What Happens When a 48K-Student District Commits to the ‘Science of Learning’

On a recent afternoon, Caroline Able, a first-grade teacher at North Frederick Elementary School in Frederick County, Maryland, sat in a small office with her principal, Tracy Poquette, carefully practicing the next day's math lesson.

Able, who is in her third year teaching, walked through each step, demonstrating how she was going to present comparisons between two numbers, then what students would do. She sometimes stopped to focus on granular details: Should she go over math vocabulary words like sum and difference beforehand, or will her students remember what they mean? Should students write down problems and answers in notebooks, or on mini-whiteboards?

Poquette recommended the whiteboards. "You're going to ask them to hold them up," Poquette coached Able, miming holding a whiteboard in the air. "Then you can see their answers, and how they got to that. Every student is responding."

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Giving students multiple chances to "respond," or provide answers, is a learning strategy supported by research , and part of why Able is here — to ensure that she's incorporating evidence-based practices into her teaching. The sessions are meant to accelerate student learning and take some of the guesswork out of becoming an effective teacher, part of a larger district plan to incorporate research from the fields of neuroscience, educational psychology and cognitive science — often referred together broadly as the 'science of learning.'

Frederick County, situated about 50 miles north of Washington, D.C., and 50 miles west of Baltimore, is a diverse district with 69 schools and 48,000 students , and one of only a handful to use learning science research to try to improve schools at scale. Launched in 2015, it's the centerpiece of a school improvement plan, and leaders say the goal is to raise academic achievement overall, as well as shrink stubborn gaps between more advantaged students and their less advantaged peers.

"As a district, we've ben talking about achievement gaps for a long time," said Margaret Lee, Frederick County's director of organizational development who has led the charge toward the science of learning. "I've seen it in every role that I've had, always looking at what could make the difference. Like every district in America, every silver bullet that people thought up had been peddled to us. It started to frustrate me that none of these things were making a difference, and that was a catalyst that led us here."

The district is seeing steady progress in a positive direction, even when accounting for pandemic-related learning loss. Third-grade English Language Arts scores , for example, on the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program test, rose from 49.5% proficient in 2018, to 60% proficient in 2023 — 12 points above the state average. In math, students from disadvantaged groups have also seen steady gains. African-American third graders were 38% proficient in 2018, but rose to 43.8% by 2023; over five years, low-income Title I third graders slowly grew from 32% to 37.6% proficient.

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Amid a growing awareness of learning science and a spotlight on curriculum reform , experts are beginning to look to districts like Frederick County to gauge whether it can be a model for academic improvement. Unlike more common state plans reforming how reading is taught , or increasing math support for struggling students, the Frederick County plan is tackling learning as a whole — across subjects and grades — to systematically alter the paradigm of how teaching and learning happens throughout its schools.

Training adults on how the brain learns

Frederick County's plan turns on a single premise: most of the adults who work with kids don't know how the brain learns, and haven't been exposed to the body of research on which teaching practices are more likely to support it.

Research has shown that applying cognitive science principles and strategies to classrooms are "significant factors affecting rates of learning and its retention in many everyday classroom situations," with certain caveats regarding the limitations of what scientists currently know about when and where to implement them. But within universities, scientific research on learning has historically been separate from teacher training, and misunderstandings about how learning happens are common in the field of education. They've led to such disproven ideas as children having " learning styles ," like being a "visual" or "kinetic" learner, or using the three-cueing method to teach reading, prompting students to try to guess at unfamiliar words using context clues like looking at pictures.

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The district has made educating faculty and staff on cognitive science a top priority. In 2017, Frederick County formed a partnership with The Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning and began training teachers, instructional coaches and leaders in the bedrock principles of the science of learning , including an understanding of how memory works and its pivotal role in academic learning; creating classroom environments that reduce obstacles and distractions while maximizing student memory; and creating effective ways to test whether students have learned the needed material.

The training homed in on how to translate findings from cognitive science and educational psychology into classroom practice, including explicit teaching's role in learning new material, meaning direct instruction heavily guided by the teacher, and why students need background knowledge to understand what they read and form connections to new learning. Classroom changes also include specific learning strategies like retrieval practice and interleaving, in which teachers go back to learned material in multiple ways, spaced out over time, which has been shown to improve students' memory of what they learned.

The training has changed the way the district is approaching content subjects like math. Stacy Sisler, a secondary math curriculum specialist for Frederick County, credits increased knowledge of learning research with steady gains middle schoolers have seen in math across the district. She first learned about the science of learning through the district training, and admits she was initially reluctant to adopt the changes. The more she learned, however, the more Sisler began to think the research made sense, and was applicable to every math classroom.

"As I started to learn more and gain a deeper understanding, then it became — how does instruction change because of this?" Sisler said. "We don't just say it and it magically happens, so what does that actually look like?"

Under her leadership, curriculum and instructional practices were re-designed to better reflect the research. Middle school math teachers have been trained in practices like teaching math more directly using example problems, checking student work multiple times during class time to gauge student understanding and incorporating more math practice both into each lesson and across lessons.

Lee said even when considering how hard it often is to pinpoint what caused learning gains, the instructional changes coincided with significant improvements for students in Frederick County. Over five years since implementing the changes, middle school math students' benchmark assessments have grown, in some schools by as much as 20%, especially among students of color and English learners. Over the same five-year period across the state of Maryland, students of color and English learners' math proficiency as measured on the state exam has declined. In 2023 for example, only 8.2% of Black middle school students were proficient in math, down 8 percentage points from 2018.

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'Using the time we do have differently'

New teachers across the district are onboarded in a three-year science-of-learning coaching program, which includes lesson coaching like first-grade teacher Caroline Able's, but also group study. The aim is to give new teachers evidence-informed knowledge and tactics to decrease some of the trial-and-error that comes along with being a beginner.

First-year eighth-grade math teacher Elizabeth Sypole's monthly training is currently focused on evidence-based classroom routines that foster students' attention.

Sypole has learned techniques like signal, pause, insist , a simple hand motion followed by a pause meant to help students get quiet quickly. Previously unaware of the technique, Sypole said it has been instrumental in her classroom management. "Literally within two days of doing it, everybody is quiet. It's so much less stressful than trying to get everybody to quiet down. They know exactly what to do now and it's just the routine."

Leaders get the training, too — principals, assistant principals and supervisors are focused on equity, and how schools can eliminate learning gaps between groups of students. Kent Wentzel, the district's leadership development specialist, trains leaders in researcher Barak Rosenshine's principles of instruction , which include presenting new material in small, manageable steps and providing extra support for students if the task is especially difficult. The idea is to make learning as accessible as possible to everyone.

The training, book studies and coaching sessions focused on the science of learning make up the heart of the district's professional development, and therefore don't require tons of extra funding or extra time for educators and leaders outside their contract hours, said Lee. In the past, professional learning brought in from outside vendors were "one-off" learning experiences not tied to any bigger picture or goal. Now all professional learning must meet a set of district standards for being "evidence-informed and equity-driven," ensuring the entire district is swimming in the same direction.

"We haven't made extra time, we are just using the time we do have differently," Lee said.

While much of the district training is mandatory—like district-wide professional development and leadership training—other parts are optional or opt-in, like teacher book studies and principal coaching. The district is hoping that by making the science of learning training something gradual that takes hold naturally, it will win buy-in from the most experienced staffers over time because it was not a one-and-done push.

Bernard Quesada, the veteran principal at Middletown High School, has embraced the science of learning approach to teaching. He said the organic approach and long-term picture has been key to its success at his school of mostly accomplished, veteran teachers.

"When these things become mandates, and schools have to comply, you get a lukewarm reception," Quesada said. "Schools get initiative fatigue."

Middletown teachers have adopted the new learning, Quesada said, because administrators have been intentional to connect the research to what teachers are already doing well. Quesada quoted learning researcher and retired University College London professor Dylan William — a speaker he heard at a recent science of learning conference.

"William said, 'There's no next new, big thing. It's a lot of old, small things that work and are boring,'" Quesada laughed. "That's about as true a statement as I've heard in my life."

'Guilty of chasing the next greatest thing'

On the other side of the country, in rural Delta County, Colorado, teachers are working on asking students better questions to get them thinking stronger and deeper — moving beyond basic factual answers to more "how" and "why" questions that require students to think not just about the answer, but how they got there.

Like Frederick County, the small southwestern Colorado district with one-quarter English language learners and 65% low-income students has been training all their teachers and school leaders in the science of learning. Also like Frederick County, the district has taken a "no-silver-bullets" approach and has revamped professional learning, putting learning research at the center, with deep dives for teachers and leaders into cognitive science principles like " effortful thinking ," a technique where teachers design lessons that require students to evaluate, provide reasoning and detailed explanations for learned material.

The district's science of teaching and learning lead, Shawna Angelo, said she's looking to help teachers "align how the brain learns with how we are delivering instruction."

The focus on effortful thinking was supported by Deans for Impact , an organization that has worked for nearly a decade to improve teaching by getting the scientific principles of learning into more classrooms.

Executive Director Valerie Sakimura sees districts like Frederick County and Delta County as models for improving academic achievement in more school systems across the country. "The priority for our work is helping teacher preparation programs and partnering districts trying to support teachers around the science of learning," she said. "Our particular focus is aspiring and early-career teachers."

Deans for Impact is also brokering partnerships between school districts and local universities, offering coursework and training on cognitive science principles for student teachers. Teacher training facilities as varied as the Louisiana Resource Center for Teachers and American University are breaking down the longstanding barrier between teacher training and research science, teaching future educators about how learning happens long before they step into a classroom.

Frederick County has partnered with Hood College, where many local teachers get their degrees, to design coursework and provide instruction based on the science of learning for student teachers. District instructional coaches and mentor teachers work with teachers in training as well, giving them a chance to watch evidence-informed techniques in action and practice them in their student teaching.

Michael Markoe, deputy superintendent for Frederick County, said through all this work, the district is trying to create a throughline, where all teachers, coaches, principals — everyone is moving in the same direction, speaking the same language, all based on the research. When school leaders recently inquired about personalized learning, for example, where students progress and master subjects at their own pace, Markoe reminded them that the district is, for the time being, focused on only one thing: evidence of effectiveness.

"I've been in education almost 30 years. I've been guilty of chasing the next greatest thing," he said. "If we are going to advance personalized learning, we have to see the research behind it and ensure it's the right thing for our children."

Getting the entire district on board is long, slow work. Because there are no mandates, some schools haven't embraced the science of learning, or have chosen to focus on other priorities, despite leadership's wholesale commitment to the methodology.

But Lee, the district's organizational developmental director, isn't deterred.

"I compare it to moving an aircraft carrier. To move the ship, you are making lots of tiny moves in the same direction. If you spin a wheel in a school system, you will throw people off the ship," she said. "Public education isn't patient. Everyone wants to fix it tomorrow, but those things don't work."