and the pursuit of improving learning efficiency and performance is no longer the sole focus. Some research now aims to cultivate learners’ motivation and enhance their self-efficacy by applying digital technology in a reasonable manner, as demonstrated by recent studies (Beardsley et al. 2021 ; Creely et al. 2021 ).

The COVID-19 pandemic has emerged as a crucial backdrop for the digital technology’s role in sustaining global education, as highlighted by recent scholarly research (Zhou et al. 2022 ; Pan and Zhang, 2020 ; Mo et al. 2022 ). The online learning environment, which is supported by digital technology, has become the primary battleground for global education (Yu, 2022 ). This social context has led to various studies being conducted, with some scholars positing that the pandemic has impacted the traditional teaching order while also expanding learning possibilities in terms of patterns and forms (Alabdulaziz, 2021 ). Furthermore, the pandemic has acted as a catalyst for teacher teaching and technological innovation, and this viewpoint has been empirically substantiated (Moorhouse and Wong, 2021 ). Additionally, some scholars believe that the pandemic’s push is a crucial driving force for the digital transformation of the education system, serving as an essential mechanism for overcoming the system’s inertia (Romero et al. 2021 ).

The rapid outbreak of the pandemic posed a challenge to the large-scale implementation of digital technologies, which was influenced by a complex interplay of subjective and objective factors. Objective constraints included the lack of infrastructure in some regions to support digital technologies, while subjective obstacles included psychological resistance among certain students and teachers (Moorhouse, 2021 ). These factors greatly impacted the progress of online learning during the pandemic. Additionally, Timotheou et al. ( 2023 ) conducted a comprehensive systematic review of existing research on digital technology use during the pandemic, highlighting the critical role played by various factors such as learners’ and teachers’ digital skills, teachers’ personal attributes and professional development, school leadership and management, and administration in facilitating the digitalization and transformation of schools.

The current stage of research is characterized by the pivotal term “digital literacy,” denoting a growing interest in learners’ attitudes and adoption of emerging technologies. Initially, the term “literacy” was restricted to fundamental abilities and knowledge associated with books and print materials (McMillan, 1996 ). However, with the swift advancement of computers and digital technology, there have been various attempts to broaden the scope of literacy beyond its traditional meaning, including game literacy (Buckingham and Burn, 2007 ), information literacy (Eisenberg, 2008 ), and media literacy (Turin and Friesem, 2020 ). Similarly, digital literacy has emerged as a crucial concept, and Gilster and Glister ( 1997 ) were the first to introduce this concept, referring to the proficiency in utilizing technology and processing digital information in academic, professional, and daily life settings. In practical educational settings, learners who possess higher digital literacy often exhibit an aptitude for quickly mastering digital devices and applying them intelligently to education and teaching (Yu, 2022 ).

The utilization of digital technology in education has undergone significant changes over the past two decades, and has been a crucial driver of educational reform with each new technological revolution. The impact of these changes on the underlying logic of digital technology education applications has been noticeable. From computer technology to more recent developments such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and artificial intelligence (AI), the acceleration in digital technology development has been ongoing. Educational reforms spurred by digital technology development continue to be dynamic, as each new digital innovation presents new possibilities and models for teaching practice. This is especially relevant in the post-pandemic era, where the importance of technological progress in supporting teaching cannot be overstated (Mughal et al. 2022 ). Existing digital technologies have already greatly expanded the dimensions of education in both time and space, while future digital technologies aim to expand learners’ perceptions. Researchers have highlighted the potential of integrated technology and immersive technology in the development of the educational metaverse, which is highly anticipated to create a new dimension for the teaching and learning environment, foster a new value system for the discipline of educational technology, and more effectively and efficiently achieve the grand educational blueprint of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (Zhang et al. 2022 ; Li and Yu, 2023 ).

Hotspot evolution analysis (RQ3)

The examination of keyword evolution reveals a consistent trend in the advancement of digital technology education application research. The emergence and transformation of keywords serve as indicators of the varying research interests in this field. Thus, the utilization of the burst detection function available in CiteSpace allowed for the identification of the top 10 burst words that exhibited a high level of burst strength. This outcome is illustrated in Table 7 .

According to the results presented in Table 7 , the explosive terminology within the realm of digital technology education research has exhibited a concentration mainly between the years 2018 and 2022. Prior to this time frame, the emerging keywords were limited to “information technology” and “computer”. Notably, among them, computer, as an emergent keyword, has always had a high explosive intensity from 2008 to 2018, which reflects the important position of computer in digital technology and is the main carrier of many digital technologies such as Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Assessment and Feedback systems (Barlovits et al. 2022 ).

Since 2018, an increasing number of research studies have focused on evaluating the capabilities of learners to accept, apply, and comprehend digital technologies. As indicated by the use of terms such as “digital literacy” and “digital skill,” the assessment of learners’ digital literacy has become a critical task. Scholarly efforts have been directed towards the development of literacy assessment tools and the implementation of empirical assessments. Furthermore, enhancing the digital literacy of both learners and educators has garnered significant attention. (Nagle, 2018 ; Yu, 2022 ). Simultaneously, given the widespread use of various digital technologies in different formal and informal learning settings, promoting learners’ digital skills has become a crucial objective for contemporary schools (Nygren et al. 2019 ; Forde and OBrien, 2022 ).

Since 2020, the field of applied research on digital technology education has witnessed the emergence of three new hotspots, all of which have been affected to some extent by the pandemic. Firstly, digital technology has been widely applied in physical education, which is one of the subjects that has been severely affected by the pandemic (Parris et al. 2022 ; Jiang and Ning, 2022 ). Secondly, digital transformation has become an important measure for most schools, especially higher education institutions, to cope with the impact of the pandemic globally (García-Morales et al. 2021 ). Although the concept of digital transformation was proposed earlier, the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly accelerated this transformation process. Educational institutions must carefully redesign their educational products to face this new situation, providing timely digital learning methods, environments, tools, and support systems that have far-reaching impacts on modern society (Krishnamurthy, 2020 ; Salas-Pilco et al. 2022 ). Moreover, the professional development of teachers has become a key mission of educational institutions in the post-pandemic era. Teachers need to have a certain level of digital literacy and be familiar with the tools and online teaching resources used in online teaching, which has become a research hotspot today. Organizing digital skills training for teachers to cope with the application of emerging technologies in education is an important issue for teacher professional development and lifelong learning (Garzón-Artacho et al. 2021 ). As the main organizers and practitioners of emergency remote teaching (ERT) during the pandemic, teachers must put cognitive effort into their professional development to ensure effective implementation of ERT (Romero-Hall and Jaramillo Cherrez, 2022 ).

The burst word “digital transformation” reveals that we are in the midst of an ongoing digital technology revolution. With the emergence of innovative digital technologies such as ChatGPT and Microsoft 365 Copilot, technology trends will continue to evolve, albeit unpredictably. While the impact of these advancements on school education remains uncertain, it is anticipated that the widespread integration of technology will significantly affect the current education system. Rejecting emerging technologies without careful consideration is unwise. Like any revolution, the technological revolution in the education field has both positive and negative aspects. Detractors argue that digital technology disrupts learning and memory (Baron, 2021 ) or causes learners to become addicted and distracted from learning (Selwyn and Aagaard, 2020 ). On the other hand, the prudent use of digital technology in education offers a glimpse of a golden age of open learning. Educational leaders and practitioners have the opportunity to leverage cutting-edge digital technologies to address current educational challenges and develop a rational path for the sustainable and healthy growth of education.

Discussion on performance analysis (RQ1)

The field of digital technology education application research has experienced substantial growth since the turn of the century, a phenomenon that is quantifiably apparent through an analysis of authorship, country/region contributions, and institutional engagement. This expansion reflects the increased integration of digital technologies in educational settings and the heightened scholarly interest in understanding and optimizing their use.

Discussion on authorship productivity in digital technology education research

The authorship distribution within digital technology education research is indicative of the field’s intellectual structure and depth. A primary figure in this domain is Neil Selwyn, whose substantial citation rate underscores the profound impact of his work. His focus on the implications of digital technology in higher education and educational sociology has proven to be seminal. Selwyn’s research trajectory, especially the exploration of spatiotemporal extensions of education through technology, provides valuable insights into the multifaceted role of digital tools in learning processes (Selwyn et al. 2019 ).

Other notable contributors, like Henderson and Edwards, present diversified research interests, such as the impact of digital technologies during the pandemic and their application in early childhood education, respectively. Their varied focuses highlight the breadth of digital technology education research, encompassing pedagogical innovation, technological adaptation, and policy development.

Discussion on country/region-level productivity and collaboration

At the country/region level, the United Kingdom, specifically England, emerges as a leading contributor with 92 published papers and a significant citation count. This is closely followed by Australia and the United States, indicating a strong English-speaking research axis. Such geographical concentration of scholarly output often correlates with investment in research and development, technological infrastructure, and the prevalence of higher education institutions engaging in cutting-edge research.

China’s notable inclusion as the only non-Western country among the top contributors to the field suggests a growing research capacity and interest in digital technology in education. However, the lower average citation per paper for China could reflect emerging engagement or different research focuses that may not yet have achieved the same international recognition as Western counterparts.

The chord diagram analysis furthers this understanding, revealing dense interconnections between countries like the United States, China, and England, which indicates robust collaborations. Such collaborations are fundamental in addressing global educational challenges and shaping international research agendas.

Discussion on institutional-level contributions to digital technology education

Institutional productivity in digital technology education research reveals a constellation of universities driving the field forward. Monash University and the Australian Catholic University have the highest publication output, signaling Australia’s significant role in advancing digital education research. The University of Oslo’s remarkable average citation count per publication indicates influential research contributions, potentially reflecting high-quality studies that resonate with the broader academic community.

The strong showing of UK institutions, including the University of London, The Open University, and the University of Cambridge, reinforces the UK’s prominence in this research field. Such institutions are often at the forefront of pedagogical innovation, benefiting from established research cultures and funding mechanisms that support sustained inquiry into digital education.

Discussion on journal publication analysis

An examination of journal outputs offers a lens into the communicative channels of the field’s knowledge base. Journals such as Education and Information Technologies , Computers & Education , and the British Journal of Educational Technology not only serve as the primary disseminators of research findings but also as indicators of research quality and relevance. The impact factor (IF) serves as a proxy for the quality and influence of these journals within the academic community.

The high citation counts for articles published in Computers & Education suggest that research disseminated through this medium has a wide-reaching impact and is of particular interest to the field. This is further evidenced by its significant IF of 11.182, indicating that the journal is a pivotal platform for seminal work in the application of digital technology in education.

The authorship, regional, and institutional productivity in the field of digital technology education application research collectively narrate the evolution of this domain since the turn of the century. The prominence of certain authors and countries underscores the importance of socioeconomic factors and existing academic infrastructure in fostering research productivity. Meanwhile, the centrality of specific journals as outlets for high-impact research emphasizes the role of academic publishing in shaping the research landscape.

As the field continues to grow, future research may benefit from leveraging the collaborative networks that have been elucidated through this analysis, perhaps focusing on underrepresented regions to broaden the scope and diversity of research. Furthermore, the stabilization of publication numbers in recent years invites a deeper exploration into potential plateaus in research trends or saturation in certain sub-fields, signaling an opportunity for novel inquiries and methodological innovations.

Discussion on the evolutionary trends (RQ2)

The evolution of the research field concerning the application of digital technology in education over the past two decades is a story of convergence, diversification, and transformation, shaped by rapid technological advancements and shifting educational paradigms.

At the turn of the century, the inception of digital technology in education was largely exploratory, with a focus on how emerging computer technologies could be harnessed to enhance traditional learning environments. Research from this early period was primarily descriptive, reflecting on the potential and challenges of incorporating digital tools into the educational setting. This phase was critical in establishing the fundamental discourse that would guide subsequent research, as it set the stage for understanding the scope and impact of digital technology in learning spaces (Wang et al. 2023 ).

As the first decade progressed, the narrative expanded to encompass the pedagogical implications of digital technologies. This was a period of conceptual debates, where terms like “digital natives” and “disruptive pedagogy” entered the academic lexicon, underscoring the growing acknowledgment of digital technology as a transformative force within education (Bennett and Maton, 2010 ). During this time, the research began to reflect a more nuanced understanding of the integration of technology, considering not only its potential to change where and how learning occurred but also its implications for educational equity and access.

In the second decade, with the maturation of internet connectivity and mobile technology, the focus of research shifted from theoretical speculations to empirical investigations. The proliferation of digital devices and the ubiquity of social media influenced how learners interacted with information and each other, prompting a surge in studies that sought to measure the impact of these tools on learning outcomes. The digital divide and issues related to digital literacy became central concerns, as scholars explored the varying capacities of students and educators to engage with technology effectively.

Throughout this period, there was an increasing emphasis on the individualization of learning experiences, facilitated by adaptive technologies that could cater to the unique needs and pacing of learners (Jing et al. 2023a ). This individualization was coupled with a growing recognition of the importance of collaborative learning, both online and offline, and the role of digital tools in supporting these processes. Blended learning models, which combined face-to-face instruction with online resources, emerged as a significant trend, advocating for a balance between traditional pedagogies and innovative digital strategies.

The later years, particularly marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, accelerated the necessity for digital technology in education, transforming it from a supplementary tool to an essential platform for delivering education globally (Mo et al. 2022 ; Mustapha et al. 2021 ). This era brought about an unprecedented focus on online learning environments, distance education, and virtual classrooms. Research became more granular, examining not just the pedagogical effectiveness of digital tools, but also their role in maintaining continuity of education during crises, their impact on teacher and student well-being, and their implications for the future of educational policy and infrastructure.

Across these two decades, the research field has seen a shift from examining digital technology as an external addition to the educational process, to viewing it as an integral component of curriculum design, instructional strategies, and even assessment methods. The emergent themes have broadened from a narrow focus on specific tools or platforms to include wider considerations such as data privacy, ethical use of technology, and the environmental impact of digital tools.

Moreover, the field has moved from considering the application of digital technology in education as a primarily cognitive endeavor to recognizing its role in facilitating socio-emotional learning, digital citizenship, and global competencies. Researchers have increasingly turned their attention to the ways in which technology can support collaborative skills, cultural understanding, and ethical reasoning within diverse student populations.

In summary, the past over twenty years in the research field of digital technology applications in education have been characterized by a progression from foundational inquiries to complex analyses of digital integration. This evolution has mirrored the trajectory of technology itself, from a facilitative tool to a pervasive ecosystem defining contemporary educational experiences. As we look to the future, the field is poised to delve into the implications of emerging technologies like AI, AR, and VR, and their potential to redefine the educational landscape even further. This ongoing metamorphosis suggests that the application of digital technology in education will continue to be a rich area of inquiry, demanding continual adaptation and forward-thinking from educators and researchers alike.

Discussion on the study of research hotspots (RQ3)

The analysis of keyword evolution in digital technology education application research elucidates the current frontiers in the field, reflecting a trajectory that is in tandem with the rapidly advancing digital age. This landscape is sculpted by emergent technological innovations and shaped by the demands of an increasingly digital society.

Interdisciplinary integration and pedagogical transformation

One of the frontiers identified from recent keyword bursts includes the integration of digital technology into diverse educational contexts, particularly noted with the keyword “physical education.” The digitalization of disciplines traditionally characterized by physical presence illustrates the pervasive reach of technology and signifies a push towards interdisciplinary integration where technology is not only a facilitator but also a transformative agent. This integration challenges educators to reconceptualize curriculum delivery to accommodate digital tools that can enhance or simulate the physical aspects of learning.

Digital literacy and skills acquisition

Another pivotal frontier is the focus on “digital literacy” and “digital skill”, which has intensified in recent years. This suggests a shift from mere access to technology towards a comprehensive understanding and utilization of digital tools. In this realm, the emphasis is not only on the ability to use technology but also on critical thinking, problem-solving, and the ethical use of digital resources (Yu, 2022 ). The acquisition of digital literacy is no longer an additive skill but a fundamental aspect of modern education, essential for navigating and contributing to the digital world.

Educational digital transformation

The keyword “digital transformation” marks a significant research frontier, emphasizing the systemic changes that education institutions must undergo to align with the digital era (Romero et al. 2021 ). This transformation includes the redesigning of learning environments, pedagogical strategies, and assessment methods to harness digital technology’s full potential. Research in this area explores the complexity of institutional change, addressing the infrastructural, cultural, and policy adjustments needed for a seamless digital transition.

Engagement and participation

Further exploration into “engagement” and “participation” underscores the importance of student-centered learning environments that are mediated by technology. The current frontiers examine how digital platforms can foster collaboration, inclusivity, and active learning, potentially leading to more meaningful and personalized educational experiences. Here, the use of technology seeks to support the emotional and cognitive aspects of learning, moving beyond the transactional view of education to one that is relational and interactive.

Professional development and teacher readiness

As the field evolves, “professional development” emerges as a crucial area, particularly in light of the pandemic which necessitated emergency remote teaching. The need for teacher readiness in a digital age is a pressing frontier, with research focusing on the competencies required for educators to effectively integrate technology into their teaching practices. This includes familiarity with digital tools, pedagogical innovation, and an ongoing commitment to personal and professional growth in the digital domain.

Pandemic as a catalyst

The recent pandemic has acted as a catalyst for accelerated research and application in this field, particularly in the domains of “digital transformation,” “professional development,” and “physical education.” This period has been a litmus test for the resilience and adaptability of educational systems to continue their operations in an emergency. Research has thus been directed at understanding how digital technologies can support not only continuity but also enhance the quality and reach of education in such contexts.

Ethical and societal considerations

The frontier of digital technology in education is also expanding to consider broader ethical and societal implications. This includes issues of digital equity, data privacy, and the sociocultural impact of technology on learning communities. The research explores how educational technology can be leveraged to address inequities and create more equitable learning opportunities for all students, regardless of their socioeconomic background.

Innovation and emerging technologies

Looking forward, the frontiers are set to be influenced by ongoing and future technological innovations, such as artificial intelligence (AI) (Wu and Yu, 2023 ; Chen et al. 2022a ). The exploration into how these technologies can be integrated into educational practices to create immersive and adaptive learning experiences represents a bold new chapter for the field.

In conclusion, the current frontiers of research on the application of digital technology in education are multifaceted and dynamic. They reflect an overarching movement towards deeper integration of technology in educational systems and pedagogical practices, where the goals are not only to facilitate learning but to redefine it. As these frontiers continue to expand and evolve, they will shape the educational landscape, requiring a concerted effort from researchers, educators, policymakers, and technologists to navigate the challenges and harness the opportunities presented by the digital revolution in education.

Conclusions and future research

Conclusions.

The utilization of digital technology in education is a research area that cuts across multiple technical and educational domains and continues to experience dynamic growth due to the continuous progress of technology. In this study, a systematic review of this field was conducted through bibliometric techniques to examine its development trajectory. The primary focus of the review was to investigate the leading contributors, productive national institutions, significant publications, and evolving development patterns. The study’s quantitative analysis resulted in several key conclusions that shed light on this research field’s current state and future prospects.

(1) The research field of digital technology education applications has entered a stage of rapid development, particularly in recent years due to the impact of the pandemic, resulting in a peak of publications. Within this field, several key authors (Selwyn, Henderson, Edwards, etc.) and countries/regions (England, Australia, USA, etc.) have emerged, who have made significant contributions. International exchanges in this field have become frequent, with a high degree of internationalization in academic research. Higher education institutions in the UK and Australia are the core productive forces in this field at the institutional level.

(2) Education and Information Technologies , Computers & Education , and the British Journal of Educational Technology are notable journals that publish research related to digital technology education applications. These journals are affiliated with the research field of educational technology and provide effective communication platforms for sharing digital technology education applications.

(3) Over the past two decades, research on digital technology education applications has progressed from its early stages of budding, initial development, and critical exploration to accelerated transformation, and it is currently approaching maturity. Technological progress and changes in the times have been key driving forces for educational transformation and innovation, and both have played important roles in promoting the continuous development of education.

(4) Influenced by the pandemic, three emerging frontiers have emerged in current research on digital technology education applications, which are physical education, digital transformation, and professional development under the promotion of digital technology. These frontier research hotspots reflect the core issues that the education system faces when encountering new technologies. The evolution of research hotspots shows that technology breakthroughs in education’s original boundaries of time and space create new challenges. The continuous self-renewal of education is achieved by solving one hotspot problem after another.

The present study offers significant practical implications for scholars and practitioners in the field of digital technology education applications. Firstly, it presents a well-defined framework of the existing research in this area, serving as a comprehensive guide for new entrants to the field and shedding light on the developmental trajectory of this research domain. Secondly, the study identifies several contemporary research hotspots, thus offering a valuable decision-making resource for scholars aiming to explore potential research directions. Thirdly, the study undertakes an exhaustive analysis of published literature to identify core journals in the field of digital technology education applications, with Sustainability being identified as a promising open access journal that publishes extensively on this topic. This finding can potentially facilitate scholars in selecting appropriate journals for their research outputs.

Limitation and future research

Influenced by some objective factors, this study also has some limitations. First of all, the bibliometrics analysis software has high standards for data. In order to ensure the quality and integrity of the collected data, the research only selects the periodical papers in SCIE and SSCI indexes, which are the core collection of Web of Science database, and excludes other databases, conference papers, editorials and other publications, which may ignore some scientific research and original opinions in the field of digital technology education and application research. In addition, although this study used professional software to carry out bibliometric analysis and obtained more objective quantitative data, the analysis and interpretation of data will inevitably have a certain subjective color, and the influence of subjectivity on data analysis cannot be completely avoided. As such, future research endeavors will broaden the scope of literature screening and proactively engage scholars in the field to gain objective and state-of-the-art insights, while minimizing the adverse impact of personal subjectivity on research analysis.

Data availability

The datasets analyzed during the current study are available in the Dataverse repository: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/F9QMHY

Alabdulaziz MS (2021) COVID-19 and the use of digital technology in mathematics education. Educ Inf Technol 26(6):7609–7633. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-021-10602-3

Arif TB, Munaf U, Ul-Haque I (2023) The future of medical education and research: is ChatGPT a blessing or blight in disguise? Med Educ Online 28. https://doi.org/10.1080/10872981.2023.2181052

Banerjee M, Chiew D, Patel KT, Johns I, Chappell D, Linton N, Cole GD, Francis DP, Szram J, Ross J, Zaman S (2021) The impact of artificial intelligence on clinical education: perceptions of postgraduate trainee doctors in London (UK) and recommendations for trainers. BMC Med Educ 21. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-021-02870-x

Barlovits S, Caldeira A, Fesakis G, Jablonski S, Koutsomanoli Filippaki D, Lázaro C, Ludwig M, Mammana MF, Moura A, Oehler DXK, Recio T, Taranto E, Volika S(2022) Adaptive, synchronous, and mobile online education: developing the ASYMPTOTE learning environment. Mathematics 10:1628. https://doi.org/10.3390/math10101628

Article   Google Scholar  

Baron NS(2021) Know what? How digital technologies undermine learning and remembering J Pragmat 175:27–37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.01.011

Batista J, Morais NS, Ramos F (2016) Researching the use of communication technologies in higher education institutions in Portugal. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-0571-6.ch057

Beardsley M, Albó L, Aragón P, Hernández-Leo D (2021) Emergency education effects on teacher abilities and motivation to use digital technologies. Br J Educ Technol 52. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13101

Bennett S, Maton K(2010) Beyond the “digital natives” debate: towards a more nuanced understanding of students’ technology experiences J Comput Assist Learn 26:321–331. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2010.00360.x

Buckingham D, Burn A (2007) Game literacy in theory and practice 16:323–349

Google Scholar  

Bulfin S, Pangrazio L, Selwyn N (2014) Making “MOOCs”: the construction of a new digital higher education within news media discourse. In: The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning 15. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v15i5.1856

Camilleri MA, Camilleri AC(2016) Digital learning resources and ubiquitous technologies in education Technol Knowl Learn 22:65–82. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10758-016-9287-7

Chen C(2006) CiteSpace II: detecting and visualizing emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature J Am Soc Inf Sci Technol 57:359–377. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20317

Chen J, Dai J, Zhu K, Xu L(2022) Effects of extended reality on language learning: a meta-analysis Front Psychol 13:1016519. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1016519

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Chen J, Wang CL, Tang Y (2022b) Knowledge mapping of volunteer motivation: a bibliometric analysis and cross-cultural comparative study. Front Psychol 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.883150

Cohen A, Soffer T, Henderson M(2022) Students’ use of technology and their perceptions of its usefulness in higher education: International comparison J Comput Assist Learn 38(5):1321–1331. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12678

Collins A, Halverson R(2010) The second educational revolution: rethinking education in the age of technology J Comput Assist Learn 26:18–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2009.00339.x

Conole G, Alevizou P (2010) A literature review of the use of Web 2.0 tools in higher education. Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, UK: the Open University, retrieved 17 February

Creely E, Henriksen D, Crawford R, Henderson M(2021) Exploring creative risk-taking and productive failure in classroom practice. A case study of the perceived self-efficacy and agency of teachers at one school Think Ski Creat 42:100951. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2021.100951

Davis N, Eickelmann B, Zaka P(2013) Restructuring of educational systems in the digital age from a co-evolutionary perspective J Comput Assist Learn 29:438–450. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12032

De Belli N (2009) Bibliometrics and citation analysis: from the science citation index to cybermetrics, Scarecrow Press. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12032

Domínguez A, Saenz-de-Navarrete J, de-Marcos L, Fernández-Sanz L, Pagés C, Martínez-Herráiz JJ(2013) Gamifying learning experiences: practical implications and outcomes Comput Educ 63:380–392. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2012.12.020

Donnison S (2009) Discourses in conflict: the relationship between Gen Y pre-service teachers, digital technologies and lifelong learning. Australasian J Educ Technol 25. https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.1138

Durfee SM, Jain S, Shaffer K (2003) Incorporating electronic media into medical student education. Acad Radiol 10:205–210. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1076-6332(03)80046-6

Dzikowski P(2018) A bibliometric analysis of born global firms J Bus Res 85:281–294. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2017.12.054

van Eck NJ, Waltman L(2009) Software survey: VOSviewer, a computer program for bibliometric mapping Scientometrics 84:523–538 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-009-0146-3

Edwards S(2013) Digital play in the early years: a contextual response to the problem of integrating technologies and play-based pedagogies in the early childhood curriculum Eur Early Child Educ Res J 21:199–212. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293x.2013.789190

Edwards S(2015) New concepts of play and the problem of technology, digital media and popular-culture integration with play-based learning in early childhood education Technol Pedagogy Educ 25:513–532 https://doi.org/10.1080/1475939x.2015.1108929

Article   MathSciNet   Google Scholar  

Eisenberg MB(2008) Information literacy: essential skills for the information age DESIDOC J Libr Inf Technol 28:39–47. https://doi.org/10.14429/djlit.28.2.166

Forde C, OBrien A (2022) A literature review of barriers and opportunities presented by digitally enhanced practical skill teaching and learning in health science education. Med Educ Online 27. https://doi.org/10.1080/10872981.2022.2068210

García-Morales VJ, Garrido-Moreno A, Martín-Rojas R (2021) The transformation of higher education after the COVID disruption: emerging challenges in an online learning scenario. Front Psychol 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.616059

Garfield E(2006) The history and meaning of the journal impact factor JAMA 295:90. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.295.1.90

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Garzón-Artacho E, Sola-Martínez T, Romero-Rodríguez JM, Gómez-García G(2021) Teachers’ perceptions of digital competence at the lifelong learning stage Heliyon 7:e07513. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2021.e07513

Gaviria-Marin M, Merigó JM, Baier-Fuentes H(2019) Knowledge management: a global examination based on bibliometric analysis Technol Forecast Soc Change 140:194–220. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2018.07.006

Gilster P, Glister P (1997) Digital literacy. Wiley Computer Pub, New York

Greenhow C, Lewin C(2015) Social media and education: reconceptualizing the boundaries of formal and informal learning Learn Media Technol 41:6–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2015.1064954

Hawkins DT(2001) Bibliometrics of electronic journals in information science Infor Res 7(1):7–1. http://informationr.net/ir/7-1/paper120.html

Henderson M, Selwyn N, Finger G, Aston R(2015) Students’ everyday engagement with digital technology in university: exploring patterns of use and “usefulness J High Educ Policy Manag 37:308–319 https://doi.org/10.1080/1360080x.2015.1034424

Huang CK, Neylon C, Hosking R, Montgomery L, Wilson KS, Ozaygen A, Brookes-Kenworthy C (2020) Evaluating the impact of open access policies on research institutions. eLife 9. https://doi.org/10.7554/elife.57067

Hwang GJ, Tsai CC(2011) Research trends in mobile and ubiquitous learning: a review of publications in selected journals from 2001 to 2010 Br J Educ Technol 42:E65–E70. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2011.01183.x

Hwang GJ, Wu PH, Zhuang YY, Huang YM(2013) Effects of the inquiry-based mobile learning model on the cognitive load and learning achievement of students Interact Learn Environ 21:338–354. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2011.575789

Jiang S, Ning CF (2022) Interactive communication in the process of physical education: are social media contributing to the improvement of physical training performance. Universal Access Inf Soc, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-022-00911-w

Jing Y, Zhao L, Zhu KK, Wang H, Wang CL, Xia Q(2023) Research landscape of adaptive learning in education: a bibliometric study on research publications from 2000 to 2022 Sustainability 15:3115–3115. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15043115

Jing Y, Wang CL, Chen Y, Wang H, Yu T, Shadiev R (2023b) Bibliometric mapping techniques in educational technology research: a systematic literature review. Educ Inf Technol 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-023-12178-6

Krishnamurthy S (2020) The future of business education: a commentary in the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic. J Bus Res. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.05.034

Kumar S, Lim WM, Pandey N, Christopher Westland J (2021) 20 years of electronic commerce research. Electron Commer Res 21:1–40

Kyza EA, Georgiou Y(2018) Scaffolding augmented reality inquiry learning: the design and investigation of the TraceReaders location-based, augmented reality platform Interact Learn Environ 27:211–225. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2018.1458039

Laurillard D(2008) Technology enhanced learning as a tool for pedagogical innovation J Philos Educ 42:521–533. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.2008.00658.x

Li M, Yu Z (2023) A systematic review on the metaverse-based blended English learning. Front Psychol 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1087508

Luo H, Li G, Feng Q, Yang Y, Zuo M (2021) Virtual reality in K-12 and higher education: a systematic review of the literature from 2000 to 2019. J Comput Assist Learn. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12538

Margaryan A, Littlejohn A, Vojt G(2011) Are digital natives a myth or reality? University students’ use of digital technologies Comput Educ 56:429–440. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2010.09.004

McMillan S(1996) Literacy and computer literacy: definitions and comparisons Comput Educ 27:161–170. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0360-1315(96)00026-7

Mo CY, Wang CL, Dai J, Jin P (2022) Video playback speed influence on learning effect from the perspective of personalized adaptive learning: a study based on cognitive load theory. Front Psychology 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.839982

Moorhouse BL (2021) Beginning teaching during COVID-19: newly qualified Hong Kong teachers’ preparedness for online teaching. Educ Stud 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/03055698.2021.1964939

Moorhouse BL, Wong KM (2021) The COVID-19 Pandemic as a catalyst for teacher pedagogical and technological innovation and development: teachers’ perspectives. Asia Pac J Educ 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2021.1988511

Moskal P, Dziuban C, Hartman J (2013) Blended learning: a dangerous idea? Internet High Educ 18:15–23

Mughal MY, Andleeb N, Khurram AFA, Ali MY, Aslam MS, Saleem MN (2022) Perceptions of teaching-learning force about Metaverse for education: a qualitative study. J. Positive School Psychol 6:1738–1745

Mustapha I, Thuy Van N, Shahverdi M, Qureshi MI, Khan N (2021) Effectiveness of digital technology in education during COVID-19 pandemic. a bibliometric analysis. Int J Interact Mob Technol 15:136

Nagle J (2018) Twitter, cyber-violence, and the need for a critical social media literacy in teacher education: a review of the literature. Teach Teach Education 76:86–94

Nazare J, Woolf A, Sysoev I, Ballinger S, Saveski M, Walker M, Roy D (2022) Technology-assisted coaching can increase engagement with learning technology at home and caregivers’ awareness of it. Comput Educ 188:104565

Nguyen UP, Hallinger P (2020) Assessing the distinctive contributions of simulation & gaming to the literature, 1970-2019: a bibliometric review. Simul Gaming 104687812094156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046878120941569

Nygren H, Nissinen K, Hämäläinen R, Wever B(2019) Lifelong learning: formal, non-formal and informal learning in the context of the use of problem-solving skills in technology-rich environments Br J Educ Technol 50:1759–1770. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12807

Page MJ, McKenzie JE, Bossuyt PM, Boutron I, Hoffmann TC, Mulrow CD, Moher D (2021) The PRISMA 2020 statement: an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews. Int J Surg 88:105906

Pan SL, Zhang S(2020) From fighting COVID-19 pandemic to tackling sustainable development goals: an opportunity for responsible information systems research Int J Inf Manage 55:102196. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2020.102196

Pan X, Yan E, Cui M, Hua W(2018) Examining the usage, citation, and diffusion patterns of bibliometric mapping software: a comparative study of three tools J Informetr 12:481–493. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2018.03.005

Parris Z, Cale L, Harris J, Casey A (2022) Physical activity for health, covid-19 and social media: what, where and why?. Movimento, 28. https://doi.org/10.22456/1982-8918.122533

Pasquini LA, Evangelopoulos N (2016) Sociotechnical stewardship in higher education: a field study of social media policy documents. J Comput High Educ 29:218–239

Pérez-Sanagustín M, Hernández-Leo D, Santos P, Delgado Kloos C, Blat J(2014) Augmenting reality and formality of informal and non-formal settings to enhance blended learning IEEE Trans Learn Technol 7:118–131. https://doi.org/10.1109/TLT.2014.2312719

Pinto M, Leite C (2020) Digital technologies in support of students learning in Higher Education: literature review. Digital Education Review 343–360. https://doi.org/10.1344/der.2020.37.343-360

Pires F, Masanet MJ, Tomasena JM, Scolari CA(2022) Learning with YouTube: beyond formal and informal through new actors, strategies and affordances Convergence 28(3):838–853. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856521102054

Pritchard A (1969) Statistical bibliography or bibliometrics 25:348

Romero M, Romeu T, Guitert M, Baztán P (2021) Digital transformation in higher education: the UOC case. In ICERI2021 Proceedings (pp. 6695–6703). IATED https://doi.org/10.21125/iceri.2021.1512

Romero-Hall E, Jaramillo Cherrez N (2022) Teaching in times of disruption: faculty digital literacy in higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Innovations in Education and Teaching International 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2022.2030782

Rospigliosi PA(2023) Artificial intelligence in teaching and learning: what questions should we ask of ChatGPT? Interactive Learning Environments 31:1–3. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2023.2180191

Salas-Pilco SZ, Yang Y, Zhang Z(2022) Student engagement in online learning in Latin American higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic: a systematic review. Br J Educ Technol 53(3):593–619. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13190

Selwyn N(2009) The digital native-myth and reality In Aslib proceedings 61(4):364–379. https://doi.org/10.1108/00012530910973776

Selwyn N(2012) Making sense of young people, education and digital technology: the role of sociological theory Oxford Review of Education 38:81–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2011.577949

Selwyn N, Facer K(2014) The sociology of education and digital technology: past, present and future Oxford Rev Educ 40:482–496. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2014.933005

Selwyn N, Banaji S, Hadjithoma-Garstka C, Clark W(2011) Providing a platform for parents? Exploring the nature of parental engagement with school Learning Platforms J Comput Assist Learn 27:314–323. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2011.00428.x

Selwyn N, Aagaard J (2020) Banning mobile phones from classrooms-an opportunity to advance understandings of technology addiction, distraction and cyberbullying. Br J Educ Technol 52. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12943

Selwyn N, O’Neill C, Smith G, Andrejevic M, Gu X (2021) A necessary evil? The rise of online exam proctoring in Australian universities. Media Int Austr 1329878X2110058. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x211005862

Selwyn N, Pangrazio L, Nemorin S, Perrotta C (2019) What might the school of 2030 be like? An exercise in social science fiction. Learn, Media Technol 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1694944

Selwyn, N (2016) What works and why?* Understanding successful technology enabled learning within institutional contexts 2016 Final report Appendices (Part B). Monash University Griffith University

Sjöberg D, Holmgren R (2021) Informal workplace learning in swedish police education-a teacher perspective. Vocations and Learning. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12186-021-09267-3

Strotmann A, Zhao D (2012) Author name disambiguation: what difference does it make in author-based citation analysis? J Am Soc Inf Sci Technol 63:1820–1833

Article   CAS   Google Scholar  

Sutherland R, Facer K, Furlong R, Furlong J(2000) A new environment for education? The computer in the home. Comput Educ 34:195–212. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0360-1315(99)00045-7

Szeto E, Cheng AY-N, Hong J-C(2015) Learning with social media: how do preservice teachers integrate YouTube and Social Media in teaching? Asia-Pac Educ Res 25:35–44. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40299-015-0230-9

Tang E, Lam C(2014) Building an effective online learning community (OLC) in blog-based teaching portfolios Int High Educ 20:79–85. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2012.12.002

Taskin Z, Al U(2019) Natural language processing applications in library and information science Online Inf Rev 43:676–690. https://doi.org/10.1108/oir-07-2018-0217

Tegtmeyer K, Ibsen L, Goldstein B(2001) Computer-assisted learning in critical care: from ENIAC to HAL Crit Care Med 29:N177–N182. https://doi.org/10.1097/00003246-200108001-00006

Article   CAS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Timotheou S, Miliou O, Dimitriadis Y, Sobrino SV, Giannoutsou N, Cachia R, Moné AM, Ioannou A(2023) Impacts of digital technologies on education and factors influencing schools' digital capacity and transformation: a literature review. Educ Inf Technol 28(6):6695–6726. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-022-11431-8

Trujillo Maza EM, Gómez Lozano MT, Cardozo Alarcón AC, Moreno Zuluaga L, Gamba Fadul M (2016) Blended learning supported by digital technology and competency-based medical education: a case study of the social medicine course at the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. Int J Educ Technol High Educ 13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-016-0027-9

Turin O, Friesem Y(2020) Is that media literacy?: Israeli and US media scholars’ perceptions of the field J Media Lit Educ 12:132–144. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-009-0146-3

Van Eck NJ, Waltman L (2019) VOSviewer manual. Universiteit Leiden

Vratulis V, Clarke T, Hoban G, Erickson G(2011) Additive and disruptive pedagogies: the use of slowmation as an example of digital technology implementation Teach Teach Educ 27:1179–1188. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2011.06.004

Wang CL, Dai J, Xu LJ (2022) Big data and data mining in education: a bibliometrics study from 2010 to 2022. In 2022 7th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Big Data Analytics ( ICCCBDA ) (pp. 507-512). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/icccbda55098.2022.9778874

Wang CL, Dai J, Zhu KK, Yu T, Gu XQ (2023) Understanding the continuance intention of college students toward new E-learning spaces based on an integrated model of the TAM and TTF. Int J Hum-Comput Int 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2023.2291609

Wong L-H, Boticki I, Sun J, Looi C-K(2011) Improving the scaffolds of a mobile-assisted Chinese character forming game via a design-based research cycle Comput Hum Behav 27:1783–1793. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2011.03.005

Wu R, Yu Z (2023) Do AI chatbots improve students learning outcomes? Evidence from a meta-analysis. Br J Educ Technol. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13334

Yang D, Zhou J, Shi D, Pan Q, Wang D, Chen X, Liu J (2022) Research status, hotspots, and evolutionary trends of global digital education via knowledge graph analysis. Sustainability 14:15157–15157. https://doi.org/10.3390/su142215157

Yu T, Dai J, Wang CL (2023) Adoption of blended learning: Chinese university students’ perspectives. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 10:390. https://doi.org/10.3390/su142215157

Yu Z (2022) Sustaining student roles, digital literacy, learning achievements, and motivation in online learning environments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sustainability 14:4388. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14084388

Za S, Spagnoletti P, North-Samardzic A(2014) Organisational learning as an emerging process: the generative role of digital tools in informal learning practices Br J Educ Technol 45:1023–1035. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12211

Zhang X, Chen Y, Hu L, Wang Y (2022) The metaverse in education: definition, framework, features, potential applications, challenges, and future research topics. Front Psychol 13:1016300. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1016300

Zhou M, Dzingirai C, Hove K, Chitata T, Mugandani R (2022) Adoption, use and enhancement of virtual learning during COVID-19. Education and Information Technologies. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-022-10985-x

Download references

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Zhejiang Provincial Social Science Planning Project, “Mechanisms and Pathways for Empowering Classroom Teaching through Learning Spaces under the Strategy of High-Quality Education Development”, the 2022 National Social Science Foundation Education Youth Project “Research on the Strategy of Creating Learning Space Value and Empowering Classroom Teaching under the background of ‘Double Reduction’” (Grant No. CCA220319) and the National College Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship Training Program of China (Grant No. 202310337023).

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

College of Educational Science and Technology, Zhejiang University of Technology, Zhejiang, China

Chengliang Wang, Xiaojiao Chen, Yidan Liu & Yuhui Jing

Graduate School of Business, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Minden, Malaysia

Department of Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Beihang University, Beijing, China

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

Conceptualization: Y.J., C.W.; methodology, C.W.; software, C.W., Y.L.; writing-original draft preparation, C.W., Y.L.; writing-review and editing, T.Y., Y.L., C.W.; supervision, X.C., T.Y.; project administration, Y.J.; funding acquisition, X.C., Y.L. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. All authors have read and approved the re-submission of the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yuhui Jing .

Ethics declarations

Ethical approval.

Ethical approval was not required as the study did not involve human participants.

Informed consent

Informed consent was not required as the study did not involve human participants.

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary information

Rights and permissions.

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Wang, C., Chen, X., Yu, T. et al. Education reform and change driven by digital technology: a bibliometric study from a global perspective. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 256 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-02717-y

Download citation

Received : 11 July 2023

Accepted : 17 January 2024

Published : 12 February 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-02717-y

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

Why understanding the historical purposes of modern schooling matters today

Subscribe to the center for universal education bulletin, ghulam omar qargha and ghulam omar qargha fellow - global economy and development , center for universal education emily markovich morris emily markovich morris fellow - global economy and development , center for universal education @emilymarmorris.

May 22, 2023

This commentary is the second of a three-part series on (1) why it is important to define the purpose of education , (2) how historical forces have interacted to shape the purposes of today’s modern schooling systems, and (3) the role of power in reshaping how the purpose of school is taken up by global education actors in policy and practice .

Last month, UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed acknowledged that achieving the goal of quality education for all by 2030 is unlikely due to the “ triple crisis in education ” many countries face—”equity and inclusion, quality, and relevance.” Ensuring education systems are relevant requires reflecting on the historical purposes of schooling and examining how those purposes have evolved in different contexts. Having dialogues about what relevant, inclusive, and quality education means for diverse communities and societies is a critical part of the quest to transform education .

In this commentary, we discuss how the purposes of modern schooling are tied to the legacies of colonization and highlight how modern schooling has obscured and silenced other forms and purposes of education as it has spread. We also argue that it is critical to acknowledge the traditions of learning that predate modern schooling to understand where we want to move as a global community in transforming education. Appreciating the rich mosaic of educational histories and purposes builds on the strengths of educational systems in different localities and allows us to ensure transformation efforts center relevance alongside inclusion, equity, and quality.

Schooling is not synonymous with education

The term “school” is often used interchangeably with “education,” but there are some important distinctions. Education encompasses not only formal schooling but also nonformal and informal learning. Nonformal education refers to intentional and institutionalized learning that is often an “ addition, alternative, and/or a complement to formal schooling ,” such as community-based education programs for out-of-school youth and adults. Informal learning encompasses learning that is not institutionalized , such as learning a trade or skill from a family member or education that takes place organically through hobbies and recreational activities. All three forms are vital to our educational ecosystems and histories, but in this commentary, the focus is on the history of formal schooling that often has more narrow purposes than the wider field of education.

Appreciating the rich mosaic of educational histories and purposes builds on the strengths of educational systems in different localities and allows us to ensure transformation efforts center relevance alongside inclusion, equity, and quality.

Formal schooling began to take shape around the 18th century. However, numerous education systems, such as religious, civil service, apprenticeship, and indigenous systems, have existed for thousands of years. These pre-existing systems focused on the enrichment of the self, community, and society as their primary purposes. For example, the Keju system in China (dating to 206 BCE) and the dabiristan civil servant schools in present-day Afghanistan and Iran (dating to the 3rd century) aimed to prepare well-rounded civil servants by teaching students a wide range of subjects, including religious texts, literature, philosophy, history, administrative documents, cooking, and archery.

The artes liberalis (liberal arts) program, dating back to ancient Greece and Rome, taught broad-based curricula focused on grammar, rhetoric, and logic, as well as geometry, astronomy, and music. Apprenticeships and guilds from ancient civilizations in Egypt, Greece, and Rome provided vocational training and gave students spiritual and moral grounding. Madrassas in the Muslim world continue to teach sacred texts, grammar, rhetoric, logic, astronomy, medicine, and music as a healing science.

The rise of modern schooling 

Modern schooling primarily originated in Europe to build national identities for newly formed nation-states and to replace the Catholic Church’s political and social reign after The Thirty Years’ War (~1610-1648). The purpose of schooling in the 17th century was largely to create loyal subjects to the newly formed nation-states rather than the monarchies. It focused on assimilation, homogenization, and building national identities through standardized language and bringing together strangers to create a unified national identity for fostering social control and political legitimacy rather than democratic civic engagement as we understand it today. The Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation (~1685-1815) across the European empire emphasized education as a means to prepare good citizens. Protestant leaders like Martin Luther (1483-1546) and John Amos Comenius (1592-1670)—from Germany and what is now the Czech Republic—called for mass schooling to make religious texts widely available. Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke (1632-1704) and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) argued for a secular government founded on citizen loyalty to the nation rather than the Catholic church. Modern schooling “assume(d) a primary responsibility for the moral, cultural, and political development of the nation ( Andy Green , p. 80).” As such, inclusive and equitable quality education for all —as we ground the purpose today in Sustainable Development Goal 4—was less about human rights and more about building national and religious influence and learning.

The purpose of school turned more toward economic development in Great Britain and across Europe and the United States before and during the Industrial Revolution (1820–1840). The Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith (1723-1790), known as the “Father of Economics” and the “Father of Capitalism,” advocated for mass schooling as a condition for the proper functioning of a free-market economy. Later, North American economists and sociologists Walt Rostow (1916-2003), Alex Inkeles (1920-2010), and Theodore Shultz (1902-1998) argued that modern schooling provided individuals with the skills and knowledge necessary to participate in the modern economy, and was vital to the economic development of nation-states. These arguments led to the human capital theory , which economists like Milton Friedman have used to advocate for the deregulation and privatization of schools to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of schooling. Advocacy for increased parental choice, competition, and accountability resulting from these privatization movements remain deeply rooted in our public discourse and debates on schooling today.

The increased emphasis on economics did not imply that national identity was no longer a focal point in education. John Dewey’s writings emphasize that schooling maintained its primary objective of preparing students for their societal roles by functioning as micro-communities that replicated the typical conditions of society.

The expansion of modern schooling

Although the formation and evolution of modern schooling are rooted in the histories of Europe, North America, and other parts of the Global North, today, almost every nation-state in the world has adopted the model as its official form of education. In most countries under colonial influence, the colonizing forces used  modern schooling  to develop a workforce in the colony, spread culture and values, control the local populations from opposing colonial rule, and create a sense of national unity among colonized peoples. After the rise of nation-states, schooling became a tool for modernizing, developing, and globalizing.

As modern schooling was intentionally spread and dispersed by colonial forces  within Europe and across the world , the result was often the displacement and repressing of existing education models and philosophies of education. This global expansion needs more systematic dialogue about how and which purposes of schooling were assumed in the process. As Julius K. Nyerere, the first president of independent Tanzania, said , “The education provided by the colonial government in the two countries which now form Tanzania had a different purpose. It was not designed to prepare young people for service of their country; instead, it was motivated by a desire to inculcate the values of a colonial society and train individuals for service of the colonial state” (p. 2-3). In more recent writings, climate-focused scholars argue that adopting modern schooling paradigms, like that of John Dewey’s educational philosophy, has transferred a global modernist conception of human agency that urges  humans to colonize nature .

In foreign aid and donor agenda and relationships , purposes of education are often implicit instead of explicitly named and questioned. Although efforts are essential to bringing communities around the world together toward a common goal in education, we must recognize the critical dialogues on modern schooling that have been vibrant and dynamic across the rise of modern schooling.

Furthering a critical dialogue on modern schooling

Throughout history, critics of modern schooling have challenged the positioning of schools for  building national identities and civic engagement , and  economic development . These critiques can be seen in Indigenous education movements, as discussed in Linda Tuhiwahi Smith’s foundational work on decolonizing methodologies and Paolo Freire’s work on critical dialogues in education in Brazil and Latin America. They are part of the language reclamation movements in education across Africa led by Ngugi wa’ Thiongo and others, and efforts to decolonize curriculum .

The deputy secretary-general emphasized reimagining and transforming education systems to make them “ fit for purpose .” This requires a deliberate appreciation of and dialogue on the diverse purposes of education and the various existing models of education systems, both historically and presently. We must question how our efforts to “ fix systems ” often prioritize specific purposes and narrowly focus on schooling as sole avenue for education. If we do not acknowledge how different purposes of education have been privileged through history with the rise and spread of modern schooling, then we risk the possibility of reproducing a colonial model of teaching and learning with narrow purposes. Expanding our purposes will make schooling even more inclusive and high-quality, and most certainly more relevant for the times.

Related Content

Emily Markovich Morris, Ghulam Omar Qargha

February 16, 2023

Ghulam Omar Qargha, Rangina Hamidi, Iveta Silova

September 16, 2022

Rebecca Winthrop, The Hon. Minister David Sengeh

June 23, 2022

Global Education

Global Economy and Development

Center for Universal Education

June 20, 2024

Modupe (Mo) Olateju, Grace Cannon, Kelsey Rappe

June 14, 2024

Emily Markovich Morris, Laura Nóra, Richaa Hoysala, Max Lieblich, Sophie Partington, Rebecca Winthrop

May 31, 2024

• Games & Quizzes
• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction & Top Questions

Prehistoric and primitive cultures

• Mesopotamia
• North China
• The Hindu tradition
• The introduction of Buddhist influences
• Classical India
• Indian influences on Asia
• Xi (Western) Zhou (1046–771 bce )
• Dong (Eastern) Zhou (770–256 bce )
• Qin autocracy (221–206 bce )
• Scholarship under the Han (206 bce –220 ce )
• Introduction of Buddhism
• Ancient Hebrews
• Education of youth
• Higher education
• The institutions
• Physical education
• The primary school
• Secondary education
• Early Roman education
• Roman modifications
• Education in the later Roman Empire
• Ancient Persia
• Elementary education
• Professional education
• Early Russian education: Kiev and Muscovy
• Influences on Muslim education and culture
• Aims and purposes of Muslim education
• Organization of education
• Major periods of Muslim education and learning
• Influence of Islamic learning on the West
• From the beginnings to the 4th century
• From the 5th to the 8th century
• The Irish and English revivals
• The cultural revival under Charlemagne and his successors
• Influences of the Carolingian renaissance abroad
• Education of the laity in the 9th and 10th centuries
• Monastic schools
• Urban schools
• New curricula and philosophies
• Thomist philosophy
• The Italian universities
• The French universities
• The English universities
• Universities elsewhere in Europe
• General characteristics of medieval universities
• Lay education and the lower schools
• The foundations of Muslim education
• The Mughal period
• The Tang dynasty (618–907 ce )
• The Song (960–1279)
• The Mongol period (1206–1368)
• The Ming period (1368–1644)
• The Manchu period (1644–1911/12)
• The ancient period to the 12th century
• Education of the warriors
• Education in the Tokugawa era
• Effect of early Western contacts
• The Muslim influence
• The secular influence
• Early influences
• Emergence of the new gymnasium
• Nonscholastic traditions
• Dutch humanism
• Juan Luis Vives
• The early English humanists
• Luther and the German Reformation
• The English Reformation
• The French Reformation
• The Calvinist Reformation
• The Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation
• The legacy of the Reformation
• The new scientism and rationalism
• The Protestant demand for universal elementary education
• The pedagogy of Ratke
• The pedagogy of Comenius
• The schools of Gotha
• Courtly education
• The teaching congregations
• Female education
• The Puritan reformers
• Royalist education
• The academies
• John Locke’s empiricism and education as conduct
• Giambattista Vico, critic of Cartesianism
• The condition of the schools and universities
• August Hermann Francke
• Johann Julius Hecker
• The Sensationists
• The Rousseauists
• National education under enlightened rulers
• Spanish and Portuguese America
• French Québec
• New England
• The new academies
• The middle colonies
• The Southern colonies
• Newfoundland and the Maritime Provinces.
• The social and historical setting
• The pedagogy of Pestalozzi
• The influence of Pestalozzi
• The pedagogy of Froebel
• The kindergarten movement
• The psychology and pedagogy of Herbart
• The Herbartians
• Other German theorists
• French theorists
• Spencer’s scientism
• Humboldt’s reforms
• Developments after 1815
• Girls’ schools
• The new German universities
• Development of state education
• Elementary Education Act
• Secondary and higher education
• The educational awakening
• Education for females
• New Zealand
• Education under the East India Company
• Indian universities
• The Meiji Restoration and the assimilation of Western civilization
• Establishment of a national system of education
• The conservative reaction
• Establishment of nationalistic education systems
• Promotion of industrial education
• Social and historical background
• Influence of psychology and other fields on education
• Traditional movements
• Progressive education
• Child-centred education
• Scientific-realist education
• Social-reconstructionist education
• Major trends and problems
• Early 19th to early 20th century
• Education Act of 1944
• The comprehensive movement
• Further education
• Imperial Germany
• Weimar Republic
• Nazi Germany
• Changes after World War II
• The Third Republic
• The Netherlands
• Switzerland
• Expansion of American education
• Curriculum reforms
• Federal involvement in local education
• Changes in higher education
• Professional organizations
• Canadian educational reforms
• The administration of public education
• Before 1917
• The Stalinist years, 1931–53
• The Khrushchev reforms
• From Brezhnev to Gorbachev
• Perestroika and education
• The modernization movement
• Education in the republic
• Education under the Nationalist government
• Education under communism
• Post-Mao education
• Communism and the intellectuals
• Education at the beginning of the century
• Education to 1940
• Education changes during World War II
• Education after World War II
• Pre-independence period
• The postindependence period in India
• The postindependence period in Pakistan
• The postindependence period in Bangladesh
• The postindependence period in Sri Lanka
• South Africa
• General influences and policies of the colonial powers
• Education in Portuguese colonies and former colonies
• German educational policy in Africa
• Education in British colonies and former colonies
• Education in French colonies and former colonies
• Education in Belgian colonies and former colonies
• Problems and tasks of African education in the late 20th century
• Colonialism and its consequences
• The second half of the 20th century
• The Islamic revival
• Migration and the brain drain
• The heritage of independence
• Administration
• Primary education and literacy
• Reform trends
• Malaysia and Singapore
• Philippines
• Education and social cohesion
• Education and social conflict
• Education and personal growth
• Education and civil society
• Education and economic development
• Primary-level school enrollments
• Secondary-level school enrollments
• Tertiary-level school enrollments
• Other developments in formal education
• Literacy as a measure of success
• Access to education
• Implications for socioeconomic status
• Social consequences of education in developing countries
• The role of the state
• Social and family interaction
• Alternative forms of education

What was education like in ancient Athens?

How does social class affect education attainment, when did education become compulsory, what are alternative forms of education, do school vouchers offer students access to better education.

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Academia - Return on Education Using the Concept of Opportunity Cost
• National Geographic - Geography
• World History Encyclopedia - Education in the Elizabethan Era
• Table Of Contents

What does education mean?

Education refers to the discipline that is concerned with methods of teaching and learning in schools or school-like environments, as opposed to various nonformal and informal means of socialization .

Beginning approximately at the end of the 7th or during the 6th century, Athens became the first city-state in ancient Greece to renounce education that was oriented toward the future duties of soldiers. The evolution of Athenian education reflected that of the city itself, which was moving toward increasing democratization.

Research has found that education is the strongest determinant of individuals’ occupational status and chances of success in adult life. However, the correlation between family socioeconomic status and school success or failure appears to have increased worldwide. Long-term trends suggest that as societies industrialize and modernize, social class becomes increasingly important in determining educational outcomes and occupational attainment.

While education is not compulsory in practice everywhere in the world, the right of individuals to an educational program that respects their personality, talents, abilities, and cultural heritage has been upheld in various international agreements, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948; the Declaration of the Rights of the Child of 1959; and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966.

Alternative forms of education have developed since the late 20th century, such as distance learning , homeschooling , and many parallel or supplementary systems of education often designated as “nonformal” and “popular.” Religious institutions also instruct the young and old alike in sacred knowledge as well as in the values and skills required for participation in local, national, and transnational societies.

School vouchers have been a hotly debated topic in the United States. Some parents of voucher recipients reported high levels of satisfaction, and studies have found increased voucher student graduation rates. Some studies have found, however, that students using vouchers to attend private schools instead of public ones did not show significantly higher levels of academic achievement. Learn more at ProCon.org.

Should corporal punishment be used in elementary education settings?

Whether corporal punishment should be used in elementary education settings is widely debated. Some say it is the appropriate discipline for certain children when used in moderation because it sets clear boundaries and motivates children to behave in school. Others say can inflict long-lasting physical and mental harm on students while creating an unsafe and violent school environment. For more on the corporal punishment debate, visit ProCon.org .

Should dress codes be implemented and enforced in education settings?

Whether dress codes should be implemented and enforced in education settings is hotly debated. Some argue dress codes enforce decorum and a serious, professional atmosphere conducive to success, as well as promote safety. Others argue dress codes reinforce racist standards of beauty and dress and are are seldom uniformly mandated, often discriminating against women and marginalized groups. For more on the dress code debate, visit ProCon.org .

Recent News

education , discipline that is concerned with methods of teaching and learning in schools or school-like environments as opposed to various nonformal and informal means of socialization (e.g., rural development projects and education through parent-child relationships).

(Read Arne Duncan’s Britannica essay on “Education: The Great Equalizer.”)

Education can be thought of as the transmission of the values and accumulated knowledge of a society. In this sense, it is equivalent to what social scientists term socialization or enculturation. Children—whether conceived among New Guinea tribespeople, the Renaissance Florentines, or the middle classes of Manhattan—are born without culture . Education is designed to guide them in learning a culture , molding their behaviour in the ways of adulthood , and directing them toward their eventual role in society. In the most primitive cultures , there is often little formal learning—little of what one would ordinarily call school or classes or teachers . Instead, the entire environment and all activities are frequently viewed as school and classes, and many or all adults act as teachers. As societies grow more complex, however, the quantity of knowledge to be passed on from one generation to the next becomes more than any one person can know, and, hence, there must evolve more selective and efficient means of cultural transmission. The outcome is formal education—the school and the specialist called the teacher.

As society becomes ever more complex and schools become ever more institutionalized, educational experience becomes less directly related to daily life, less a matter of showing and learning in the context of the workaday world, and more abstracted from practice, more a matter of distilling, telling, and learning things out of context. This concentration of learning in a formal atmosphere allows children to learn far more of their culture than they are able to do by merely observing and imitating. As society gradually attaches more and more importance to education, it also tries to formulate the overall objectives, content, organization, and strategies of education. Literature becomes laden with advice on the rearing of the younger generation. In short, there develop philosophies and theories of education.

This article discusses the history of education, tracing the evolution of the formal teaching of knowledge and skills from prehistoric and ancient times to the present, and considering the various philosophies that have inspired the resulting systems. Other aspects of education are treated in a number of articles. For a treatment of education as a discipline, including educational organization, teaching methods, and the functions and training of teachers, see teaching ; pedagogy ; and teacher education . For a description of education in various specialized fields, see historiography ; legal education ; medical education ; science, history of . For an analysis of educational philosophy , see education, philosophy of . For an examination of some of the more important aids in education and the dissemination of knowledge, see dictionary ; encyclopaedia ; library ; museum ; printing ; publishing, history of . Some restrictions on educational freedom are discussed in censorship . For an analysis of pupil attributes, see intelligence, human ; learning theory ; psychological testing .

Education in primitive and early civilized cultures

The term education can be applied to primitive cultures only in the sense of enculturation , which is the process of cultural transmission. A primitive person, whose culture is the totality of his universe, has a relatively fixed sense of cultural continuity and timelessness. The model of life is relatively static and absolute, and it is transmitted from one generation to another with little deviation. As for prehistoric education, it can only be inferred from educational practices in surviving primitive cultures.

The purpose of primitive education is thus to guide children to becoming good members of their tribe or band. There is a marked emphasis upon training for citizenship , because primitive people are highly concerned with the growth of individuals as tribal members and the thorough comprehension of their way of life during passage from prepuberty to postpuberty.

Because of the variety in the countless thousands of primitive cultures, it is difficult to describe any standard and uniform characteristics of prepuberty education. Nevertheless, certain things are practiced commonly within cultures. Children actually participate in the social processes of adult activities, and their participatory learning is based upon what the American anthropologist Margaret Mead called empathy , identification, and imitation . Primitive children, before reaching puberty, learn by doing and observing basic technical practices. Their teachers are not strangers but rather their immediate community .

In contrast to the spontaneous and rather unregulated imitations in prepuberty education, postpuberty education in some cultures is strictly standardized and regulated. The teaching personnel may consist of fully initiated men, often unknown to the initiate though they are his relatives in other clans. The initiation may begin with the initiate being abruptly separated from his familial group and sent to a secluded camp where he joins other initiates. The purpose of this separation is to deflect the initiate’s deep attachment away from his family and to establish his emotional and social anchorage in the wider web of his culture.

The initiation “curriculum” does not usually include practical subjects. Instead, it consists of a whole set of cultural values, tribal religion, myths , philosophy, history, rituals, and other knowledge. Primitive people in some cultures regard the body of knowledge constituting the initiation curriculum as most essential to their tribal membership. Within this essential curriculum, religious instruction takes the most prominent place.

Modern Trends In Education: 50 Different Approaches To Learning

What if a class consisted of words that led to information that whirled into blended realms of creativity set up just for students, created by students?

contributed by Lisa Chesser and updated by TeachThought Staff

Education sprouts in many forms.

Our views of what it should look like and how it should materialize depend on our value of it and our experience with it.

What if a class consisted of words that led to information that whirled into blended realms of creativity set up just for students, created by students? The students then dictated what they learned instead of reluctantly ingesting information and standards imposed upon them.

That exists here and now. In every nook and cranny, around every corner, inside every well-engineered lesson, students might just learn what they want to learn and actually find success while improving the world around them.

Take a tour of 50 different views of education that somehow find a similar note: Education is changing and there may certain things every classroom should have .

1. Ground Up Diversity

The late Sir Ken Robinson  campaigned for changing education through talks, writing, advising, and teaching. He believes education must change because it’s a stale environment in which most students don’t really learn what they should or want to learn. How that happens makes all the difference—from the ground up. People, students, and teachers create the change, not the administrators or the executives.

2. Social Networking

With social networking growing to the point that Technorati last tracked about 70 million updated blogs, using social networking to teach any subject and catapult students into a realm other than stagnant learning means blending the traditional education with modern communication. Many educators believe this is the route to engaging students in learning all the basic skills they need.

3. Competency-Based Learning

Competency-based learning is an approach to education that focuses on the student’s demonstration of desired learning outcomes.

4. Underground Education

According to John Taylor Gatto, teachers should choose the real world over the classroom. Students don’t learn to live or survive in a classroom. They learn to survive in the real world so the concept of underground education challenges educators in any walk of life to give students the tools with which to live and breathe in the world around them. If the lesson must be taught, then teach it thinking of who they might become.

5. Navdanya

Dr. Vadana Shiva’s mission lives and breathes in  Navdanya , an organization that promotes self-reliance and earth democracy. The leaders of the organization are women who find strength in women’s movements and give women a voice. Earth democracy developed from the idea of seed saving helping local communities become self-reliant.

6. Self-Directed Learning

Read here for more on Self-Directed Learning .

7. Social Status

Even more significant to learning than being an asset, social status plays an underlying role in the education of a small or large group of people whether it’s an entire country’s agenda or certain sections or communities within that country. In other words, if that community puts importance on education as a social benefit, students and people in that community will strive to achieve it in order to raise their status in the community.

8. Lesson Study

Originating in Japan, lesson study applies to style of teaching. Conceptually, lesson study promotes the idea that teachers constantly improve and change their style of teaching based on students’ performance and reaction to it. It sounds like what we already do but not exactly. Collaboration between teachers is paramount and so is change. Combining these two factors with constant change means students never stop learning.

9. Constructive Struggling

Another  Japanese form of teaching  is to allow students to struggle through a lesson with guidance from their teacher. In other words, the student shouldn’t be embarrassed about failing the first time around, not even the second or third time. The instructor should actually encourage students to learn from that failure.

10. School in the Clouds

After experimenting with a computer in a wall where poor children basically found a way to learn without a teacher, Sugata Mitra won the Ted Prize of $1 million in 2013. He wrote an ebook named Beyond the Hole in the Wall offering an ideal for education based on a very real premise that students learn no matter what social status or economic background. They simply need the tools with which to do so.

11. Problem-Based Learning

In regards to tertiary education, problem-based learning is gaining popularity in Australia. Students are given a real-world problem then they work together to find a solution to this. In Australia, nursing programs have begun to embrace this style of teaching and learning because it challenges the students to work as if they’re dealing with real problems they’ll encounter in the workplace. Teachers find it invaluable because students learn more with this method.

12. Learning with Technologies

Another view found around the world surrounds the use of technologies as a key to students improving their learning and ‘marketability.’ Within the realm of technologies, teachers encourage students to innovate, bringing them full-circle into the 21st-century where visibility and adaptability rule.

13. Constructivist Learning

According to Dimitrios Thanasoulas of Greece with relation to philosopher Giambattista Vico, humans only understand what they construct. This concept runs on the idea that students create their own learning environments, actively participating in the knowledge they ingest. Creating your own learning involves making mistakes with no preset agenda in place. Constructive learning is not stable so many educational systems reject it.

14. International Objectives

Many countries are creating a climate conducive to international students’ interests and desires. In 2010, $7.7 billion was spent on tuition by international students in Canada. Countries that give attention to international students find economic benefits in both education and employment.

15. Asynchronous Learning Hubs

Whether through videos, cohorts, online courses, playlists, live streaming, or other approaches, the future of learning will likely be at least partly asynchronous.

16. Competency-Based Education

Competency-based education  says that regardless of the length of time it takes for a student to complete a course, the student completes it based on what they know already. The only factor in determining how or when the student completes the course is the mastery of knowledge within the subject.

17. Adaptive Learning Platforms

IXL , for example.

18. Degree Qualifications

The Lumina Foundation  argues that degree programs need to set benchmarks for students that prepare them for an ever-changing workplace. These degrees then aren’t simply meant for study but give students goals and skills that will help them find and maintain jobs once they enter the workforce.

19. Place-Based Learning

Place-Based Education “immerses students in local heritage, cultures, landscapes, opportunities, and experiences, uses these as a foundation for the study of language arts, mathematics, social studies, science and other subjects across the curriculum, and emphasizes learning through participation in service projects for the local school and/or community.” (citation needed)

20. Disrupting Innovation

Some see online education as a disruptive process in the clean line that traditional education has managed to stronghold, which links to Herbert Stein’s law in the sense that online education is putting an end to this stronghold. Americans see this as a crisis because of the unemployment rate and the competition from China and India. In response, disruptive innovation means the expense and elitism of education is changing to provide an affordable alternative.

21. Open Innovation

Open innovation promotes the idea of competition. In the business world this means opening up platforms for companies in the form of contests. In higher education, this means bringing together various institutions for competitions locally and globally. It means not confining it to only a select few but opening up to as many contestants as possible.

22. Focus On Teacher Quality

Another view and criticism of education puts the success or the blame on the teachers’ low salary. Respect for the teaching profession is crucial to the process of growing high-quality teachers. Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg believes that educators should be paid more and for good reason. In Finland, receiving placement in a master’s program for teachers is harder than getting a law or medical degree.

23. Finnish Education

Instead of focusing on meeting standards and racing to the top, Finland focuses on providing quality education to everyone. Contrary to many of the other views in this list, Finland doesn’t believe in competition or even giving grades until fifth grade. The system also doesn’t believe in punitive measures but encourages trust and equality.

24. Social Support Strategy

Organizations such as The Adolescent Girls’ Advocacy and Leadership Initiative (AGALI) use social support strategy to ensure young women learn about themselves beyond social norms. Realizing that the institutionalization of education can only go so far, these organizations provide education in other, far-reaching ways that give people a sense of confidence and self-worth necessary to finding success in life.

25. Change Agents

Elevating the teacher as the key to changing the groaning educational system, change agents are teachers who not only embrace the notion of change but simply make change happen. They don’t wait for a law to pass or a standard to take effect, they just take the initiative to ensure students learn no matter what the circumstances or limitations.

26. Common Core Change

In the United States, the implementation of common core standards is meant to support higher education, which has reported a lower standard in educational abilities than in years before. It’s also meant to challenge students more by forcing education to enter the 21st century with more student-driven learning.

27. Start-up Education

Start-ups and education are slowly finding each other and attempting to link up with one another. The only problem is that bureaucracy in education creates slow change. But, when that change does occur, fast change and innovation give students and educators an ecosystem in which to thrive and learn.

28. Mobile Education

We move as a global society so that where ever we go, we carry our smartphones with us. Between conversations, we look down and tap away at whatever our minds fancy necessary or entertaining. So education, at least in the most cognizant facets, says it will be there too. It will walk with us on our journeys, our whims, our detours, and our desires. If we take our laptops around the world, education will walk with us according to mobile educational theories.

29. Invisible Structures

On that same note, why place a student in a box? If a student prefers to learn while traveling the world, then so be it. Breaking down the walls of education doesn’t simply mean creating online classrooms but encouraging students to meet in open spaces and learn outside the confines of the institution.  Teaching outside the classroom  should be a source of inspiration, not a strange phenomenon.

30. Economic Empowerment

Giving students the ability to control their economic status through teaching them skills and economic value systems around the world helps them become leaders and innovators but also helps them find a basis for earning an income in a fluctuating economy.

31. Vocational Training

Whether students are seeking a specialized higher education or a specific skill in order to further a career path, vocational training has become a more popular avenue and view of education in general. Often used by governments to train displaced workers, it can be a valuable source of study for anyone wanting to specialize in areas such as various types of medical technicians or even graphic arts.

32. Gamification

The concept of  gamification in learning is the addition of game-like mechanics to non-game ideas and practices. The word gamification was actually coined by an English programmer, Nick Pelling, in 2004. Adding gaming to education means simply enough that the user completes certain tasks for rewards just like in a video game.

33. Smart Capital

Smart capital involves placing funds exactly where they should be. Instead of handing funds over to an entire community or country based on need, the money flows into the hands of those that need it but will also use it effectively then share their ideas and funds with others so that we eliminate mediocre use or even no use of technology and funds.

34. Catalytic Role

Many foundations or organizations play a catalytic role in advancements in education such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They help innovators change the dynamics of education by providing monetary and other resources as support through college-ready education and post-secondary success. The main idea is to strengthen the relationship between teacher and student so that the learning process progresses to the point at which students not only learn but apply what they learn.

35. Blended Learning

Blending learning  and technology gives students an advantage over others. It’s one thing to move along at one’s own pace. It’s another to learn at one’s own pace. Linking the two makes a difference worth noting. Teachers don’t have to be breathing over the neck of the student. Guiding the student is often quite enough.

36. Collective Education

The individual takes the back seat when it comes to the idea of collectivist education. Students learn in groups and more importantly with each other better and more effectively than alone. This doesn’t mean that we disregard the individual online learner, but it means that the online learner will learn better when exposed to a group of learners with similar interests who can offer insight and questioning into the process of learning any particular subject.

37. Personalized Education

Ironically enough, personalized education holds even more value than ever. The difference is that personalized education doesn’t mean there isn’t collective education. It just means that education is given importance to personalized needs and desires, that the individual should mean something within the collective forum.

38. Flexible Learning

With personalized education, the value of flexible learning needs to be addressed. Flexible learning offers students choices, convenience, and a personal approach to learning any given subject. Because we are individuals, learning and teaching should entail some form of flexibility within the realm of standardization.

39. Flipped Learning

As bluntly put as possible, a ‘ flipped classroom’  means turning learning on its head. Take the learning environment and flip it around so that students do the nitty-gritty of learning with their teachers or professors as opposed to studying for exams alone in a dark room with only a bright lamp to guide them. The fun part happens at home with a link to a short article or a video. The tough part happens in school where the teachers can help students fill in the blanks.

40. Classical Education

The classical education of any group of students rewind to a time lost to them if delivered in a lecture format. Students can experience the beauty of Shakespeare at any age because they see it like it was and is, in a theater, no matter how small or large. Students at Oxford, in an online class, or students at a small school experience classical education because it’s handed to them by teachers who deliver it in motion.

41. Free Post-Secondary Education

Countries all over the world offer free post-secondary education giving students in those countries an obvious advantage over other students who may or may not receive any education at all. Students might be able to pay for their education if they work while they’re putting themselves through school and if they’re lucky enough maybe they have a resource providing them with funds for their education, but free resources guarantee an education that adds value to whatever they want to become.

42. Religious Education

Religious education exists because communities and cultures give it an importance beyond knowledge. Linking them together with time and presence, students learn the nature of who their families and communities believe they are as well as how to deal with a changing world full of disappointments and violence.

43. Moral Education

Moral education  involves many religions and many insights into the way humans interact with one another. How we manage our way through difficulties is just as important as how we maneuver through technological advances, at least to our ancestors and their views of right and wrong.

44. Character Education

Within the realm of creating morality, there’s character standing right next to it. Character may even be a stronger element of education than morality. With students so quickly exposed to violence and sexism throughout the Internet, character development takes effort and awareness. At every level of education, students should be exposed to it and given a chance to exercise their understanding of it.

45. Readiness Testing

Readiness Testing points educators and students in the right direction according to the people who view it as necessary. It allows educational systems to decide whether students can perform various tasks at a particular level therefore giving everyone insight into where and how students should move forward.

46. Sharing Voices

In New Zealand, students are encouraged to use online tools in order to tell their own stories and have their voices heard throughout their own communities and their country. In fact, the Ministry of Education’s goal is to have students express themselves and take responsibility of their own learning.

47. Expeditionary Learning

Expeditionary learning  brings the learning out into the world expediting the need to learn more than what’s confined inside the classroom walls but even more so using the world to learn. Students feel engaged in learning while achieving goals and accomplishing character development when exposed to learning outside.

48. Self-Organized Learning Environments

According to Wikipedia, a “Self Organized Learning Environment is a program designed to support self-directed education. Sugata Mitra, an education scientist, first popularized the term in 1999, referencing an approach he developed following his Hole in the Wall experiments.”

49. Expeditionary Learning

Expeditionary learning brings the learning out into the world expediting the need to learn more than what’s confined inside the classroom walls but even more so using the world to learn. Students feel engaged in learning while achieving goals and accomplishing character development when exposed to learning outside.

50. Global View

According to renowned educator  Yong Zhoa , high-stakes testing creates more problems than provides answers and it doesn’t match success in the world today. Educating creative, entrepreneurial students should be the focus of education with what he calls world-class learners in his latest book. Zhoa believes there needs to be a paradigm shift in education that builds on students’ strengths and gives them a format where their talents flourish and take shape instead of education shaping them.

This post has been updated by TeachThought and republished from its original version by Lisa Chesser at   opencolleges.edu.au

TeachThought is an organization dedicated to innovation in education through the growth of outstanding teachers.

Open Access is an initiative that aims to make scientific research freely available to all. To date our community has made over 100 million downloads. It’s based on principles of collaboration, unobstructed discovery, and, most importantly, scientific progression. As PhD students, we found it difficult to access the research we needed, so we decided to create a new Open Access publisher that levels the playing field for scientists across the world. How? By making research easy to access, and puts the academic needs of the researchers before the business interests of publishers.

We are a community of more than 103,000 authors and editors from 3,291 institutions spanning 160 countries, including Nobel Prize winners and some of the world’s most-cited researchers. Publishing on IntechOpen allows authors to earn citations and find new collaborators, meaning more people see your work not only from your own field of study, but from other related fields too.

Brief introduction to this section that descibes Open Access especially from an IntechOpen perspective

Want to get in touch? Contact our London head office or media team here

Our team is growing all the time, so we’re always on the lookout for smart people who want to help us reshape the world of scientific publishing.

Home > Books > Lifelong Learning - Education for the Future World [Working Title]

Bridging the Gap: Traditional vs. Modern Education (A Value-Based Approach for Multiculturalism)

Submitted: 13 November 2023 Reviewed: 06 December 2023 Published: 18 January 2024

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.114068

Cite this chapter

There are two ways to cite this chapter:

From the Edited Volume

Lifelong Learning - Education for the Future World [Working Title]

Prof. Filippo Gomez Paloma

Chapter metrics overview

111 Chapter Downloads

Impact of this chapter

Total Chapter Downloads on intechopen.com

The dynamic landscape of education has witnessed a profound shift from traditional to modern pedagogical paradigms over the years. The discussion of results delves into the intriguing debate between traditional and modern educational systems (TES and MES), examining them through the lens of a value-based approach. This exploration is crucial in understanding how these two approaches shape the educational experiences of learners, faculty, and impact society at large. Drawing from the literature review and insights from a survey involving 179 students and 28 faculty staff, the work advocates a balanced integration of traditional and modern educational approaches. It underscores the pressing need for a value-based model that harmonizes age-old wisdom with contemporary innovations. The survey reveals student aspirations for a holistic, value-driven education, while the faculty acknowledges challenges and opportunities inherent in bridging this educational gap. In conclusion, the data reinforce the value-based approach, emphasizing its importance in curricula and pedagogy to promote ethical values, critical thinking, and empathy. Furthermore, the findings shed light on practical implementation challenges and offer valuable guidance to educators and policymakers. In an era of transformative education, bridging theory and practice will resonate with both students and faculty who recognize the societal benefits of a balanced synthesis between tradition and modernity.

• traditional education
• modern education
• value-based approach
• multiculturalism
• pedagogical paradigm
• ethical values
• critical thinking

Author Information

Oksana chaika *.

• National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine

*Address all correspondence to: [email protected], [email protected]

1. Introduction

The contemporary state of education is subject to be in constant flux, paving new ways and vision for the pedagogical paradigms with technological advancements, evolving societal needs, and being parallelly shaped by historical traditions driven by established educational practices. In recent decades, the dichotomy between traditional and modern educational systems (TES and MES) has emerged as a central point of debate [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]. Traditional education, deeply rooted in heritage, often emphasizes rote learning and discipline [ 4 , 5 ], especially for science majors such as math, physics, etc. that lay primary focus on calculation and comprehension, that is, according to Wang “some subjects that focus more on thinking application and deep calculation should be taught in traditional ways” ([ 4 ], p. 272) and “although traditional lecture-style teaching is more boring than high-tech classrooms, it can be more effective at improving test scores” ([ 4 ], p. 271); it is also stated that “rote learning is a well-practiced approach at all educational level, where education and assessments emphasize on memorization of content rather than comprehension and application of content in real life events” ([ 5 ], p. 114). On the other hand, modern education emphasizes innovation, learner-centric methodologies, and the integration of technology, among which cultural literacy, originality, and creativity play a crucial role, for example, “the content [of cultural literacy] in the pedagogical culture is seen pertinent to the modern FL teacher” and at the same time, it includes “professionalism, non-standard way of thinking/thinking out of the box, originality, high level literacy, expressiveness, logic, lexical wealth and communication, creativity, and culture awareness and readiness for diversity in perception” ([ 2 ], p. 103). This evolving educational landscape necessitates a critical examination to address the challenges and opportunities it presents.

Thus, the research problem at hand is the need to navigate this evolving terrain of education effectively. Understanding the dynamics, strengths, and limitations of TES and MES is crucial. Moreover, it is essential to explore how a value-based approach can bridge the gap and create a more holistic educational experience [ 6 , 7 , 8 ] for students and teachers. In this regard, Dogan believes, “the empowerment of the employees who believe in the organization’s values and respect to employees enable the employees to work at full capacity and to become happy” ([ 6 ], p. 84]); moreover, “making radical changes in the behaviors of individuals based on the values is composed of three stages, including seeing, feeling and change” and for instance, “the stage of ‘seeing’ increases the employees’ awareness towards the values” [ 6 ]. The significance of this research lies in its potential to inform educators, policymakers, and stakeholders on the path towards a more balanced and meaningful educational model.

What are the key characteristics and pedagogical paradigms of TES as defined by faculty and students?

How does MES differ from TES, and what innovations does it bring to the educational landscape?

What is the concept of a value-based approach in education, and how can it be implemented effectively, for example, for foreign language teaching and acquisition (FLT and FLA)?

What is the potential impact of a value-based educational model on learners and society?

To address these research questions, a comprehensive approach, combining literature reviews and the survey, was employed. This mixed-method approach [ 7 ] allowed for a deep exploration of the topic, incorporating both theoretical data and comments by the students and faculty from perspectives of their empirical value as real-world experiences from the educational community.

The research findings break into several sections. The introduction is followed by the review of the literature related to TES and MES, value-based education, in the light of the research agenda. Following that, the methodology section explains the survey design, data collection, and analysis. Then, the focus is laid on a discussion of the value-based approach, including its principles, theoretical framework, and practical implications. Finally, the research explores the challenges and opportunities in implementing a value-based approach in education, offering the educational model to be considered by educators, policymakers, and stakeholders. It concludes by summarizing key findings, emphasizing the importance of a balanced approach to education, and suggesting potential future research directions.

2. Theoretical readings

Education, deeply intertwined with culture and tradition, has a rich historical legacy. TES, often characterized by rote learning, discipline, and the transmission of societal values, can be traced back to ancient civilizations [ 8 , 9 ]. For example, the Confucian educational system in ancient China placed a strong emphasis on the teachings of classic texts, which became a cornerstone of traditional education [ 10 ]. The emergence of MES marked a shift towards learner-centric approaches, innovation, and the integration of technology [ 1 , 11 , 12 ]. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, educational reform movements in Europe, such as those initiated by Rousseau and Pestalozzi, laid the groundwork for contemporary educational principles with Rousseau’s three components in education: “This education comes to us from nature itself, or from other men, or from circumstances” as cited in Bazaluk ([ 13 ], p. 17) and Pestalozzi’s “new understanding of the meaning of human life and a cultural ideal”, as well as the philosopher’s basic principle of education: “education should be built according to the natural course of mental development in a child” [ 13 ]. The implementation of compulsory education and the advent of public schooling in the United States and Europe, including Ukraine, further exemplified this shift [ 14 , 15 , 16 ]. Value-based education, rooted in the philosophical underpinnings of moral and ethical development, seeks to instill values such as empathy, critical thinking, and global awareness in learners, based on fostering poly- and multiculturalism in educational classrooms [ 12 , 16 , 17 ]. This approach draws from various theories, including Kohlberg’s theory of moral development, which emphasizes the importance of nurturing ethical reasoning in education [ 18 , 19 ]. Moreover, McKenzie and Blenkinsop’s “ethic of care” highlights the significance of empathy and relationships in the educational process [ 19 ].

3. Research methodology

The methodology for this study involved the creation of a structured survey instrument to gather data on the perceptions and experiences of individuals within the traditional and modern educational systems. The survey was meticulously designed to explore key aspects of both systems and their potential convergence in a value-based approach [ 17 ]. Development included the formulation of clear and concise questions that addressed the objectives of the research and followed either the Likert scale or open-ended questions that allowed for argumentation and substantiation of opinions. Statistically, the research sample consisted of 179 students and 28 faculty staff members from the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine. A purposive sampling technique was employed to ensure a representative mix of participants with varying educational backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. Informed consent was obtained from all participants.

Data collection primarily relied on an online survey platform, allowing for the efficient distribution of the questionnaire to the selected participants. The survey comprised both closed-ended and open-ended questions, providing a balance between quantifiable data and in-depth qualitative responses. Participants were given a reasonable time frame to complete the survey to ensure thoughtful and accurate responses. The data collected from the survey was subjected to both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Qualitative data from open-ended questions were subjected to thematic analysis to identify common themes and patterns. The integration of both quantitative and qualitative analyses allowed for a comprehensive understanding of the research questions.

The study adhered to ethical guidelines and protocols. Informed consent was secured from all participants, assuring them of anonymity and confidentiality. Data was stored securely, and all personal identifiers were removed during data analysis to ensure participants’ privacy and confidentiality. The research was conducted with the utmost integrity and respect for the rights and well-being of the participants.

4. Results and discussion

The research findings point to the dichotomy between TES and MES, reinforcing the approaches to education. Thus, the study by Alsubaie investigated the effects of traditional and modern teaching methods on student achievement and found that student-centered modern approaches tend to yield better results [ 20 ]. Contrarily, another study by Chavan and Chavan [ 21 ] emphasized the value of traditional education, on the one hand, in preserving cultural heritage and moral values and certain concerns, on the other, for example, “Within the traditional knowledge system, there was a natural obligation, empathy, and overall mentoring towards students by teachers and reverence and submissiveness was exhibited by students towards teachers. Today, teachers, students, and knowledge are all treated as ‘objects’ whose value depends on the quantitative returns ‘it’ can provide” ([ 21 ], p. 278).

TES focuses on teacher-centered instruction while MES embraces learner-centered and interactive approaches: P18, “I reckon most of the seminars being conducted traditionally are rather good, especially when all the students are asked the questions and no one is bored”, P54, “MES offers personalized learning, technology integration, and a focus on critical thinking and problem-solving”;

TES uses textbooks and printed materials as primary resources as contrasted to MES which utilizes a wide range of digital and multimedia resources: P53, “TES provides a time-tested approach to education. This can offer a sense of stability and familiarity for students. However, MES incorporates modern technology and teaching methods, promoting more interactive learning and adaptability to individual student needs”, P75, “The usage of most of the online pros, such as laptops, presentations, there are more opportunities for the future; Nevertheless, I can’t deny the effectiveness of TES”;

in TES, teachers are seen as the primary source of knowledge and authority, however, in MES, teachers would rather encourage student autonomy and self-directed learning: Participant 14 (P14), “The main advantages [of TES] are the opportunities for students to master the theoretical part of knowledge. This will allow them to use it in the future with possible practical skills”; P36, “TES has limitations, such as potential limitations in adapting to individual learning styles and the rapid pace of technological advancements. MES, on the other hand, offers benefits such as personalized learning, technology integration, and global connectivity”;

TES is mainly characterized by its hierarchical and discipline-oriented structure whereas MES is perceived as flexible and adaptable, and according to the students’ answers in their key focus—often tailored to individual needs of the learner: P27, “TES can provide stronger learning of core knowledge through in-depth interaction with teachers and a focus on core academic subjects. It also often includes a rigorous curriculum and structured learning process, which can promote a disciplined approach to learning”, P122, “TES often prioritizes the basics, such as reading and writing. In addition, the teacher plays a central role, providing direct instruction and guidance, which can be beneficial for students who learn well in a structured learning environment. Also, traditional systems emphasize discipline, punctuality, obedience, and compliance.”, P81, “MES often provide more accessibility through technology, learning experiences, and up-to-date content. They can better cater to individual student needs and adapt to a rapidly changing world, making education more engaging”, and

TES promotes uniformity and conformity in learning while MES encourages creativity and independent thinking of the learner: P162, “TES - Stability and reliability, cultural heritage, specialization, number 1 system”, P171, “Modern education often allows for more flexible scheduling, catering to non-traditional students, working adults, or those with diverse time commitments”, P72, “MES focuses on fostering twenty-first century skills such as critical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration, and digital literacy”, etc.

Demographic information: participants’ age range.

These and other comments were made by the participants with the following educational background: 29.3% were participants with a college degree (high school) and incomplete bachelor’s that referred mainly to students in their first through fourth years at university; 51.2% were master students; 9.8% were faculty staff with a Ph.D. and/or more advanced degree in science, and ultimately 2.4%—“other”, that stands for a visiting researcher.

Moreover, 78% of participants experienced education in both the systems—TES and MES whereas 22% underlined their good acquaintance and journeys with either TES or MES ( Figure 2 ).

Education experience.

Finally, when the questions regarded the emotional part of the participants’ experience with TES and MES and the information about their education systems awareness and educational preferences, that is, which educational systems they feel most familiar with or have spent the most time in, under the half (41.5%) replied they felt comfortable and familiar with both the systems and the other two groups had a difference of 14.6% as to their understanding and preferences for TES (36.6%) over MES (22%) ( Figure 3 ).

Familiarity with TES and MES.

P44, “TES typically follows a well-defined curriculum, providing a structured and organized approach to learning.”

P56, “Traditional education often leads to recognized degrees, diplomas, or certificates, which are widely accepted by employers and institutions. This provides students with formal qualifications that can enhance their career prospects.”

P32, “In traditional educational settings, students have access to experienced educators who can provide guidance, support, and mentorship.”

P101, “Traditional educational institutions typically provide access to libraries, laboratories, and other resources, which can be essential for hands-on learning and research.”

P49, “MES is better in the practical part of learning of any subject. You receive more applied information and learn new practical skills, which are more similar to real-life situations.” and P94, “An individualized approach to each student and a variety of techniques are the strengths of the modern educational model. This allows the student to feel comfortable and apply knowledge in practice.”

P8, “Modern education leverages technology to enhance learning. This includes e-learning platforms, multimedia resources, and online collaboration tools, which can make education more engaging and accessible.”

P78, “Modern education often allows for more flexible scheduling, catering to non-traditional students, working adults, or those with diverse time commitments.”

P163, “Educational technology allows for the collection and analysis of data to gain insights into student progress and areas of improvement, enabling more targeted interventions.”

These and many other comments, feedback, and remarks allowed for grouping the received data under the keywords and phrases that resulted in Table 1 .

Traditional educational system vs. modern educational system.

Another remarkable aspect of the survey makes it conclude that it is not always that the younger generation, as compared to the teaching/lecturing faculty of more age seniority and less digital proficiency, would favor MES, for instance, let us follow P86, “For me, a person who doesn’t like to explore new things, the traditional system is the best, as it has everything I’m used to.”

Next, like the above, where behavioral patterns and/or values play their crucial role, the below comments shed light on what may be significantly valuable while designing and implementing curricula. The values of critical thinking, future vision, and empathy matter to a greater degree, that is, P49 names critical thinking as a value because “MES places a strong emphasis on developing critical thinking skills, students are encouraged to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information independently” and adds that “This skill is invaluable in various aspects of life, including problem-solving and decision-making”; P90 focuses on the importance of preparation for the future as “MES equips students with skills relevant to the rapidly changing job market” and “Emphasis on subjects like computer science, coding, and digital literacy prepares students for careers in technology and other evolving fields.”

That underscores the importance of scanning the learning mood and educational preferences in classrooms and outside; in an ever-evolving world, the need for innovation is not limited to technology alone; it extends to the way we approach education and pedagogical systems.

5. Value-based approach in education

Taking the discussion further, the exploration leads to the integration of a value-based educational model and bridging the gap between TES and MES, offering real-world solutions that can enhance quality, progress, and enjoyment.

A value-based educational model is a holistic approach to learning, emphasizing the development of not only academic knowledge but also strong ethical principles and values. In this model, core values such as integrity, empathy, and responsibility are integrated into the educational process, ensuring that students not only excel academically but also grow as responsible, ethical individuals [ 22 ].

Drawing from educational theories such as social learning, constructivism, and moral development, the integration of values into education is a well-structured framework [ 23 , 24 ]. These theories provide a foundation for teaching critical thinking, ethical decision-making, and empathy, allowing students to become well-rounded individuals who can navigate an ever-changing world while adhering to timeless ethical principles [ 13 , 16 , 22 ].

Traditional education often relies on rote learning, while modern education places an emphasis on critical thinking and creativity. The value-based approach bridges this gap by combining the strengths of both, nurturing individuals who can adapt to a changing world while upholding ethical principles [ 1 , 3 , 17 ].

According to the survey, 85.3% of participants believe that values are very important/important in education as contrasted to only 4.9% who do not find them very important almost similar to 2.4% who state they are not important at all as only technical knowledge, expertise, and practical skills matter in the job market today ( Figure 4 ); and 7.3% neither agree nor disagree, where the comments specify that the value component is fully personal and plays little role in education; however, it will play its role in family and work life in future.

Values in education.

To bridge the gap between TES and MES via a value-based approach, participants suggest as follows: P3, “We should try to change the basic course of study and let students decide for themselves what to prioritize. Some people prefer practical knowledge, some prefer theory. We should respect people’s preferences in exploring the approaches that suit them.”; P70, “Implement a blended learning approach that combines elements of TES and MES, this can involve a mix of traditional classroom instruction and technology-enhanced learning experiences.”; P32, “Provide comprehensive and ongoing professional development for teachers to adopt innovative teaching methods and effectively integrate technology into their instructional practices”, which can ensure that teachers are equipped with the skills and knowledge to harness the benefits of both TES and MES in their classrooms; P162, “Design educational frameworks that allow for individualized learning paths” to involve incorporating personalized learning plans, adaptive learning technologies, and student self-assessment; P117, “Place a greater emphasis on developing essential skills such as critical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration, and digital literacy because these skills are crucial for success in the modern world and can be integrated into both TES and MES approaches.”, etc.

Implementing a value-based educational model has practical implications that positively impact both students and the education system. Students exposed to this approach are more likely to become empathetic, socially responsible individuals who can address complex ethical challenges, leading to improved classroom behavior and a positive school culture [ 3 , 4 , 16 ].

6. Impact on learners and society

The study has brought to the forefront the contrasting characteristics of TES, rooted in tradition and discipline, and MES, driven by innovation and learner-centric methodologies. Participants have expressed a resounding consensus on the need for a more holistic educational model, one that combines the strengths of both systems while emphasizing values such as empathy, tolerance, and cultural diversity.

Speaking about the impact on learners and society, it is required to spotlight (a) the imperative of a balanced approach, (b) the need to transform the educational landscape, and (c) a call to action for educators and policymakers, in particular.

Thus, the implications of the research underscore the critical significance of a balanced educational approach. A value-based educational framework that seamlessly integrates the merits of TES and MES can give rise to a more comprehensive and harmonious learning environment. It fosters not only academic excellence but also the ethical and emotional intelligence essential for thriving in an increasingly interconnected world.

Next, the findings extend beyond the boundaries of this study. They have far-reaching implications for the educational landscape, offering the promise of transformation. The integration of a value-based approach carries the potential to shape a generation of learners who are not only academically proficient but also socially responsible, empathetic, and culturally aware. Finally, the present research calls for consideration, further reflection, and most importantly, action. It calls upon educators, policymakers, and stakeholders to reevaluate the core values that underpin education and the pedagogical methodologies employed. A value-based approach represents an opportunity to redefine the educational landscape, nurturing empathetic, critical, and globally aware individuals. With the onward look to the future, education is not confined to the acquisition of knowledge alone; it is about the transformation of individuals and the enrichment of society. It is believed that with an embraced balanced approach and prioritized value-based education, learners and society at large may reap the benefits of the best of both traditional and modern educational systems.

7. Conclusions and recommendations

In the realm of education, the coexistence of TES and MES presents a fascinating landscape for researchers. Along with the challenges, there are opportunities and lessons learned from the coexistence of these systems, that lead to shape future research directions.

To be realistic, it is necessary to address the obstacles in implementing a value-based approach, especially the two identified with the processed and analyzed research data—resistance to change and assessment methods.

Following the findings, one significant challenge in integrating a value-based approach into both TES and MES is the resistance to change. Educators, parents, and institutions may be reluctant to shift from traditional content-focused teaching to a more values-oriented curriculum. Another challenge arises with the assessment methods. Traditional systems often rely on standardized testing for assessment, making it challenging to evaluate students’ personal values and ethics. It also reads in Halstead and Taylor [ 25 ] that developing effective and standardized methods for assessing values is an ongoing challenge.

However, by laying more focus on incorporating technology in classroom and advancing community engagement, TES and MES can find more opportunities for promoting value-based education. The integration of technology, such as e-learning platforms and educational apps, offers a promising avenue to promote value-based education. Today, more and more researchers are exploring how technology can be used to deliver values-centered content [ 1 , 8 , 9 ]. Collaborating with community organizations and stakeholders provides an opportunity to reinforce values taught in school. There have been many works published where research focuses on strategies to engage local communities in shaping students’ values [ 17 , 23 ].

To design and implement strategies (a) for integrating values into educational curricula, (b) guidance for educators, policymakers, and stakeholders as educators should effectively integrate values into their teaching methods, policymakers should establish these clear guidelines for values-based curricula, and stakeholders should offer support through resources and advocacy.

To consider future research directions for long-term impact, cross-cultural studies, and teacher training.

Future research should focus on assessing the long-term impact of values-based education on students’ personal and professional lives, examining its influence on career success, societal well-being, and global citizenship. Comparative studies across different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds are needed to determine the adaptability and effectiveness of value-based education in diverse settings. In the end, more research should explore effective teacher training programs that prepare educators to deliver values-centered content and foster ethical development in students.

In conclusion, the coexistence of TES and MES presents both challenges and opportunities in the integration of value-based education. Lessons from the survey and literature review highlight the positive impact of values-based education on students, while recommendations emphasize the importance of standardized curricula and support from educators, policymakers, and stakeholders.

A. Survey questionnaire

Section 1: demographic information

1.1. What is your age ?

18–24

25–34

35–44

45–54

55–64

1.2. What is your gender?

Prefer not to say

1.3. What is your educational background?

High school

Bachelor’s degree

Master’s degree

Ph.D. or other advanced degree

Other (please specify)

Section 2: experience and preferences

2.1. Have you experienced education in both traditional and modern educational systems (TES and MES)?

2.2. Which educational system do you feel most familiar with or have spent the most time in?

Traditional educational system (TES)

Modern educational system (MES)

Both equally

2.3. What, in your opinion, are the key strengths of TES in comparison to MES? Why?

2.4. What, in your opinion, are the key strengths of MES in comparison to TES? Why?

Section 3: values in education

3.1. How important do you believe it is to integrate values such as empathy, tolerance, and cultural diversity into the education system?

Very important

Not very important

Not important at all

3.2. Do you think traditional educational systems place enough emphasis on teaching these values?

3.3. Do you think modern educational systems place enough emphasis on teaching these values?

3.4. What other values in your opinion are important for education today? Why?

Section 4: bridging the gap 4 .1. In your opinion, what strategies or changes could be made to bridge the gap between TES and MES and create a more balanced educational model?

Section 5: overall impressions

5.1. Overall, do you believe it is possible to create a value-based educational system that successfully combines elements of both TES and MES?

Section 6: additional comments

6.1. Is there anything else you would like to share or any additional comments related to traditional and modern educational systems?

• 1. Dewsbury B, Brame CJ. Inclusive teaching. CBE – Life Sciences Education. 2019; 18 (2):1-5. DOI: 10.1187/cbe.19-01-0021
• 2. Chaika O. Implementing technology of poly-/multicultural education for future foreign language teachers: Integrated approach. International Journal of Philology. 2022; 13 (4):101-109. DOI: 10.31548/philolog13(4_2).2022.011
• 3. Alsubaie MA. The influence of traditional and modern teaching methods on students' achievements. Journal of Education and Practice. 2015; 6 (19):29-40
• 4. Wang Y. A comparative study on the effectiveness of traditional and modern teaching methods. In: 2022 5th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2022). Zhengzhou: Atlantis Press; 2022. pp. 270-277
• 5. Ahmed A, Ahmed N. Comparative analysis of rote learning on high and low achievers in graduate and undergraduate programs. Journal of Education and Educational Development. 2017; 4 (1):111-129. Available from: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1161522.pdf
• 6. Dogan S. Model of values-based management process in schools: A mixed design study. International Journal of Higher Education. 2016; 5 (1):83-96
• 7. Bergman M. Advances in Mixed Methods Research: Theories and Applications. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE; 2008
• 8. Takahiro N. Confucian modernity in Japan religion and the state. Journal of Japanese Philosophy. 2020; 6 (1):45-62
• 9. O'Dwyer S. Deflating the ‘Confucian Heritage Culture’ thesis in intercultural and academic English education. Language, Culture and Curriculum. 2017; 30 (2):198-211
• 10. Bahtilla M, Xu H. The influence of Confucius’s educational thoughts on China’s educational system. Open Access Library Journal. 2021; 8 (5):1-17
• 11. Abe H. Borrowing from Japan: China’s first modern educational system. In: China’s Education and the Industrialized World. London: Routledge; 2017. pp. 57-300
• 12. Chaika O, Lytvyniuk O, Trofymenko A, Zaluzhna O, Shepel Y. Fundamentals of poly-/multicultural education for a modern foreign language instructor in the system of their professional and personal growth. AD ALTA: Journal of Interdisciplinary Research. 2022; 11 (02 (Special Issue XXIV)):150-155
• 13. Bazaluk O. Plato’s traditions in modern educational theories. Analele Universității din Craiova. Seria Filosofie. 2019; 1 (43):5-20
• 14. Carpentier V. The history of higher education in modern Europe. In: Tamura EH, editor. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2019
• 15. Chicosky CL. Restructuring the modern education system in the United States: A look at the value of compulsory education laws. Brigham Young University Education and Law Journal. 2015; 2015 :7-20. Available from: https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/elj/vol2015/iss1/2
• 16. Chaika O, Absaliamova Y, Marchuk V, Dovhaniuk E, Kolesnykov A. Poly- and multiculturalism underpinning personality formation of future foreign language teachers. Amazonia Investiga. 2022; 11 (52):221-231. Available from: https://www.webofscience.com/wos/woscc/full-record/WOS:000806131700024
• 17. Biesta GJ. Why ‘what works’ still won’t work: From evidence-based education to value-based education. Studies in Philosophy and Education. 2010; 29 :491-503
• 18. Mathes EW. An evolutionary perspective on Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. Current Psychology. 2021; 40 (8):3908-3921
• 19. McKenzie M, Blenkinsop S. An ethic of care and educational practice. Journal of Adventure Education & Outdoor Learning. 2006; 6 (2):91-105
• 20. Alsubaie MA. Examples of current issues in the multicultural classroom. Journal of Education and Practice. 2015; 6 (10):86-89
• 21. Chavan JR, Chavan SV. Human evolution–A key focus of transformational teacher. In: Knowledge Globalization Conference; Pune, India. Massachusetts, USA: Knowledge Globalization Institute LLC; 2012. pp. 275-285
• 22. Gilfoil DM, Focht JW. Value-based delivery of education: MOOCs as messengers. American Journal of Business Education. 2015; 8 (3):223-238
• 23. Rushton JP. Moral cognition, behaviorism, and social learning theory. Ethics. 1982; 92 (3):459-467
• 24. Cummings R, Harlow S. The constructivist roots of moral education. The Educational Forum. 2000; 64 (4):300-307
• 25. Halstead M, Taylor MJ. Values in Education and Education in Values. London, Washington, D.C.: The Falmer Press; 1996

© 2023 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

IntechOpen Author/Editor? To get your discount, log in .

Discounts available on purchase of multiple copies. View rates

Local taxes (VAT) are calculated in later steps, if applicable.

• Newsletters

IE 11 Not Supported

Istelive 24: 8 innovative ideas to transform k-12 education, eight presenters at iste’s annual conference tuesday in denver shared their own visions, anecdotes and suggestions for innovative changes in their field, each making a case for exploration and openness to technology..

LEAVE ‘GOOD ENOUGH’ BEHIND

Ai use cases, tips for effective makerspaces, don’t be afraid to flip the script, the power of social media, indigenous knowledge, reimagining seat time, respond to change, rather than react.

45,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

Here’s your new year gift, one app for all your, study abroad needs, start your journey, track your progress, grow with the community and so much more.

Verification Code

An OTP has been sent to your registered mobile no. Please verify

Thanks for your comment !

Our team will review it before it's shown to our readers.

• Education /

Modern Education: A Significant Leap Forward

• Updated on  
• Nov 25, 2022

The advancement of human civilization is significantly influenced by education . Since the beginning of time, the way that people learn has changed significantly over time and continues to do so as a result of developing technology. However, thanks to the internet and other digital technology, online learning environments are becoming more popular than traditional classrooms. The spatial restriction of a physical classroom has been entirely eliminated by the current educational system, benefiting a wide variety of pupils simultaneously throughout the world. We shall shed some light and talk about Modern Education in this blog.

This Blog Includes:

What is modern education, traditional education vs. modern education, which one is better, need for modern education, what is the purpose of modern education, modern education in india, traditional education and modern education, traditional education: tried and tested, modern education: a welcome change, the wheel of modern education, smart education: the advent of online learning, grading & assessment in modern education, the three main ingredients for effective modern education, modern education: a sample study, why finland’s schools outperform most others across the developed world, benefits of modern education, disadvantages of the modern education system, challenges faced by modern education system, modern education speech.

Modern Education is the latest and contemporary version of education that is taught in schools and learning institutions in the 21st century. Modern education doesn’t just only focus on prominent academic disciplines of Commerce, Science and Arts but also aims to foster critical thinking, life skills, value education, analytical skills and decision-making skills in students. Modern Education also makes use of the latest technology such as mobile applications, audio and video platforms like YouTube, Podcasts, E-books, Movies, etc. to educate learners and make the learning process more engaging and interesting.

We have all been educated in a teacher-centric classroom, a system where the teacher is in upfront and the students are seated in nice neat rows, listening to the lecture and taking notes. This system has been, and to some extent, still forms the core of our education system. Schools have relied on it for decades, and have only recently undergone major changes. Living in the 21st century, technology has become an integral part of our everyday lives. None of us can deny that it has brought about nothing short of an overhaul of our world, and more importantly of our educational system. From chalkboards to whiteboards and now to smart boards, technology has become our main source of research, knowledge, and teaching. This blog is going to shed some light on the modern education system and how it is replacing traditional methods of teaching.

Both traditional and contemporary education is connected to and distinct from one another. There was a point in our nation’s early history when there were no schools. The education or information is passed down to the children from their ancestors. At the time, this expertise was primarily concerned with survival abilities. The people who lived in jungles received their education from their predecessors, who demonstrated to them how to build tools, use animal skins for various uses, and hunt for sustenance. They received instruction on their rites and practices. Their respective beliefs were discussed in class.

They imparted moral lessons to them through the tales of their gods and monarchs. In India, the monarchs used to send their sons to institutions known as gurukuls. They learned how to wield various weapons, how to defend themselves, and how to assault their adversaries at these gurukuls. Additionally, they learned the fundamentals of governing an empire . These kinds of schools weren’t intended for the community. The royal families were the only ones who had access to it. The expertise that their parents possessed was passed on to the other children in the empire by them. The value of education grew across the nation as the democratic government was created in the next years. Schools were opened where any kind of student could come and learn. Modern education was established at this time.

Both types of education have their own place and importance in society. We cannot categorise education as good or bad. Traditional education was good in its time, and modern education is good in its time. Actually, it depends on the individual. It all depends on what the individual wishes to learn. Traditional education is unquestionably better for learning about one’s customs and religion. Modern education, on the other hand, is beneficial to those who wish to learn about science or mathematics. Both types of education are equally important. Our culture is frequently associated with traditional education. And it is beneficial, if not essential, to learn about one’s own culture. Everyone should know their religion’s stories and beliefs, as well as their traditions and culture. Similarly, it is critical to keep up with the world in terms of modern developments that are taking place today. This expresses the significance of modern education. Modern education is required to keep in touch with the rest of the world and to understand what is going on.

The academic curriculum needs to be modernised not simply to keep up with the times, but also to better educate students about the rapid breakthroughs in technology. Becoming flexible to changing times, helps students become skilled at employing both conventional abilities and technical competence with equal ease.

The existing educational system does ordinary people an injustice by limiting their potential, making it impossible for them to handle the intricacies of both private and public life. Since there are many different issues facing mankind in today’s competitive world, the educational system must be made adaptable enough to educate pupils for this dynamic environment .

Here are the key purposes of modern education:

• To foster essential life skills, critical thinking, decision-making skills and analytical competencies in its learners.
• To facilitate a positive approach towards diversity, inclusion, compassion and a sense of responsibility in students.
• To create a fun and engaging learning process.
• To incorporate educational technology to make the learning environment more experiential with a key focus on real-world applications of concepts.
• To ensure that learning and education reach every corner of the world whether through physical classrooms or online learning.
• To build an equal relationship between the teacher and learner and foster the curiosity of students and teach them to inquire and ask questions rather than the passive traditional approach.

The Indian education system has its deep roots in ancient oral learning as well as the Gurukul education system which later was transformed into formal education by the British. Here are the salient features of modern education in India:

• Modern education in India was brought by the British colonisers in the 1830s along with the English language which is credited to have been introduced in India by Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay.
• While metaphysics and philosophy were earlier studied at Nalanda University, the new modern education system brought by the British focused on academic disciplines like Science and Mathematics.
• As India became free from the British, basic education was made compulsory, especially for 6-14 years of age with schools constructed all across the country.
• The modern-age education system of India in the 21st century is constituted of a new approach to learning from online education to skill-development courses, digital learning platforms, a grading system as well as the use of educational technology in the classrooms and a newly introduced New Education Policy !

Notes on Modern Education

Want to study the importance of modern education and how it is different from traditional education? Here are some important study notes on Modern Education:

Teaching styles have changed significantly over the years. The traditional way of imparting education primarily employs recitation and memorization techniques whereas modern education involves interactive methods for effective learning. The following paragraphs elaborate more on both approaches.

The conventional education method focuses more on teaching and passing on information and knowledge to learners. It focuses more on recitation than on anything else. For example, students are made to sit in silence while one student after another would take turns reciting a lesson until each one had been called upon. The teacher will listen to each student’s recitation who is expected to learn and memorise the assignments to the word. Traditional education methods rely heavily on replication-based assessment in practical and written exams as well. However, how traditional teaching methods were utilized more than ensured that students were rewarded for their efforts, used class periods efficiently and exercised clear rules to manage student behaviour. Traditional methods are based on established customs that had been used successfully in schools over many years.

Why is modern education important? Modern education significantly differs from the traditional methods of teaching and is widely practised in schools today emphasising more on science and technology. Progressive modern education focuses more on the student’s needs rather than assuming that all students are at the same level of understanding. It is activity-based comprising of questioning, explaining, demonstration and collaboration techniques. Embodied in the BEd Syllabus , this form of education teaches imaginative, creative thinking and visualization. 

Amongst the core features of Modern Education, Online Education has become a quintessential part of the learning process and pedagogy in the contemporary age. Offering an immense scope of learning anything, anytime and anywhere, the Internet has become a vast pool of knowledge welcoming people of all ages to furnish their skills and expand their expertise in different fields of study. Further, online learning is just a constituent of Smart Education which utilised technology to facilitate an interactive process of teaching and learning. The importance of technology in education is imperative today and you can learn anything and anywhere just with the help of a functioning network connection and a smartphone, tablet or computer, utilizing tools like MDM for education .

Apart from the approach to teaching and learning, another unique aspect of modern education is the introduction of a grading system that focuses on providing students with certain grades rather than marks to eliminate the quantification of a student’s knowledge about a subject. While marks were the major element of assessment in traditional education, modern education has brought forward a grading system which is a better way to provide students with an overview of their knowledge and understanding of different subjects. With this advanced marking pattern, students are relieved from the scoring pressure and teachers are also able to highlight the areas where a student needs to work more on and where they can focus on helping the student perform better.

Modern education comprises various learning and teaching methods including the popular ‘space learning’ wherein students are encouraged to quickly switch through activities. It is a learning method in which the condensed learning content is provided with a 10-minutes break for physical activities. For example, students would be provided with 15 minutes of PowerPoint presentation and then allotted 10 minutes of sport. This method aims to improve their learning abilities. It is claimed that physical exercises help brain cells to create a connection that they need to remember the course. Furthermore, it has the additional benefit of allowing people to relax.

Modern education is aided by a variety of computer technologies, the internet, and projector presentations to make studies interesting and interactive for students. It encourages students to engage with the real world, and analyse everything that happens in different life spheres. Students are taken to respective sectors and industries where they witness the practical application of concepts they learned theoretically. These methods help improve the quality of education and improve the engagement of students effectively. 

Also Read: Importance of Value Education

In particular, the advantages of modern education can be summarised as:

• Modern education is a dynamic way of learning enabling students to learn a lot faster. The interaction between students and teachers helps students understand better.
• Enabling students to participate in physical activities to improve their efficiency is another advantage. Modern education allows students to do a lot more than just learn and helps them become more social and interactive. 
• Cocurricular activities, recreational activities, drama and art in education help students to become creative, industrious as well as the patient. This is one of the factors that make students look forward to schooling. 
• Modern education comprises screening classes and lectures which are scheduled at specific timings, this helps to make students punctual and consistent. 

Lack of interpersonal interaction: Courses taken online are self-paced. It is challenging for the students to build relationships with their peers. little to no face-to-face interaction and little social engagement.

The likelihood of becoming distracted: The likelihood of becoming distracted is quite high for students who are less focused and lack motivation. The students wander off course and end up doing something different.

Learners get isolated: since they don’t engage with the outside world, which increases the likelihood that they may feel lonely and alone.

1. Conformity:

Employees are required to abide by a set of rules to accomplish corporate goals or targets, which may limit their freedom and creativity.

2. Loss of Responsibility:

The people feel less accountable for the general expansion of the business as a result of the development in the specialisation. Even though their employees are not receiving the required training and development, it has been observed that firms frequently blame “ globalisation ” for all of their problems.

3. Lack Of Proper Communication:

There is frequently poor communication between various sectors

and teams as a result of overcomplication and shortened deadlines, which has a detrimental effect on the company’s overall performance.

Good morning to everyone in this assembly. I will discuss my opinions regarding the Indian educational system in my speech. People with more education may be easier to drive but harder to lead. Additionally, it makes governing simple but enslaving difficult. It is true that a man is just marginally better than an animal without education. Therefore, true education is the development of the mind, and it is necessary for living a happy life.

Education in India at the Present Time It is true that the Indian educational system is not the greatest. It is fairly monotonous and ineffective due to the lack of revisions and upgrades. Students are not very interested in their education. The issue of student’s lack of enthusiasm for learning is caused by a variety of issues.

People hold the traditional educational system responsible. The system has created a very reflecting image of education and study. Education is more about inquiry than it is about working hard to pass exams and assessments. But it seems like the existing educational system is a hardship.

Lack of computer-based education Only concentrating on books and paperwork is the part of our educational system that is the most onerous. I just want to know why schools don’t eliminate paper from the educational process! In the modern world, computer-assisted methods should be used to provide education. The entire educational system should be automated for all tasks.

Indian Education System Improvement By imposing unnecessary constraints and rules, schools and instructors risk distorting the joyous pursuit of education. Teachers need to entice students with the allures of education, learning, and acquiring information.

Teachers must explain to the students the excitement involved in the process of transmitting knowledge. Classroom instruction must be more entertaining than dull.

Our administration has implemented a number of programmes to address the flaws in our educational system. Consequently, it is a fantastic start. Although education has advanced significantly, much more work needs to be done in the near future.

Conclusion Therefore, if we want to protect our independence, it is absolutely necessary. Our nation has seen how a small number of Englishmen governed this area for more than a century. This resulted from the absence of a real educational system. This should never happen again, and the only way to prevent it is to have an ideal school system. The real education system would enable us to control our fate.

Thus, we hope that this blog on modern education helped you gain some modern perspectives on new methods of learning and teaching. We at Leverage Edu , believe in pushing your potential and bringing out the best in you. If you’re planning to pursue higher education and need assistance, get in touch with our experts and start your career today! 

Team Leverage Edu

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Contact no. *

Thank you for sharing the great informatic article. It will definitely many people.

Thank you for taking out the time and writing the comment! Do explore similar blogs and sign up for our newsletter.

Very well explained the modern education system how it will change and how it will work in a positive manner. You can also go for interactive training rooms. If you want your employees to enjoy the initial on-borading days, then head on to automation services provided by lightomated to build interactive training rooms. They use best quality and standardized products like hi tech audio sytems, speakers, remote controlling, etc

Thank you for your comment!

Thanks for sharing. I will try to implement these methods on my blog. Thanks for sharing. Keep updating us.

Thanks for reading.

Wow! Thank you so much sharing this information, I was researching for information on modern education and this has helped me a lot..

Thank for the comment! Please sign up for our newsletter to get all the information you need on studying abroad!

This blog worths reading! Loved the way it has been represented. Thank you for such helpful sentences and ideas that I have been adding to my project. Good day~

Leaving already?

8 Universities with higher ROI than IITs and IIMs

Grab this one-time opportunity to download this ebook

Connect With Us

45,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. take the first step today..

Resend OTP in

Need help with?

Study abroad.

UK, Canada, US & More

IELTS, GRE, GMAT & More

Scholarship, Loans & Forex

Country Preference

New Zealand

Which English test are you planning to take?

Which academic test are you planning to take.

Not Sure yet

When are you planning to take the exam?

Already booked my exam slot

Within 2 Months

Want to learn about the test

Which Degree do you wish to pursue?

When do you want to start studying abroad.

September 2024

January 2025

What is your budget to study abroad?

How would you describe this article ?

Please rate this article

We would like to hear more.

The Value and Evolution of Cliff Notes in Modern Education

This essay is about the role and evolution of Cliff Notes in modern education. It discusses how Cliff Notes originally concise literary summaries and analyses have adapted to include digital resources interactive content and multimedia elements. The essay highlights the benefits of Cliff Notes in aiding comprehension reinforcing learning and promoting critical thinking while also addressing criticisms regarding their potential to encourage superficial understanding. It emphasizes the importance of using Cliff Notes as supplementary tools rather than replacements for original texts and discusses how educators can integrate them effectively into teaching strategies. The essay concludes by recognizing Cliff Notes as valuable educational resources that continue to meet the needs of students and educators.

How it works

Cliff Notes the trusty sidekick for students tackling tough literature have come a long way. They’re more than just cheat sheets now; they’re a lifeline for kids trying to make sense of complex books. Starting off as simple summaries back in 1958 these guides have evolved to keep up with the times making sure they stay helpful and relevant.

Back in the day Clifton Hillegass had a bright idea: break down classic literature into bite-sized pieces that everyone could understand.

His first study guides were a hit thanks to their clear and straightforward format. Cliff Notes gave students plot summaries character breakdowns and theme explanations. For kids struggling with old-timey language or dense writing these guides were a godsend. They made it possible for students to keep up with their reading and actually understand what they were reading.

Fast forward to today and Cliff Notes have gone digital. You can still get the printed guides but now there are also online resources videos quizzes and even tutoring services. This move to multimedia learning fits perfectly with how kids today prefer to study. With videos and interactive content learning becomes more engaging and easier to grasp.

Cliff Notes aren’t just about passing exams though. They help students really understand and think critically about what they’re reading. By breaking down information clearly they help kids see the big picture and make connections between different parts of a story. This not only helps with comprehension but also makes for great class discussions. The critical essays and thematic discussions in the guides push students to dive deeper into the material sparking a real love for literature.

But of course there’s a bit of controversy. Some folks worry that students might skip the actual books and just rely on Cliff Notes missing out on the full experience of reading. That’s why it’s important to use these guides as a supplement not a substitute. When used right Cliff Notes can make reading the original texts more enjoyable and understandable.

Teachers have a big role in showing students how to use Cliff Notes properly. By combining the guides with the original texts teachers can help students develop good study habits and analytical skills. They might have students read both the book and the notes then compare and discuss them in class. This can lead to richer conversations and a deeper grasp of the material. Plus the quizzes and questions in Cliff Notes can help teachers check how well students are understanding the content and encourage critical thinking.

Cliff Notes reflect a bigger trend in education: the need for concise targeted learning tools in a world full of distractions. With short attention spans and lots of information to sift through resources like Cliff Notes help students focus on what’s important. This shift towards efficient learning is likely to keep growing as digital learning tools become more common.

In the end Cliff Notes have proven to be a valuable resource in modern education. They’ve adapted to meet the needs of today’s students and teachers enhancing learning and fostering a deeper understanding of literature. As education keeps evolving tools like Cliff Notes will be key in helping students navigate the world of literature and succeed academically.

Remember this essay is just the beginning. For more help and to make sure your essay hits all the right notes consider reaching out to professionals at EduBirdie.

Cite this page

The Value and Evolution of Cliff Notes in Modern Education. (2024, Jul 06). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/the-value-and-evolution-of-cliff-notes-in-modern-education/

"The Value and Evolution of Cliff Notes in Modern Education." PapersOwl.com , 6 Jul 2024, https://papersowl.com/examples/the-value-and-evolution-of-cliff-notes-in-modern-education/

PapersOwl.com. (2024). The Value and Evolution of Cliff Notes in Modern Education . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-value-and-evolution-of-cliff-notes-in-modern-education/ [Accessed: 8 Jul. 2024]

"The Value and Evolution of Cliff Notes in Modern Education." PapersOwl.com, Jul 06, 2024. Accessed July 8, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/the-value-and-evolution-of-cliff-notes-in-modern-education/

"The Value and Evolution of Cliff Notes in Modern Education," PapersOwl.com , 06-Jul-2024. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-value-and-evolution-of-cliff-notes-in-modern-education/. [Accessed: 8-Jul-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2024). The Value and Evolution of Cliff Notes in Modern Education . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-value-and-evolution-of-cliff-notes-in-modern-education/ [Accessed: 8-Jul-2024]

Don't let plagiarism ruin your grade

Hire a writer to get a unique paper crafted to your needs.

Our writers will help you fix any mistakes and get an A+!

Please check your inbox.

You can order an original essay written according to your instructions.

Trusted by over 1 million students worldwide

1. Tell Us Your Requirements

2. Pick your perfect writer

3. Get Your Paper and Pay

Hi! I'm Amy, your personal assistant!

Don't know where to start? Give me your paper requirements and I connect you to an academic expert.

short deadlines

100% Plagiarism-Free

Certified writers

• News & Politics
• Science & Health
• Life Stories
• The New Sober Boom
• Getting Hooked on Quitting
• Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous
• Is College Necessary?
• Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear
• Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset
• SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters
• 'Dark' Personalities Drawn to BTC

Today's dads help out more than previous generations. Is it actually enough?

Modern fatherhood is more involved than previous generations but research might not show the full picture, by nicole karlis.

An absent mother is often depicted as an unfathomable tragedy. An absent father though, is easily, and frequently, normalized. 

The difference in how the public views parental involvement based on gender contributes to headlines celebrating how today’s generation of dads are supposedly more involved than ever before. Over the last decade, multiple studies have stated that Millennial and Gen Z dads spend more time with their kids than previous generations. This is research worth highlighting, as studies continue to report that children benefit from more involved dads.

At the same time, studies continue to show that family responsibilities still fall more on mothers and that mothers are stressed. What’s going on?

According to a 2023 study by the Institute for Family Studies , fathers in the U.S. spend an average of 7.8 hours per week taking care of their children at home, an increase of one hour per week in just about two decades. Taking a deeper look, the researchers found that college-educated fathers with children under age 18 spent an average of 10 hours and 12 minutes a week on childcare, which was more than 2 hours a week since 2003. 

“That’s a big jump and it's encouraging news,” Dr. Wendy Wang, the director of research at the Institute for Family Studies, told Salon. “But on the other hand, you break it down by father's education and other characteristics, and you find out it's not all fathers are experiencing this increase in their time as their children.” 

"Even though fathers have become more involved with spending more time, mothers do a lot more."

Indeed, for dads without a college degree, time spent on childcare declined from 6.2 hours a week in 2003 to 5.9 hours a week. Marital status affects time spent with children as well. The study found that only half of the never-married fathers see their children at least once a day. But Wang added that more time college-educated, married fathers spend with their children doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s less responsibility placed on mothers. 

“If you compare mother’s childcare time and father's childcare time, even though fathers have become more involved with spending more time, mothers do a lot more,” Wang said. “But I think with more fathers, they're being involved, hopefully, that will lighten up some of the burdens from mothers.”

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes .

Eve Rodsky, author of the book " Fair Play ," told Salon that studies examining the time fathers spend with their children today usually fail to capture the reality of the situation for a multitude of reasons. One being that the time parents spend with children has gone up for both women and men . Indeed, one study found that today’s generation of moms spend nearly twice as much time with their kids compared to moms 50 years ago .

“Everybody's percentage of having to intensively parent has gone up,” Rodsky told Salon. “There’s no inherent difference in this generation of men.”

Rodsky added it’s also an issue of relative statistics and absolute statistics. Frequently, she added, studies claiming that fathers are spending more time with their children children are based on data that’s self-reported. The way questions are asked matter too, she further elaborated. It’s not so much who is in charge of childcare, or the time spent with a child, but the questions to ask should be centered around the cognitive labor of a task. In other words, the mental load. 

Rodsky said these studies stating that fathers today are spending more time with their kids can sometimes be helpful, but most times they are harmful. 

“Men will say, 'What do you have to complain about? I'm so much better than my dad,'” she said. “We're not looking at that type of comparison. We're looking at, well, I have to do much more than my mom, right? We want equal partnerships.”

Rodsky said women want their male spouses to handle the “conception and planning” of cognitive labor. To take ownership of a task from start to finish. “We need people who are willing to handle the conception and planning, to take over the cognitive labor, the ownership of a task from start to finish,” she said. “Until then, women will not have any relief from the mental load or from this unpaid labor challenge that we're in right now.”

Rodsky said early in her research for "Fair Play," she did a word cloud study for women on words they associated with childcare and housework when married. The two most used words were “overwhelmed” and “boredom.” 

We need your help to stay independent

“Nobody wants to be overwhelmed and bored, so I think that was the biggest concern for me, because this is a higher educated population of women, and so there is that boredom in the remoteness of the unpaid labor tasks,” she said. “But on top of it, it's still extremely overwhelming because of these cognitive labor demands.” 

For future research on parenting and gender roles, and to get a better grasp on what’s happening in America, Rodsky said there needs to be a deeper understanding of cognitive labor.

“I think it's important to understand the difference between cognitive labor and execution,” she said.  “The more that we get people to understand, and for the Bureau of Labor Statistics to understand, and for Department of Labor to understand, and for anybody who does time use to understand: that there's a difference between execution and cognitive labor, then I believe we're going to be in a much better place for how people report how men are doing more.”

about parenting

• Why people who experience severe nausea during pregnancy often go untreated
• Do transgender men and nonbinary people need to stop testosterone therapy during pregnancy?
• Study finds risk of death related to pregnancy more than doubled between 1999 and 2019 in the U.S.

Nicole Karlis is a senior writer at Salon, specializing in health and science. Tweet her @nicolekarlis .

Related Topics ------------------------------------------

Related articles.

• The Education Gradebook

At Weedon Island, campers absorb the sounds, sensations of nature

• Sonia A. Rao Times staff

Malia Bassant has Peters Anomaly, a medical condition that makes her vision blurry.

On Monday at the Weedon Island Preserve’s cultural and natural history center, she was fascinated by a table of tools once used by Florida’s indigenous people. A large shell tied to a stick as a hammer. A flat stone as a chisel. Deer tendon as rope.

Bassant, 18, likes history, but because of her vision, it’s hard for her to understand what the artifacts are if she can’t touch them and bring them close to her face.

She was able to use her other senses, like touch and hearing, to interact with the outdoors at an outing last week of a Lighthouse of Pinellas camp for blind and visually impaired youth.

In November, the Friends of Weedon Island received a $20,000 grant from the REI Cooperative Action Fund to create more equity in outdoor access. Friends of Weedon Island has used the grant money to host different groups, like veterans or low-income youth, said Bill Fehring, the organization’s president. He said he now wants to use some of the money to bring braille signs to the center’s exhibits.

Fifteen blind and visually impaired kids of all ages felt pine, oak and sable palm trees for the differences in bark. They listened for mockingbirds, blue jays, doves and laughing gulls.

“It’s different than learning in a textbook,” said Danielle Johnson, a program supervisor at Lighthouse of Pinellas. “It brings everything fully into perspective, to be able to look up close, or have descriptive language.”

Johnson said the goal is to teach kids how to access the world with limited or no vision.

The nearby Brooker Creek Preserve lent animal pelts so kids could feel white-tailed deer, bobcats, river otters, Virginia opossums, raccoons and coyotes.

Education outreach supervisor Liz Childress directed small groups to touch the pelts for texture and density to guess where the animal’s habitat is.

“This one only has one layer,” 7-year-old Christian Aikin, who is completely blind, declared upon first touching the river otter’s fur.

“No it doesn’t,” Childress said. “Try again.”

He learned that the river otter actually has two fur layers — a slick outer one, and a dry inner one.

Catch up on top stories before rush hour

Become a Times subscriber to get our afternoon newsletter, The Rundown

You’re all signed up!

Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Let’s get started.

Christian said he didn’t like walking around outside. It was humid, and he got sweaty. But he loved learning about the different noises frogs make at an indoor station Fehring set up with everyday objects.

A cricket frog sounded like two marbles clicking repeatedly.

A chorus frog was a popsicle stick scraping back and forth against the bristles of a comb.

A bullfrog was a wet thumb sliding against a balloon.

The last event of the day was a “frog concert.” Each camper used an object to emulate a different frog, while the actual frogs accompanied them on a speaker.

Christian banged his yellow and blue marbles against each other. Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap. Faster, faster. Bringing them as close to his ear as possible, he started to laugh.

“This is so cool!” he yelled.

Once Fehring directed the kids to stop, there was a few seconds of silence. Then Christian raised his hand.

“Can we do that again?” he asked.

Sonia A. Rao is an education reporter. She can be reached at [email protected].

MORE FOR YOU

• Advertisement

ONLY AVAILABLE FOR SUBSCRIBERS

The Tampa Bay Times e-Newspaper is a digital replica of the printed paper seven days a week that is available to read on desktop, mobile, and our app for subscribers only. To enjoy the e-Newspaper every day, please subscribe.