Human-focused education: Advancing broader purposes of education through the science of learning

David Brooks joined a chorus of writers who identified President Donald Trump’s reelection as a reckoning for the educational elite. His December cover story for The Atlantic critiques the education system that brought our nation to this point of division, distrust, and success only for the few. Brooks’ plan to reform the American educational meritocracy—to the extent it currently exists—begins with expanding the qualities that are valued in today’s students. It is necessary to think beyond the reading and math skills measured by standardized tests and consider curiosity, motivation, social intelligence, and mental agility, which Brooks describes as a form of critical thinking. Implementation of this vision, according to Brooks, involves adopting a student-centered approach to instruction and assessment in the classroom, and ultimately ensuring that students can pursue a wider array of opportunities that are respected in society, and thus valid pathways to success and well-being. The science of learning, an interdisciplinary field that explores how teaching and learning occurs both inside and outside the classroom, offers support for Brooks’ vision for the future of education. Beyond the theory, research in this area offers guidance on how the vision can be realized for all teachers and students.   

Brooks’ suggestion to prioritize a wider array of skills in the classroom is consistent with the breadth of skills approach described by Winthrop and McGivney in 2016. Faced with technological advances, shifts in the labor market, and globalization, these researchers argued that mastery of academic content is not sufficient for students to thrive inside and outside the classroom. Winthrop and McGivney particularly highlighted the importance of “teamwork, critical thinking, communication, persistence, and creativity.” Also in 2016, Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek developed the 6 Cs, a breadth of skills framework that emphasizes collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation, and confidence. The 6 Cs are a set of interconnected skills that build on each other as they develop. For example, effective communication requires knowing how to appropriately collaborate. However, students advance in their 6 Cs at different rates, and the same student may even show different levels of the same skill in different subject areas (e.g., deep critical thinking in social studies, but not math). The 6 Cs are based on a consensus view derived from the science of learning and leaders in the business world. These skills are also measurable, at least to some extent, using a four-level, descriptive rubric that was developed by Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek and appears in a 2020 Brookings Institution report on their framework. Here, it is important to emphasize that the rubric is only intended for formative assessment, giving teachers access to information on their students’ learning to shape future instruction, rather than high-stakes, summative evaluation of students’ skills. Additionally, it is vital to recognize how the Cs are a composite set of skills that should be advanced in a holistic manner for all students.

The idea of promoting a breadth of skills in today’s students to ensure they are prepared for the world of tomorrow is widely supported by educators in the United States, as demonstrated by the proliferation of Portraits of a Graduate and similar initiatives in school districts across the country. This perspective is also prominent internationally, including in the curricula of China and Finland, among many other nations. However, variation between countries in terms of which skills are prioritized, and how they are incorporated into the education system, is important to acknowledge.

It is equally critical to recognize the fundamental distinction between policy and practice. An effective breadth of skills approach depends on sound, evidence-based implementation with sensitivity to the needs, values, and experiences of community stakeholders. Fortunately, the science of learning offers guidance in this area. As we established in our 2020 report, and other researchers have supported, students learn best when lessons are active rather than passive, engaging instead of distracting, meaningful with connections to prior knowledge gained inside or outside the classroom instead of irrelevant, socially interactive rather than completely independent, iterative with opportunities to generate and test hypotheses, and joyful not dull. This is exemplified both in a Montessori preschool, which prioritizes active learning through the environment under a teacher’s facilitation, and at San Diego’s High Tech High, where students engage in long-term project-based learning.

Yet, even when instruction is carefully curated based on the science of learning to meet a wider array of curricular and policy objectives, the challenge of assessment remains. As prominent education researcher Gloria Ladson-Billings wrote in her 1995 article arguing for the recognition and promotion of students’ cultural identities in the classroom through culturally relevant teaching, “No matter how good a fit develops between home and school culture, students must achieve. No theory of pedagogy can escape this reality.” Currently, annual standardized assessments of students’ reading and math skills are still required in the United States between grades 3 and 8 under federal law. While we acknowledge the importance of supporting—and monitoring—students’ mastery of reading and math content, an equally wide lens must be applied both to instruction and assessment. There is movement toward a new generation of assessments that align with this perspective. For example, Brooks references portfolio-based assessments, which require students to carefully curate a collection of their own work for evaluation. As these new approaches progress, evidence from the science of learning warns against viewing instruction and assessment under a breadth of skills framework as a sequence of independent steps, given that even reading and math rely on common cognitive abilities. Therefore, it is important for educators and policymakers to consistently view such a system as a pursuit of genuinely holistic teaching and learning.

Brooks envisions an education system that truly benefits all students and society. Likewise, the development of the 6 Cs as one breadth of skills framework was motivated by a desire for “happy, healthy, thinking, caring, and social children who become collaborative, creative, competent, and responsible citizens tomorrow.” The science of learning offers a guide for how to achieve these goals and ensure that education goes beyond test scores to achieve its broader purposes.