The research, published in Educational Psychology Review by Marci S. DeCaro, Ryan J. Patrick, Campbell R. Bego, and Angela K. Thompson of the University of Louisville, tested a prediction drawn from cognitive load theory: that exploratory activities only pay off when they impose a manageable burden on working memory. When the task forces learners to juggle too many interacting pieces of information at once, the benefits of exploration appear to evaporate — and may even reverse.

The theoretical backbone of the study is the concept of element interactivity, a central construct in cognitive load theory. Learning materials vary enormously in how many distinct elements — facts, rules, relationships, procedures — must be held and coordinated in working memory simultaneously. A single programming error with one obvious cause involves low element interactivity; a task requiring students to diagnose three different error types, each with multiple interacting features, involves high element interactivity. Because working memory can hold only a handful of elements at once, tasks with high interactivity can overwhelm novices before meaningful learning even begins. The researchers reasoned that exploration, which lacks the scaffolding of direct instruction, might be especially vulnerable to this overload.

To test the idea, the team ran three classroom-based experiments with first-year engineering students learning to recognize and fix common programming errors. In Study 1, involving 388 students, half the class received a lecture followed by a practice activity targeting three types of programming errors — the traditional instruct-first sequence. The other half completed the same activity before the lecture, in the explore-first order. Afterwards, all students completed a survey measuring interest and curiosity, along with a posttest assessing both basic facts and deeper conceptual understanding of the material.

The results were striking. Students who explored first actually scored lower on the posttest than those who received instruction first. They reported no more interest or curiosity than their instruct-first peers — a disappointment for advocates of exploration — and, crucially, they reported higher cognitive load. In other words, the exploration activity seemed to have consumed mental resources without delivering its promised motivational or conceptual dividends. The authors interpret this as suggestive evidence that the combined activity, covering three error types at once, exceeded what novices could productively process before any instruction.

Studies 2a and 2b, with 393 and 402 students respectively, then manipulated the key variable directly: the complexity of the exploration activity, operationalized through element interactivity. Study 2a kept the complex format, bundling all three error types into a single activity before the lecture, and essentially replicated Study 1 — explore-first students again underperformed on the posttest and carried a heavier cognitive load. Study 2b, however, split the same content into three simpler activities, each targeting one error type and each interleaved with a mini-lecture. The total content was identical; only the size of the conceptual units changed.

The outcome flipped. In Study 2b, exploring first boosted conceptual knowledge relative to the instruct-first sequence, and equalized performance on basic factual knowledge between the two orders. Explore-first students also reported higher interest and curiosity — the motivational signature that exploration research has long promised — although, notably, they still reported higher cognitive load. The pattern suggests that when exploration is broken into smaller conceptual chunks, the extra mental effort becomes productive rather than paralyzing: learners can discern the important conceptual features of each unit, generate meaningful ideas about them, and then use the subsequent instruction to refine those ideas.

The authors are careful to frame their findings as ecologically valid but suggestive, with effect sizes ranging from small to very small. These were real classrooms, not laboratories, which strengthens the practical relevance of the results but also introduces the noise inherent in authentic educational settings. Even so, the consistency of the reversal across Study 1 and Study 2a, and its disappearance under the simplified format of Study 2b, aligns closely with what cognitive load theory would predict. Prior work by Sweller, Kalyuga, and colleagues had already shown that problem-solving before instruction tends to hurt learning when element interactivity is high; the new study extends that logic to the specific case of exploratory pre-instruction activities, showing that the same task can succeed or fail depending entirely on how its conceptual units are sized.

The implications for instructional design are potentially far-reaching. Active learning has become a rallying cry in STEM education, with large meta-analyses linking it to improved performance in science and engineering courses. Yet this study suggests that not all active learning is created equal: an exploration activity that is too complex may actively harm conceptual learning while simultaneously failing to spark the curiosity it is meant to ignite. Designers of flipped classrooms, invention tasks, and productive-failure curricula may need to audit their activities for element interactivity, breaking multi-concept challenges into smaller exploratory episodes before learners face the full complexity of the domain.

There is also a subtler lesson about cognitive load itself. Explore-first students in Study 2b reported higher cognitive load even while learning more, indicating that load is not inherently bad — what matters is whether that load is spent on sense-making within manageable conceptual units or on futile attempts to coordinate too many unfamiliar elements at once. As the authors conclude, exploration activities with smaller conceptual units may help learners discern important features and deepen understanding, while complex ones may bury those features under a fog of overload. For a field still debating how much guidance to give and when, the message is refreshingly concrete: before you let students explore, count the elements they will have to juggle.

Subject of Research: The role of element interactivity and cognitive load in determining whether exploratory learning before instruction improves or impairs student learning

Article Title: Considering Cognitive Load When Exploring Before Instruction: The Potential Role of Element Interactivity

Article References: DeCaro, M. S., Bego, C. R., Thompson, A. K., & Patrick, R. J. (2026). Considering Cognitive Load When Exploring Before Instruction: The Potential Role of Element Interactivity. Educational Psychology Review, 38(1), Article 127. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-026-10223-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10648-026-10223-7

Keywords: exploratory learning, cognitive load theory, element interactivity, productive failure, instructional sequencing, engineering education, programming errors, conceptual knowledge, working memory, active learning, undergraduate students, curiosity

The research, published in the journal Large-scale Assessments in Education, was led by Samuel Falcon of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria together with Yuney Santos of Mid Atlantic University. Rather than looking only at test scores, the team turned its attention to what the authors call psychoeducational resources: the relational, motivational, and emotional assets that determine whether a student can actually use a second chance when one is offered. The study draws on the Spanish sample of PISA 2022, the Programme for International Student Assessment, which in Spain covered 29,775 students aged 15 to 16. Of these, 5,642 students, or 18.95 percent, had repeated a grade at least once, a striking figure when set against the OECD average of around 9 percent.

Spain is an unusually important laboratory for this question. Retention there has long been more frequent than in most other wealthy countries, persisting even through reforms intended to curb it. In PISA 2022, 22 percent of Spanish 15-year-olds reported having repeated a grade after entering primary school. That means retention is not a marginal intervention affecting a small and exceptional group; it is a routine feature of the educational trajectory of a large share of Spanish adolescents. Understanding what that experience does to students, beyond their mathematics and reading scores, therefore matters for an entire generation.

The methodological challenge is that students are not randomly assigned to repeat a grade. Retained students tend to differ from their promoted peers before the decision is ever made: in the Spanish sample they came from families with lower economic, social and cultural status, had fewer years of early childhood education, were more likely to be first-generation immigrants, more likely to be male, and more likely to have been born late in the year, a well-known relative-age effect. A naive comparison of retained and non-retained students would therefore confound the effect of retention with these pre-existing differences. To address this, the researchers used propensity score matching, a statistical technique that estimates each student’s probability of being retained from observed background characteristics and then pairs each retained student with a non-retained student of similar probability.

The matching procedure was unusually careful. The team tested several specifications, including generalised full matching and nearest-neighbour matching at 1:1 and 1:2 ratios with various calipers, and settled on 1:1 nearest-neighbour matching without replacement, which kept every retained student in the analysis while achieving excellent balance. After matching, the mean of the maximum absolute standardised mean differences was 0.026 for the original covariates, well below the conventional 0.10 threshold, and 0.074 even for higher-order and interaction terms. Missing values in the background covariates were handled through multiple imputation across five datasets, with estimates pooled using Rubin’s rules. The analyses also incorporated PISA’s complex survey design, combining matching weights with the final student weights and 80 replicate weights using balanced repeated replication with Fay’s adjustment.

The seven outcomes spanned three domains. School integration was captured by sense of belonging and perceived quality of student-teacher relationships. Learning-related resources included self-directed learning self-efficacy, perseverance, and curiosity. Emotional functioning was measured through emotional control and stress resistance, indices drawn from the OECD framework on social and emotional skills. The results were strikingly consistent in direction. After matching and adjustment, retained students scored significantly lower on six of the seven resources, with associations surviving a Benjamini-Hochberg false discovery rate correction across outcomes.

The largest differences appeared in the learning-related domain. Self-directed learning self-efficacy, students’ confidence in managing their own learning tasks independently, showed the biggest gap, with an effect size of d = -0.27, followed by perseverance at d = -0.25. Curiosity was lower as well (d = -0.12), while the relational and emotional differences were smaller: sense of belonging (d = -0.07), student-teacher relationships (d = -0.09), and emotional control (d = -0.09). Only stress resistance showed essentially no difference, with an effect size of -0.01 and a regression coefficient of exactly zero that was nowhere near statistical significance. Sensitivity analyses using alternative matching specifications reproduced the same pattern, suggesting the findings are not an artefact of one particular matching choice.

There is a deep irony in the two largest effects. The entire rationale for retention is that an extra year gives students time to master content they could not grasp the first time. But that rationale presupposes students who feel capable of organising their own learning, who persist when tasks become difficult, and who remain open to new ideas. The study suggests retained students are precisely the ones who report being weakest in these resources. The authors interpret this as consistent with retention being embedded in a longer history of academic struggle, in which the relationship with effort and academic agency may already be fragile. Repeating a grade, in this light, may not rebuild that relationship; it may simply extend a trajectory in which students feel less and less competent at steering their own learning.

The relational findings matter for a similar reason. Retained students are typically separated from their original peer group, placed with younger classmates, and carry a visible marker of prior failure in front of teachers and peers. Cross-national PISA evidence has repeatedly shown that repeaters report lower belonging, and the Spanish data confirm this pattern even after matching on background characteristics. Interestingly, the picture on emotions was mixed: retained students reported more difficulty regulating irritation, anger, and frustration, yet showed no difference in general stress resistance. The authors suggest these two constructs capture distinct aspects of emotional functioning, and that retention may be more closely tied to emotional regulation in challenging situations than to a general tolerance for pressure, though they caution that this interpretation requires longitudinal testing.

The researchers are careful about what their design can and cannot show. Because the data are cross-sectional and observational, the results are adjusted associations, not causal effects. The propensity score model could not account for prior achievement, attendance, learning difficulties, behaviour, teacher judgements, or the school-level practices that shape retention decisions, so residual confounding is likely. There is also no way to know whether retained students already had lower belonging or perseverance before repeating, or whether the differences emerged afterwards. Missing data posed a further complication, particularly for self-directed learning self-efficacy, where questionnaire routing tied to COVID-19 school closures left 34 percent of observations unavailable, and missingness was consistently higher among retained students. Even so, the consistency of the pattern across six outcomes, three domains, and multiple matching specifications is difficult to dismiss.

The policy implications are sobering. If repeating a grade is meant to be a second opportunity, the study suggests that time alone does not create the conditions for recovery. The authors argue that retention should not be treated as an intervention in itself, and they point to candidate domains for future support research: transition planning after retention, monitoring of school belonging, teacher guidance aimed at rebuilding academic confidence, and structured help for self-regulated learning, with particular attention to self-directed learning self-efficacy and perseverance, the two resources showing the largest gaps. More broadly, the findings reinforce a growing argument that evaluations of grade retention should not be restricted to test scores. Whether students remain connected to school, confident in managing their learning, and emotionally equipped to continue may ultimately determine whether the extra year helps or harms, and those dimensions are invisible in achievement data alone. For a country where nearly one in five adolescents repeats a grade, that is a message worth taking seriously.

Subject of Research: Associations between grade retention and psychoeducational resources among Spanish students in PISA 2022

Article Title: Grade retention and psychoeducational resources: evidence from PISA 2022 using propensity score matching

Article References: Falcon, S., & Santos, Y. (2026). Grade retention and psychoeducational resources: evidence from PISA 2022 using propensity score matching. Large-scale Assessments in Education, 14(1), Article 48. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40536-026-00323-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40536-026-00323-9

Keywords: grade retention, PISA 2022, propensity score matching, psychoeducational resources, school belonging, student-teacher relationships, self-directed learning self-efficacy, perseverance, curiosity, emotional control, Spain, educational psychology

The study, conducted by Perıhan Tugba Seker and Ozge Savas of Uşak University’s Department of Preschool Education, followed 21 children aged 60 to 72 months attending a public kindergarten in central Uşak during the 2020–2021 academic year. The research adopted a qualitative single-case study design, a methodology chosen precisely because it allows researchers to examine a bounded, real-life classroom phenomenon in depth without manipulating children’s natural behavior. Ethical approval was granted by the Uşak University Social and Human Sciences Scientific Research and Publication Ethics Committee, and informed written consent was obtained from parents before data collection began.

Crucially, the topic of investigation was not selected by the researchers or the teacher. During an outdoor recess in early November, a small group of children noticed ants carrying breadcrumbs toward a soil mound and their questions multiplied rapidly: Where were they taking the crumbs? Did ants freeze in the rain? How did they find their way without getting lost? Was there a giant city beneath the soil? The researchers documented these spontaneous exchanges in anecdotal records and recognized in them the authentic spark of curiosity that would anchor the project. This genesis matters methodologically: rather than imposing an externally designed unit, the team traced how children’s pre-existing interests could be channeled into structured, multidimensional scientific inquiry.

The project was organized around the three canonical phases of the Project Approach as articulated by Katz and Chard and later developed by Helm and Katz. In the initiation phase, spanning the first two weeks, children’s prior knowledge and misconceptions were elicited through free drawing and collaborative discussion, and co-constructed concept maps were used to visualize initial hypotheses about ant anatomy, behavior, and ecology. The fieldwork phase, from weeks three to five, formed the analytical core of the intervention: children conducted guided nature walks, observed ants through magnifying glasses and digital microscopes, documented findings through field mapping, and collaboratively designed and built model ant farms, embedding engineering design and mathematical measurement of movement patterns and distances into authentic contexts. The finalization phase in weeks six and seven centered on reflection and public sharing, with children revising their concept maps and preparing a community exhibition of their work.

Sessions ran three days per week for 45 to 60 minutes, totaling approximately 21 structured project sessions, and were mapped deliberately onto the constructivist, child-centered Turkish National Preschool Education Program. The educators’ role was carefully calibrated. Rather than lecturing or dispensing answers, the teacher functioned as facilitator and co-investigator, deploying open-ended questions—such as asking what might happen if the texture of an ant’s path changed—to stimulate prediction and solution design, while enriching classroom learning centers with magnifiers, tweezers, field journals, and art supplies as the project’s needs evolved.

The most dramatic findings concerned the dismantling of anthropomorphic misconceptions. Before the project, interviews and drawings revealed that children largely interpreted ant biology through the lens of human life. They imagined ant families with mothers, fathers, and children, insisted that ants never sleep because they always work, and variously credited the insects with anywhere from two to seven legs. After the intervention, post-project interviews documented a profound conceptual shift: children correctly deployed scientific terminology including colony, larva, and maze-like chambers, and described accurate biological structures and behaviors. The researchers argue this demonstrates that preschoolers can master genuinely complex scientific vocabulary and concepts when those concepts are explored deeply rather than treated superficially.

Procedural skills evolved in parallel. Early in the project, children could perceive no diversity within the insect world, claiming there were only black ants or inventing fictional species such as ants made of iron. By the finalization stage, they had progressed from global descriptions to fine-grained, attribute-based classification, accurately distinguishing ecological and behavioral roles such as queen ants, worker ants, carpenter ants, and wood ants based on physical form and function. Children’s understanding of the antenna underwent a particularly striking transformation. Initially described as the thing that runs the television or simply as ears, the antenna was reconceptualized after the project as a multifunctional sensory organ through which ants find their way, avoid danger, hear, and taste—a shift the researchers interpret as evidence of transition from passive questioning to causal, evidence-based explanation.

The integrated STEAM design proved central to these gains, and the authors emphasize that the arts functioned as far more than decoration. When presented with a design challenge inspired by the temperature-regulated architecture of ant nests, children used salt ceramics to sculpt intricate, interconnected three-dimensional models of warehouse systems, verbally attributing functions and names to each component. This artistic modeling acted as a cognitive and symbolic language, allowing children to translate abstract biological findings into tangible engineered products, and to test and communicate mental models that verbal language alone could not yet carry. Robot designs inspired by ant body structure, antennae, and legs further extended the engineering dimension of the inquiry.

Collaboration and communication developed alongside cognitive skills. Because workshop tasks such as constructing interconnected colony pathways were too complex for any single child, cooperative problem-solving became a practical necessity, and the researchers observed a marked reduction in egocentric behavior as children negotiated design choices and built consensus. The culminating public exhibition, for which each child’s artifacts were systematically labeled, saw children confidently explaining their work and every structural detail to an audience, reinforcing scientific communication and metacognitive reflection. A spontaneous home-school learning loop also emerged: children carried their inquiries into daily life, identifying and naming real ants encountered outdoors according to their morphological traits, and sharing their observations with parents—an authentic cross-contextual transfer of knowledge that turned family involvement into an active support mechanism for early scientific literacy.

The authors acknowledge limitations, including winter weather that constrained outdoor observation of ants and forced some sessions to rely on simulated ant farms and digital resources, as well as administrative constraints that prevented families from physically attending the final exhibition, which had to be shared through photographs and video. Even so, the study concludes with a clear message for educators, teacher-training programs, and policymakers: when long-term, interest-driven projects are integrated with a STEAM framework and supported by responsive adult scaffolding, young children are fully capable of fine-grained observation, attribute-based classification, higher-order causal questioning, and collaborative engineering design. The lowly ant, it turns out, was all the invitation these preschool scientists needed.

Subject of Research: Development of scientific inquiry skills in preschool children through a project-based STEAM investigation of ants

Article Title: Preschool children develop scientific inquiry skills through STEM based investigations

Article References: Preschool children develop scientific inquiry skills through STEM based investigations. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02127-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02127-z

Keywords: early childhood education, STEM education, STEAM, project-based learning, scientific inquiry, preschool, curiosity, science misconceptions, ants, Uşak University, qualitative case study, Discover Education