Youki Terada & Stephen Merrill, The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2025 (December 4, 2025).
I have a new love: Edutopia’s (linked above) annual summary of important educational studies. Some explicitly address higher education teaching issues. Some only apply to k-12 education. And some purport to only apply to k-12 education, but their lessons also apply to higher education teaching. I encourage you to read the whole thing and decide for yourself. Below is my summary of the studies I thought were most relevant to law teaching. (I have followed Edutopia’s numbering system.)
1: Researchers experimented with banning cell phones in class in 10 universities in India. Researchers concluded that the cell phone bans helped narrow achievement gaps and improve grades.
3: Researchers scheduled 90-second mini-breaks every ten minutes in a 90-minute psychology undergraduate class or by a single 10-minute break at the halfway point. Students were invited to use the 90-second breaks to chat with each other, stand up, sip water, etc. Researchers found that students given the mini-breaks maintained as high as 76% better attention than their peers given the single, ten-minute break.
8. A team of researchers analyzed 70 years of studies and concluded what my co-authors and I concluded in What the Best Law Teachers Do:
[T]rusting, supportive student-teacher relationships were linked to a wide range of benefits . . . : higher academic achievement, improved behavior, better executive function and self-control, and greater feelings of belonging, motivation, and well-being.
10. I will quote from the Edutopia article on this one. It reports an important study re college student use of AI.
[A] 2025 MIT study of older students wired up to EEG machines as they wrote essays reveals a . . . pattern. College-aged students who were given access to ChatGPT as they responded to provocative questions tended to “follow the thinking” of the machine, produced “statistically homogenous essays,” and exhibited brain activity that was localized and poorly coordinated. Stunningly, minutes later, only 17 percent of the ChatGPT users could recall a single sentence from their essays. Students who used search engines or wrote essays without any assistance fared much better, recalling sentences at rates of 83 and 89 percent, respectively.
