Can Early Exposure to the Teaching Profession Increase Teacher Supply and Diversity?

 

This study examines whether early exposure to the teaching career has the potential to expand the size and diversity of new teacher supply. 

Exploiting the staggered expansion of high school education courses across Texas, the authors find little evidence that these courses increased new teacher supply or diversity despite course takers being substantially more diverse than the teacher workforce. 

High school education course takers who become teachers are similarly effective and more likely to be retained than their peers. 

Most course takers drop out of the teacher pipeline prior to college enrollment where racial gaps in 4-year college going serve as major barriers. 

These findings suggest that early exposure without support to increase college going is unlikely to increase teacher supply or diversity.

Giving students a voice in how they learn could transform the classroom experience

Research from Queen Mary University of London explores how combining learner autonomy with student-led enquiry can create a more engaging and collaborative experience for international students learning academic English. 

What happens when students are given more say in what they learn, how they learn it and which questions they want to investigate? 

A new study from Queen Mary University of London, led by Dr. Ana Ines Salvi, suggests that giving international students greater agency in the classroom can create opportunities for deeper learning, collaboration and reflection. 

The research, published in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes, explored what happened when learner autonomy was combined with Exploratory Practice – an approach that encourages teachers and students to investigate questions and develop understanding together. 

The study was carried out during a four-week pre-sessional English course for 17 international students preparing to study a Master's degree in Manufacturing at a UK university. 

Rather than relying solely on teacher-led instruction, students were encouraged to make decisions about aspects of their learning based on their own needs. They worked collaboratively, reflected on their progress and investigated questions – or “puzzles” – that interested them. 

These included questions such as “Why are we here?”, “Why is it hard to find accommodation around the university?” and “Why is it hard to come up with a good idea for our library project?” 

Students researched their questions using sources including academic literature and the internet, discussed their findings with classmates and presented what they had learned. 

The research identified five key themes in students' experiences: learning through interaction and collaboration, student agency, working towards understanding, quality of life and joy, and integrating research into teaching and learning. 

Students' feedback indicated that they valued being able to make decisions about their learning and work together with their peers. Some students also said that keeping a daily learning diary helped them reflect on what they had learned and consider what they wanted to do next. 

The exploratory activities also gave students the opportunity to develop research and interpersonal skills. For example, students reported learning how to formulate questions, collect and organise information, interview people and work with classmates from different countries. 

Importantly, the research does not suggest that students should simply be left to learn independently. Students also highlighted the value of guidance from the teacher, with some suggesting that they would have welcomed more support when making decisions or working in groups. 

The study's author, Dr Anna Ines Salvi, combined the two approaches to explore how they could complement one another. The findings suggest that learner autonomy can provide a clear structure for students to plan, carry out and evaluate their learning, while Exploratory Practice can encourage students to ask questions, investigate what matters to them and focus on understanding rather than simply finding solutions. 

The approach also brought academic learning together with students' wider experiences of living and studying in a new environment. 

One student reflected on the experience a year later, saying: “Questions are always the best teacher.” 

The research suggests that combining learner autonomy and Exploratory Practice may offer a way for teachers to integrate research, reflection and student-led enquiry into everyday teaching, rather than treating research as something separate from classroom learning. 

The author notes that the study was conducted with a small group over a short four-week course and that, as a practitioner research study, the teacher also acted as the researcher. The findings therefore provide insight into this particular classroom experience rather than evidence that the approach will produce the same outcomes in all educational settings. 

The study adds to research exploring how students can become active participants in their own education – not simply recipients of teaching, but people who help shape their learning experience and investigate questions that matter to them. 

 

Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1475158526001396 

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Journal

Journal of English for Academic Purposes

 

What specific harms occur on each major online platform and whom they most affect

The interaction between online life and teens’ mental health keeps hitting the news. In August, Meta agreed to pay $17 billion to settle a federal lawsuit over addictive features of Facebook and Instagram targeted toward youth. On Sept. 10, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a new law banning addictive social media features for those younger than 16. And several states are adding health warnings to social media platforms for youth; California’s takes effect Jan. 1, 2027.

But as mental health experts, policymakers, parents and educators grapple with how to help teenagers stay safe online, they’ve run into a significant challenge: Online experiences aren’t a monolith, yet research on teens’ online lives tends to focus on only a few platforms or harms at a time.

Stanford University experts and their colleagues aim to fill the data gap via a comprehensive survey about what specific harms occur on each major online platform and whom they most affect.

“If we’re not measuring how often these specific harms are happening, or what our kids are actually experiencing online, we have no way of knowing whether an intervention is working,” said Eleni Linos, MD, DrPH, director of the Stanford Center for Digital Health and a professor at Stanford Medicine. “In order to know if a specific harm is decreasing, we need to show this with actual data.”

The new study, published Sept. 18 in JAMA Pediatrics, offers one of the first comprehensive attempts to survey teens about the harms they experience online.

The research team shared key insights from their survey of a nationally representative sample of U.S. 13- to 17-year-olds who were asked about their online and offline experiences of several forms of harm over the previous four weeks. So far, the researchers have collected pilot data from 472 participants. They envision this research as a starting point for asking the same questions of much larger groups of teens.

Here are five takeaways from their work.

1. Measuring several specific harms, from many platforms, gives better insight into what teens experience online

Understanding online harms requires considering how different people experience many kinds of harms on various online platforms. The team at the Stanford Center for Digital Health reviewed past work and convened experts from academia, tech companies, and advocacy and mental health organizations to develop an extensive list of potential harms to ask teens about. In the survey they developed, some questions were worded broadly — “Have you personally witnessed or experienced something that affected you negatively?” and “Have you witnessed or experienced content that you would consider bad for the world?”

Other questions were specific, such as asking about exposure to unwanted sexual images; content that made someone feel worse about themselves; insults or threats; violent images; content that encouraged self-harm; or content that discriminated against people based on gender, religion, race, sexual orientation or other aspects of identity.

The survey asked about experiences of each harm on many platforms, including several types of social media, Pinterest, Discord (a free online communication platform that can be used for texts, voice calls and video chats), online gaming, text messages, FaceTime and email. They also asked how frequently each online activity disrupted participants’ sleep.

“We thought it was important to ask about each of these distinct kinds of harms separately, and across platforms,” said lead study author Angela Lee, PhD, who was a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Center for Digital Health when the study was conducted. “This lets us go beyond broad statements like, ‘Being online is bad,’ to understanding the specific places where adolescents are saying that they are having bad experiences.”

The researchers also collected detailed demographic information about each participant to allow them to identify which harms are most likely to crop up for which teens and whether external social factors contribute to negative experiences.

2. Teens’ online experiences are extremely varied

“Our results showed that teens reported experiencing more harms on certain platforms,” Lee said.

Rates of reported sleep disruption attributed to specific apps ranged from single digits to around 40%, depending on the platform, with a total of about half of participants reporting that at least one aspect of their online activities had “sometimes” or “often” disrupted their sleep in the previous four weeks.

Teens’ rates of experiencing bullying or harassment ranged from near zero to around 8%, depending on the platform, with the highest rates in certain apps that enable messaging. Rates of witnessing bullying or harassment of others were generally higher than rates of experiencing bullying personally, but they also varied widely among platforms.

Because the study sample is relatively small, it’s too early to know to what degree differences in negative experiences are due to the platforms versus who is using them, the paper noted. “For example, exposure to content that makes one feel bad about oneself was more prevalent on Pinterest than on Discord. While this could reflect stronger content moderation policies or safer design on Discord, it could also reflect Pinterest’s greater popularity among girls, who may be more susceptible to social comparison than boys,” the authors wrote.

“Future work is needed to disentangle how much of these differences in reported harms are driven by user selection or the dynamics of engagement with the platform, in addition to considering how people interact with different platforms,” Lee said.

3. Teens’ online experiences need to be compared with what they experience in the rest of life

This important control question — how rates of online harms compare with the prevalence of the same harm offline — hasn’t always been included in previous surveys of what teens experience online. As anyone who was a teenager before the 2000s can tell you, teens found ways to treat each other poorly before the internet existed.

Some forms of harm occur about as often online and offline, the study found: Direct harassment was about as common in both places, with 18.5% of teens reporting they had been harassed offline versus 16.4% online in the previous four weeks.

But other forms of harm were much more common online, including exposure to violent imagery, unwanted sexual images and content that encouraged self-harm.

The gaps between online and offline experiences can help point toward the largest opportunities to make online life better, the researchers said. Some forms of harm — such as when teens are sexually solicited online — clearly point to a need for better responses to online risks from the legal system and other structures designed to protect young people.

4. Navigating the mix of online and offline life makes it a challenging time to be a kid

“I want teens to know that the harms and risks they encounter online are not acceptable,” said study coauthor Sunny Xun Liu, PhD, director of research for the Social Media Lab within Stanford University’s Department of Communication. “We want them to grow up in a digital world where they feel safe to explore.”

Liu said she hopes teens will always feel willing to share what they see and experience online, particularly as it relates to telling adults about emerging harms, or risks they face on new platforms where they are among the earliest adopters.

“Teens are often the first to encounter new risks and harms related to technology, especially artificial intelligence,” she said. “Their insights will help us identify and mitigate those problems.”

5. It’s a tricky time to be a parent as well

Until now, discussions on how parents can mitigate online harms have often taken broad strokes, such as encouraging parents to limit total screen time or sign up for campaigns like Wait Until 8th, in which families commit to keeping their children cell-phone-free until eighth grade.

“It can be hard for parents to know where it is safe for their kids to play and explore online,” Lee said. “We hope we can get a more granular look at where harms are concentrated. I think it’s also important to recognize that there are both serious harms and meaningful benefits to being online for many young people.”

For example, she said, online communities can be supportive spaces for teens from marginalized groups, and most teens feel benefits from staying in touch with friends and peers through different communication channels.

“As we keep supporting youth safety online, I hope we can keep open connections with teens in our lives: asking them what they see online; how it makes them feel; and helping support them if they have experiences that are scary, hurtful or problematic.”

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, New York University and the University of Southern California contributed to the study.