Tag: Researchers

  • Researchers May Be Forced to Rely on an Obscure Court

    Researchers May Be Forced to Rely on an Obscure Court

    Several hundred feet from the White House, down a concrete path and across a quiet brick courtyard adorned with historical markers lie the doors to a small courthouse.

    Inside, etched into the stone wall, is a quote from Abraham Lincoln: “It is as much the duty of government to render prompt justice against itself, in favor of citizens, as it is to administer the same, between private individuals.”

    It’s apt for what’s in this building: the Court of Federal Claims, a legal venue where the U.S. government is always the one being sued. The building is now poised to be the site of fights over droves of terminated research grants.

    Although it’s the latest iteration of a court that’s existed since 1855, predating Lincoln’s election, it’s not a well-known institution. It’s not the subject of on-screen, steamy legal dramas. But the U.S. Supreme Court’s preliminary rulings last year have elevated its importance for higher ed.

    A majority of justices say this 16-judge court likely has jurisdiction over lawsuits regarding thousands of National Institutes of Health federal research grants that the Trump administration has tried to terminate, as well as other fights concerning canceled grants. If the Supreme Court sticks by its current thinking in final rulings, the Court of Federal Claims could be handling fights over countless grants that the Trump administration and future higher ed-targeting presidencies may try to cancel in the future.

    One catch: This court doesn’t have the authority to actually restore the grants. It can award money for canceled ones, but experienced lawyers who practice before it disagree on whether it will provide compensation even approaching what the grants were worth—they can be for millions of dollars apiece.

    Attorneys also say that researchers likely won’t have the right in this court to challenge their grant terminations; they’ll have to rely on their universities to sue on their behalf because the institutions are the legal parties to research grants. Overall, it’s generally unclear how a research grant-related case would turn out in this court.

    “This is—I think esoteric is probably an understatement,” said Bob Wagman, president of the Court of Federal Claims Bar Association and a lawyer before the court for 25 years.

    Lobby of the United States Court of Federal Claims building.

    Ryan Quinn/Inside Higher Ed

    ‘A Mess’

    As far as Wagman knows, the court has yet to say what level of monetary damages plaintiffs could win from the court over research grant terminations. He said that’s just one of a number of “threshold” issues judges will have to decide on regarding how these cases will work. 

    “It’s just been sort of an avalanche and people are trying to figure out what makes the most sense,” Wagman said.

    Ted Waters, the managing partner at Feldesman LLP and a George Washington University Law School adjunct professor, said “it’s all a mess because nobody knows what the rules are.”

    He contends that plaintiffs before this court couldn’t win back the full value of their grants but instead only “out-of-pocket termination costs,” such as the expense of giving two weeks’ severance pay to employees a university hired in expectation of receiving the grant. He said Congress didn’t create the Court of Federal Claims and the special appeals court that’s over it to deal with federal grants; it’s meant for contracts, such as when the government purchases items from companies.

    “This is all new stuff, and none of the kinks have been worked out,” said Waters, who’s been working in the federal grants field since 1992.

    Heather Pierce, senior director of science policy for the Association of American Medical Colleges, said thousands of terminated NIH grant cases going to the Court of Federal Claims “would clog the court immediately.” Elizabeth Hecker, a senior counsel with specialty in higher ed for Crowell & Moring LLP, echoed that.

    “There’s gonna be a tremendous backup … and these are gonna take years and years and years to decide,” Hecker said. “Whereas, if you go to federal district court, you can get a preliminary injunction.”

    But Waters doubts there will be a flood of cases. He said there’s little to fight over because researchers can’t get the relief they want from the court.

    The [Supreme] Court grapples with none of these complexities before sending plaintiffs through the labyrinth it has created.”

    Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

    Anuj Vohra, a partner at Crowell & Moring LLP, who began his career in Washington working for the Justice Department before the court, said “the court does not have equitable powers to reinstate grants, and I think that is, in large part, why the government is trying to move much of this litigation to the court.”

    He said plaintiffs will have to expend resources to win in this court and, while “we don’t know exactly how the Department of Justice is going to defend these grant terminations, … I assume they’re going to argue that the researchers are entitled to something less than the entire amount of the grant.”

    Still, Vohra said he doesn’t think going to the court would be pointless.

    “Grant terminations have not historically been litigated in the Court of Federal Claims, and so the challenges we’re seeing now are kind of charting a new course in terms of damages, theories and entitlement,” he said. “But I certainly don’t think it’s a fool’s errand to come to the court, and I think we’re going to see a lot more litigation over grant terminations this year.”

    Courtyard of the United States Court of Claims building.

    Courtyard of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims building. Lincoln’s secretary of state lived and was almost assassinated at this site.

    Ryan Quinn/Inside Higher Ed

    ‘The Labyrinth’

    Not all the Supreme Court justices thought this was a good idea.

    The conservative majority, absent Chief Justice John Roberts, first mentioned the Court of Federal Claims last year in one line in a roughly two-page preliminary ruling in April.

    “The Tucker Act grants the Court of Federal Claims jurisdiction over suits based on ‘any express or implied contract with the United States,’” the majority wrote, reasoning that canceled Education Department K-12 teacher training grants in that case were contracts.

    There was only one justice, and that’s Amy Coney Barrett, who thought that that was the right outcome.”

    Elizabeth Hecker, senior counsel with Crowell & Moring LLP

    Then, in August, in ongoing litigation over the Trump administration’s termination of thousands of NIH research grants, Justice Amy Coney Barrett was the deciding vote. In a five-page preliminary opinion, she said a regular federal district court “likely lacked jurisdiction to hear challenges to the grant terminations, which belong in the Court of Federal Claims.” In a partial concurrence with Barrett, Justice Neil Gorsuch criticized the lower court judge—who had ruled the grants should be reinstated while the case continued—for not following the conservative majority’s earlier (also preliminary) ruling in the Education Department lawsuit.

    “Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them,” Gorsuch wrote. He said that, even though the decision in the Education Department case wasn’t a final judgment, “when this Court issues a decision, it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts.”

    Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson countered in a 20-page dissent that “the Court of Federal Claims is authorized to award only money damages for contract breaches, not reinstatement of grant funding improperly terminated in violation of federal law.” She defended the district court’s decision.

    “Having struck down unlawful agency action, the District Court ‘also had the authority to grant the complete relief’ that followed,” Jackson wrote, quoting precedent. “Under the rule the Court announces today, however, no court can reinstate the plaintiffs’ grants.” In a footnote, she added that “the Court grapples with none of these complexities before sending plaintiffs through the labyrinth it has created.”

    A plaque inside the United States Court of Claims building.

    A plaque outside the United States Court of Federal Claims building.

    Ryan Quinn/Inside Higher Ed

    Barrett concluded in her August decision that the district court did likely have the right to void the NIH guidance upon which the agency based its terminations, even though it likely didn’t have the right to restore the grants. But four of Barrett’s colleagues said the district court was likely wrong on both issues, while the other four said the district court was likely right on both.

    That meant Barrett was the deciding vote on a split order that allowed universities, researchers and other organizations to challenge the guidance in district court, but said they had to challenge the actual grant terminations in the Court of Federal Claims.

    “There was only one justice, and that’s Amy Coney Barrett, who thought that that was the right outcome,” said Hecker, of Crowell & Moring LLP. She said “it’s a very unusual and seemingly inefficient way to go about doing things.”

    Hecker said one way to avoid this dual-track litigation would be for plaintiffs challenging grant terminations to use constitutional arguments—such as claiming that grant cancellations violate the First Amendment—rather than the Administrative Procedure Act, a law cited in the NIH grants case that invited the counter-argument from the government that the cases belonged in the Court of Federal Claims.

    Waters, of Feldesman LLP, said the ramifications of sending grant cases to the Court of Federal Claims extend far beyond higher ed, to highways, green technology and more.

    “The importance of grant programs—I don’t think people realized until now,” he said, adding that they “touch the whole fabric of American society.”

    Wagman, the president for the court’s bar association, said he thinks that, given the uncertainty of how claims for money before the court will turn out, most people would just prefer their grants be reinstated.

    “But if that’s all you got,” he said, “that’s all you got.”

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  • Canada launches CAD$1.7bn investment to recruit 1,000 global researchers

    Canada launches CAD$1.7bn investment to recruit 1,000 global researchers

    The Global Impact+ Research Talent Initiative will fund new research chairs, early-career posts, and infrastructure upgrades across universities to draw in leading academics from overseas and Canadian researchers currently working abroad. 

    “[The] investment is about securing Canada’s place at the forefront of discovery and innovation and leveraging our strength in science to support our future well-being and prosperity for generations to come,” said Canadian minister of industry Melanie Joly, announcing the program.  

    Through recruiting top talent, the program aims to “deliver direct economic, societal and health benefits for Canadians,” she stated.  

    The U15 group of Canada’s leading research-intensive universities welcomed the details of the investment, which was initially put forward in the government’s 2026-28 Immigration Levels Plan last month.  

    Robert Asselin, U15’s CEO, described the initiative as a “call to action” to make Canada a world-leading hub for research and innovation. 

    “This is a significant step which recognises that Canada’s security and economic success depend on supporting highly qualified talent with the ideas and expertise to deliver bold new discoveries,” he said.  

    Policymakers said the initiative was one of the largest recruitment programs of its kind in the world, with minister of health Majorie Michel emphasising the tangible benefits to Canada’s healthcare system.  

    “Better healthcare begins with better research. And in Canada, we believe in science. We value our scientists.” 

    “These investments will attract the best and brightest in the world, including Francophone researchers. This is the exact talent we need to drive better healthcare outcomes for Canadians and grow the Canadian economy,” Michel declared. 

    This is the exact talent we need to drive better healthcare outcomes for Canadians and grow the Canadian economy

    Majorie Michel, Canadian Minister of Health

    The investment will be split across four funding streams. The Canada Impact+ Research Chairs program has been allocated the bulk of the investment and is set to receive CAD$1bn over 12 years to help universities attract world-leading international researchers.  

    Meanwhile, the Canada Impact+ Emerging Leaders program will use CAD$120 million over 12 years to bring international early-career researchers to the country and expand the research talent pool with “fresh ideas and diverse perspectives”. 

    Two additional funds of CAD$400m and CAD$130m respectively, will be used to strengthen research infrastructure and provide training to support doctoral students and researchers relocating to Canada.  

    Recruitment will focus on fields such as artificial intelligence, health, clean technology, quantum science, environmental resilience, democratic resilience, manufacturing, defence, and cybersecurity. 

    Karim Bardeesy, parliamentary secretary to the minister of industry, said at the announcement: “We need to invite the best and brightest from around the world and those Canadians abroad to come and do that work here in Canada.” 

    The initiative comes as Canada plans to reduce new international study permits by more than 50% in 2026, driven by wider federal efforts to reduce Canada’s temporary resident population to less than 5% of the total by the end of 2027. 

    Delivering Canada’s 2025 budget in November, finance minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said the measures were designed to give the government greater control over the immigration system and bring immigration back to “sustainable levels”. 

    The government has said immigration measures will be targeted to specifically boost the scientific benefits for Canada, such as through increasing the country’s supply of doctors as part of a new International Talent Attraction Strategy and Action Plan. 

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  • The NIH Policy Holding Researchers “Hostage”

    The NIH Policy Holding Researchers “Hostage”

    Rachael Sirianni is one of the thousands of research scientists whose work has been decimated by the Trump administration’s massive cuts to the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies.

    “My lab is crumbling,” said the pediatric brain cancer researcher, who works at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. “Over the course of the last eight months, I’ve had to shutter more than half of my research program.”

    At the same time, she has a backlog of papers she’s still trying to get published in journals that are the best fit for her research and career, including several that charge thousands in fees to make the paper free to access. And if she wants her work to comply with a new NIH policy to expedite public access to federally funded research—part of the agency’s effort to restore trust in science, it says—she may have to start paying even more.

    The 2024 Public Access Policy, which took effect July 1, requires federally funded researchers to deposit their accepted peer-reviewed article manuscript into an open-access repository, such as the NIH-managed PubMed Central, immediately after a journal accepts it for publication. But researchers are reporting that some journals, including at least several high-impact titles owned by Elsevier, Wiley and Springer—are charging authors anywhere from $2,000 to more than $10,000 in article processing charges (APCs) to make their work immediately accessible.

    While researchers can use their NIH grants to pay for APCs, that’s hard for some to justify in such a precarious funding environment.

    “If I had full access to the institutional dollars that normally support my research program, or if I really believed that that grant that scored well is eventually going to get funded, I could risk my research dollars on these open-access fees,” Sirianni said. “But because of the trauma that the Trump administration is imposing on scientists across the country, we are faced with impossible decisions. Do we dedicate our money to the experiments? Do we maintain our research personnel? Do we comply with open-access fees?”

    Open-access advocates and experts say that predicament is exposing the limits of the government’s ability to rein in the $19 billion scholarly publishing industry, which is fueled by academic incentive structures that reward researchers for publishing frequently in widely cited, prestigious journals. Meanwhile, the publishing industry—which has long opposed immediate open access in part because it threatens subscription-dependent business models—says the rollout of the policy gives them no choice but to charge APCs.

    Zero Embargo

    The 2024 policy replaces the 2008 Public Access Policy, which allowed publishers to embargo new peer-reviewed federally funded research articles for 12 months before making them publicly available. That embargo period allowed publishers to turn a profit from selling academic libraries subscriptions to exclusive content; authors who wanted to make their papers publicly accessible before the embargo was lifted typically paid an APC.

    The government’s goal in lifting the embargo was to promote “equity and advance the work of restoring the public’s trust in Government science, and to advance American scientific leadership,” Alondra Nelson, the former acting director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote in a 2022 memo bearing her name. “A federal public access policy consistent with our values of equal opportunity must allow for broad and expeditious sharing of federally funded research—and must allow all Americans to benefit from the returns on our research and development investments without delay.”

    Although the Biden administration finalized the policy, the Trump administration is carrying it forward. It was set to take effect across federal agencies on Dec. 31, but NIH director Jay Bhattacharya announced in April that he was implementing it six months ahead of schedule to promote “maximum transparency.”

    Although Sirianni supports the spirit of NIH’s new open-access policy, she’s worried that high APCs will deter researchers from submitting their work to influential journals that might otherwise be a good fit, to the detriment of the scientific literature.

    “There’s absolutely going to be a lot of work that doesn’t get published or gets published in the wrong journal,” Sirianni said. “This policy is harming scientists. Instead of ensuring that research dollars are invested in providing knowledge to the scientific community and to the public, those dollars will be spent on feeding giant publishing corporations more money.”

    ‘Not Sustainable’?

    However, publishers say the NIH’s zero-embargo policy is forcing them to recoup lost subscription revenue through APCs to sustain operational costs, including article selection, curation, peer and editorial review, publication, archiving, and maintenance.

    “We are unable to support approaches that aim to make subscription articles immediately and freely available, which are not sustainable in the long term given they undermine the subscription model on which they depend,” an Elsevier spokesperson said in an email to Inside Higher Ed.

    “The best method for addressing issues of cost in publication is through a vibrant, competitive, and dynamic publishing marketplace with maximum author choice, including fee-based public access and read-and-publish agreements,” Carl Maxwell, senior vice president of public policy for the Association of American Publishers, who lobbied against the zero-embargo policy, wrote in an email. “We don’t think it’s a good idea to compel researchers to use a one-size-fits-all open access business model that has the potential to require NIH-funded researchers to pay out of pocket to fund the peer review process, in some cases harming their ability to communicate their research results to the scientific community and the general public.”

    Caroline Sutton, CEO for the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, added that researchers’ frustration with the NIH’s new open-access policy “reveals one of the real human impacts of well-intentioned policies that do not fully consider the operational realities of the research ecosystem.”

    It also raises long-standing questions about how to sustain that ecosystem.

    “Should the responsibility for funding this work lie with the funder? With the research or institutional library? Should publishers not be compensated?” she wrote in an email. “And how can the critical system of checks and balances—which must be resourced—endure if it is not sustainably funded?”

    But another sector sustaining the scientific publishing industry is the faculty who produce and peer review research for little to no financial compensation. The most productive are often rewarded instead with tenure, promotion and cachet.

    Holding Articles ‘Hostage’

    While the NIH policy doesn’t require authors to publish in journals that charge APCs—plenty of reputable, fully open-access journals exist—researchers say where they publish matters to their careers. At most universities, frequently publishing research in prestigious, high-impact journals—including many with hefty APCs—carries more weight with tenure and review committees than publishing in more obscure journals.

    But researchers aren’t always clear on a journal’s APC guidelines until they get through the review process and are asked to pay open-access fees to comply with the NIH policy, Rachel Widome, a public health professor at the University of Minnesota, told Inside Higher Ed. She withdrew an article from the Elsevier-owned Sleep Health on how school start times impact adolescents after she realized she’d have to pay a $2,500 fee to upload her accepted manuscript to PubMed Central in compliance with NIH policy.

    “When that happens, they’re holding your article hostage,” she said. “Do you start from scratch and submit it to a new journal? It can take six to nine months to go through another review.”

    She ended up resubmitting the article to Sleep Health after her NIH grant ended, exempting her from the zero-embargo policy. Although “time has been wasted,” she said the APCs stand to hurt early-career scientists the most. “It’s so critical that they establish a publication record,” Widome said. “If the options of which journals they can submit to are really limited [because of APCs], that hurts their chances of getting her research out and launching her career.”

    ‘Valuing Prestige’

    But those academic incentive structures have also emboldened publishers to levy APCs in response to the NIH’s zero-embargo policy, said Dave Hansen, executive director of the Authors Alliance, a California-based nonprofit that supports authors in disseminating their work.

    “So much of the system is wrapped around valuing prestige journals that are published by some of these bigger commercial publishers. That’s really hard for even a big institution like the NIH to nudge researchers away from,” Hansen said, adding that the NIH could de-emphasize prestige factors when evaluating researchers. At the same time, “a lot of publishers recognize that there’s a massive amount of federal funding that they can now demand access to because of this new federal policy.”

    The zero-embargo policy isn’t the NIH’s only attempt to regulate the scientific publishing industry. This summer, Bhattacharya proposed capping APCs to weaken the market power of publishers, dilute the scientific elite and “make science accessible not only to the public but also to the broader scientific community, while ending perverse incentives that don’t benefit taxpayers,” he said. But critics say the plan is neither comprehensive enough to dismantle academic incentive structures, nor likely to substantially lower APCs.

    And the frustration researchers are experiencing in the early days of the NIH’s new zero-embargo access policy—which was crafted with some of the same goals as the NIH’s proposed APC caps—is already offering support for those predictions.

    “The NIH public-access policy applies to a vast amount of research, but it’s also just a percentage of the overall landscape. There are a number of players here, including the funders, researchers, institutions, publishers and libraries,” said Katie Funk, former program manager for PubMed Central, who helped develop the zero-embargo policy.

    “Without addressing the whole system, it just causes confusion,” she added. “Larger conversations need to be had about the costs of publishing. It’s not transparent and it’s pervading the whole system.”

    (This article has been updated to correct the name of the UMass medical school.)

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  • Program stops early-career researchers quitting – Campus Review

    Program stops early-career researchers quitting – Campus Review

    Universities need workers with comprehensive analytical and strategic skills, but funding cuts and progression barriers have caused retention issues, leading to early-career researchers leaving universities in droves.

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  • U.K. Weighs Streamlining Visa Process for Researchers

    U.K. Weighs Streamlining Visa Process for Researchers

    The U.K. government has been urged to remove barriers in the visa process for researchers in order to capitalize on new U.S. restrictions imposed by Donald Trump.

    The U.S. president last weekend announced a $100,000 fee for applicants to the H-1B visa program, making a vital visa route used by skilled foreign workers in the U.S. inaccessible to many.

    The U.K. is reportedly considering removing fees for its global talent visa in response. The Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE) warned that high visa costs are already a significant barrier but said it is not the only change that needs to be made.

    In a new report, CaSE highlights the obstacles presented by the current system, including concerns raised by professionals who handle visa and immigration issues at U.K. research institutions.

    It warns that information about who is eligible for the visa route is often ambiguous and hard to navigate. According to the Wellcome Sanger Institute, which contributed to the report, the language around “exceptional talent” can be intimidating for talented applicants, although many institutions also receive a large number of low-quality applications.

    “These examples point to a wider issue of confusion and unclear messaging about who is eligible, resulting in missed opportunities and cost inefficiencies,” says the report.

    Visa policy is also increasingly complex and can put a significant strain on organizations, according to CaSE.

    The Sainsbury Laboratory (TSL), a research organization that specializes in molecular plant-microbe interactions, said visa support now demands a full-time employee in human resources as well as external support costing more than $21,000 per year in legal fees.

    “The U.K. visa system is becoming increasingly complex, unclear and time-consuming—especially for research institutes like TSL that depend on international talent.

    “Policy changes are poorly communicated, portals outdated and guidance inconsistent, requiring our HR to spend extensive time interpreting information.”

    TSL said that without a fair and functional visa system, the U.K. risks reaching a “breaking point in our ability to attract global talent and sustain world-leading research.”

    Alicia Greated, executive director of CaSE, said U.K. research faces “major challenges” under the current system. She wants to see the government take action that will improve things for skilled workers and those that employ them.

    Greated welcomed reports that the Labour administration was considering reducing visa fees for highly skilled researchers, adding, “If these changes happen, they will put the U.K. in a strong position to compete on the global skills market, especially given the changes in the opposite direction in the U.S.”

    However, she said that the removal of indefinite leave to remain, or permanent residency, from individuals already settled in the U.K.—as Reform UK is advocating—would be extremely damaging to U.K. R&D and the wider economy, as well as individuals and their families.

    “Policy proposals like this also have a negative impact on the attractiveness of the U.K. as a destination for the world’s brightest and best researchers because people may worry their right to be in the country could be taken away.”

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  • A researcher’s view on using AI to become a better writer

    A researcher’s view on using AI to become a better writer

    Writing can be hard, equal parts heavy lifting and drudgery. No wonder so many students are turning to the time-saving allure of ChatGPT, which can crank out entire papers in seconds. It rescues them from procrastination jams and dreaded all-nighters, magically freeing up more time for other pursuits, like, say … doomscrolling.

    Of course, no one learns to be a better writer when someone else (or some AI bot) is doing the work for them. The question is whether chatbots can morph into decent writing teachers or coaches that students actually want to consult to improve their writing, and not just use for shortcuts.

    Maybe.

    Jennifer Meyer, an assistant professor at the University of Vienna in Austria, has been studying how AI bots can be used to improve student writing for several years. In an interview, she explained why she is cautious about the ability of AI to make us better writers and is still testing how to use the new technology effectively.

    All in the timing 

    Meyer says that just because ChatGPT is available 24/7 doesn’t mean students should consult it at the start of the writing process. Instead, Meyer believes that students would generally learn more if they wrote a first draft on their own. 

    That’s when AI could be most helpful, she thinks. With some prompting, a chatbot could provide immediate writing feedback targeted to each students’ needs. One student might need to practice writing shorter sentences. Another might be struggling with story structure and outlining. AI could theoretically meet an entire classroom’s individual needs faster than a human teacher. 

    Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

    In Meyer’s experiments, she inserted AI only after the first draft was done as part of the revision process. In a study published in 2024, she randomly assigned 200 German high school students to receive AI feedback after writing a draft of an essay in English. Their revised essays were stronger than those of 250 students who were also told to revise, but didn’t get help from AI. 

    In surveys, those with AI feedback also said they felt more motivated to rewrite than those who didn’t get feedback. That motivation is critical. Often students aren’t in the mood to rewrite, and without revisions, students can’t become better writers.

    Meyer doesn’t consider her experiment proof that AI is a great writing teacher. She didn’t compare it with how student writing improved after human feedback. Her experiment compared only AI feedback with no feedback. 

    Most importantly, one dose of AI writing feedback wasn’t enough to elevate students’ writing skills. On a second, fresh essay topic, the students who had previously received AI feedback didn’t write any better than the students who hadn’t been helped by AI.

    Related: AI writing feedback ‘better than I thought,’ top researcher says

    It’s unclear how many rounds of AI feedback it would take to boost a student’s writing skills more permanently, not just help revise the essay at hand. 

    And Meyer doesn’t know whether a student would want to keep discussing writing with an AI bot over and over again. Maybe students were willing to engage with it in this experiment because it was a novelty, but could soon tire of it. That’s next on Meyer’s research agenda.

    A viral MIT study

    A much smaller MIT study published earlier this year echoes Meyer’s theory. “Your Brain on ChatGPT” went viral because it seemed to say that using ChatGPT to help write an essay made students’ brains less engaged. Researchers found that students who wrote an essay without any online tools had stronger brain connectivity and activity than students who used AI or consulted Google to search for source materials. (Using Google while writing wasn’t nearly as bad for the brain as AI.) 

    Although those results made headlines, there was more to the experiment. The students who initially wrote an essay on their own were later given ChatGPT to help improve their essays. That switch to ChatGPT boosted brain activity, in contrast to what the neuroscientists found during the initial writing process. 

    Related: University students offload critical thinking, other hard work to AI

    These studies add to the evidence that delaying AI a bit, after some initial thinking and drafting, could be a sweet spot in learning. That’s something researchers need to test more. 

    Still, Meyer remains concerned about giving AI tools to very weak writers and to young children who haven’t developed basic writing skills. “This could be a real problem,” said Meyer. “It could be detrimental to use these tools too early.”

    Cheating your way to learning?

    Meyer doesn’t think it’s always a bad idea for students to ask ChatGPT to do the writing for them. 

    Just as young artists learn to paint by copying masterpieces in museums, students might learn to write better by copying good writing. (The late great New Yorker editor John Bennet taught Jill to write this way. He called it “copy work” and he encouraged his journalism students to do it every week by copying longhand the words of legendary writers, not AI.)

    Meyer suggests that students ask ChatGPT to write a sample essay that meets their teacher’s assignment and grading criteria. The next step is key. If students pretend it’s their own piece and submit it, that’s cheating. They’ve also offloaded cognitive work to technology and haven’t learned anything.

    Related: AI essay grading is already as ‘good as an overburdened’ teacher, but researchers say it needs more work

    But the AI essay can be an effective teaching tool, in theory, if students study the arguments, organizational structure, sentence construction and vocabulary before writing a new draft in their own words. Ideally, the next assignment should be better if students have learned through that analysis and internalized the style and techniques of the model essay, Meyer said. 

    “My hypothesis would be as long as there’s cognitive effort with it, as long as there’s a lot of time on task and like critical thinking about the output, then it should be fine,” said Meyer.

    Reconsidering praise

    Everyone likes a compliment. But too much praise can drown learning just as too much water can keep flowers from blooming.  

    ChatGPT has a tendency to pour the praise on thick and often begins with banal flattery, like “Great job!” even when a student’s writing needs a lot of work. In Meyer’s test of whether AI feedback can improve students’ writing, she intentionally told ChatGPT not to start with praise and instead go straight to constructive criticism.

    Her parsimonious approach to praise was inspired by a 2023 writing study about what motivates students to revise. The study found that when teachers started off with general praise, students were left with the false impression that their work was already good enough so they didn’t put in the extra effort to rewrite.

    Related: Asian American students lose more points in an AI essay grading study — but researchers don’t know why

    In Meyer’s experiment, the praise-free feedback was effective in getting students to revise and improve their essays. But she didn’t set up a direct competition between the two approaches — praise-free vs. praise-full — so we don’t know for sure which is more effective when students are interacting with AI.

    Being stingy with praise rubs real teachers the wrong way. After Meyer removed praise from the feedback, teachers told her they wanted to restore it. “They wondered about why the feedback was so negative,” Meyer said. “That’s not how they would do it.”

    Meyer and other researchers may one day solve the puzzle of how to turn AI chatbots into great writing coaches. But whether students will have the willpower or desire to forgo an instantly written essay is another matter. As long as ChatGPT continues to allow students to take the easy way out, it’s human nature to do so. 

    Shirley Liu is a graduate student in education at Northwestern University. Liu reported and wrote this story along with The Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay.

    Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

    This story about using AI to become a better writer was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

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  • Nation’s Report Card at risk, researchers say

    Nation’s Report Card at risk, researchers say

    This story was reported by and originally published by APM Reports in connection with its podcast Sold a Story: How Teach Kids to Read Went So Wrong.

    When voters elected Donald Trump in November, most people who worked at the U.S. Department of Education weren’t scared for their jobs. They had been through a Trump presidency before, and they hadn’t seen big changes in their department then. They saw their work as essential, mandated by law, nonpartisan and, as a result, insulated from politics.

    Then, in early February, the Department of Government Efficiency showed up. Led at the time by billionaire CEO Elon Musk, and known by the cheeky acronym DOGE, it gutted the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, posting on X that the effort would ferret out “waste, fraud and abuse.”

    A post from the Department of Government Efficiency.

    When it was done, DOGE had cut approximately $900 million in research contracts and more than 90 percent of the institute’s workforce had been laid off. (The current value of the contracts was closer to $820 million, data compiled by APM Reports shows, and the actual savings to the government was substantially less, because in some cases large amounts of money had been spent already.)

    Among staff cast aside were those who worked on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — also known as the Nation’s Report Card — which is one of the few federal education initiatives the Trump administration says it sees as valuable and wants to preserve.

    The assessment is a series of tests administered nearly every year to a national sample of more than 10,000 students in grades 4, 8 and 12. The tests regularly measure what students across the country know in reading, math and other subjects. They allow the government to track how well America’s students are learning overall. Researchers can also combine the national data with the results of tests administered by states to draw comparisons between schools and districts in different states.

    The assessment is “something we absolutely need to keep,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said at an education and technology summit in San Diego earlier this year. “If we don’t, states can be a little manipulative with their own results and their own testing. I think it’s a way that we keep everybody honest.”

    But researchers and former Department of Education employees say they worry that the test will become less and less reliable over time, because the deep cuts will cause its quality to slip — and some already see signs of trouble.

    “The main indication is that there just aren’t the staff,” said Sean Reardon, a Stanford University professor who uses the testing data to research gaps in learning between students of different income levels.

    All but one of the experts who make sure the questions in the assessment are fair and accurate — called psychometricians — have been laid off from the National Center for Education Statistics. These specialists play a key role in updating the test and making sure it accurately measures what students know.

    “These are extremely sophisticated test assessments that required a team of researchers to make them as good as they are,” said Mark Seidenberg, a researcher known for his significant contributions to the science of reading. Seidenberg added that “a half-baked” assessment would undermine public confidence in the results, which he described as “essentially another way of killing” the assessment.

    The Department of Education defended its management of the assessment in an email: “Every member of the team is working toward the same goal of maintaining NAEP’s gold-standard status,” it read in part.

    The National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policies for the national test, said in a statement that it had temporarily assigned “five staff members who have appropriate technical expertise (in psychometrics, assessment operations, and statistics) and federal contract management experience” to work at the National Center for Education Statistics. No one from DOGE responded to a request for comment.

    Harvard education professor Andrew Ho, a former member of the governing board, said the remaining staff are capable, but he’s concerned that there aren’t enough of them to prevent errors.

    “In order to put a good product up, you need a certain number of person-hours, and a certain amount of continuity and experience doing exactly this kind of job, and that’s what we lost,” Ho said.

    The Trump administration has already delayed the release of some testing data following the cutbacks. The Department of Education had previously planned to announce the results of the tests for 8th grade science, 12th grade math and 12th grade reading this summer; now that won’t happen until September. The board voted earlier this year to eliminate more than a dozen tests over the next seven years, including fourth grade science in 2028 and U.S. history for 12th graders in 2030. The governing board has also asked Congress to postpone the 2028 tests to 2029, citing a desire to avoid releasing test results in an election year. 

    “Today’s actions reflect what assessments the Governing Board believes are most valuable to stakeholders and can be best assessed by NAEP at this time, given the imperative for cost efficiencies,” board chair and former North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue said earlier this year in a press release.

    The National Assessment Governing Board canceled more than a dozen tests when it revised the schedule for the National Assessment of Educational Progress in April. This annotated version of the previous schedule, adopted in 2023, shows which tests were canceled. Topics shown in all caps were scheduled for a potential overhaul; those annotated with a red star are no longer scheduled for such a revision.

    Recent estimates peg the annual cost to keep the national assessment running at about $190 million per year, a fraction of the department’s 2025 budget of approximately $195 billion.

    Adam Gamoran, president of the William T. Grant Foundation, said multiple contracts with private firms — overseen by Department of Education staff with “substantial expertise” — are the backbone of the national test.

    “You need a staff,” said Gamoran, who was nominated last year to lead the Institute of Education Sciences. He was never confirmed by the Senate. “The fact that NCES now only has three employees indicates that they can’t possibly implement NAEP at a high level of quality, because they lack the in-house expertise to oversee that work. So that is deeply troubling.”

    The cutbacks were widespread — and far outside of what most former employees had expected under the new administration.

    “I don’t think any of us imagined this in our worst nightmares,” said a former Education Department employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation by the Trump administration. “We weren’t concerned about the utter destruction of this national resource of data.”

    “At what point does it break?” the former employee asked.

    Related: Suddenly sacked

    Every state has its own test for reading, math and other subjects. But state tests vary in difficulty and content, which makes it tricky to compare results in Minnesota to Mississippi or Montana.

    “They’re totally different tests with different scales,” Reardon said. “So NAEP is the Rosetta stone that lets them all be connected.”

    Reardon and his team at Stanford used statistical techniques to combine the federal assessment results with state test scores and other data sets to create the Educational Opportunity Project. The project, first released in 2016 and updated periodically in the years that followed, shows which schools and districts are getting the best results — especially for kids from poor families. Since the project’s release, Reardon said, the data has been downloaded 50,000 times and is used by researchers, teachers, parents, school boards and state education leaders to inform their decisions.

    For instance, the U.S. military used the data to measure school quality when weighing base closures, and superintendents used it to find demographically similar but higher-performing districts to learn from, Reardon said.

    If the quality of the data slips, those comparisons will be more difficult to make.

    “My worry is we just have less-good information on which to base educational decisions at the district, state and school level,” Reardon said. “We would be in the position of trying to improve the education system with no information. Sort of like, ‘Well, let’s hope this works. We won’t know, but it sounds like a good idea.’”

    Seidenberg, the reading researcher, said the national assessment “provided extraordinarily important, reliable information about how we’re doing in terms of teaching kids to read and how literacy is faring in the culture at large.”

    Producing a test without keeping the quality up, Seidenberg said, “would be almost as bad as not collecting the data at all.”

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.



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  • Law Firm Threatens Brown Climate Researchers

    Law Firm Threatens Brown Climate Researchers

    A law firm representing anti–wind energy groups is demanding that Brown University researchers retract findings linking those groups to the fossil fuel industry, The New York Times reported Monday. 

    The move comes weeks after Brown reached an agreement with the Trump administration. The government restored $510 million in frozen federal research grants after the university agreed to certain demands, including adopting the Trump administration’s definitions of male and female and turning over admissions data. 

    The Trump administration has halted or canceled thousands of other research grants across the country, including many focused on climate change.

    Marzulla Law LLC characterized the research published by Brown’s Climate and Development Lab as “false and injurious” in an Aug. 11 letter to Brown’s general counsel. It threatened to file complaints with Brown’s public and private funders, including the Energy Department, the National Science Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. 

    A university spokesperson did not comment specifically on the law firm’s demands but told the Times that it’s committed to maintaining academic freedom. 

    Brown researchers who authored a case study about Marzulla Law have written that the firm has “a history of advancing anti-environmental lawsuits and significant ties with the fossil fuel industry.” Researchers have also published findings accusing one of the firm’s clients—the nonprofit Green Oceans, which is trying to shut down the construction of a nearly complete $4 billion wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island—of being part of “a fossil-fuel-funded disinformation network.”

    On Friday, the Trump administration, which opposes the wind energy industry, halted the wind farm project without citing specific reasons. 

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  • SCOTUS Ruling Has “Bleak Implications” for Researchers

    SCOTUS Ruling Has “Bleak Implications” for Researchers

    Researchers will have to challenge grant terminations in federal claims court.

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | SDI Productions/E+/Getty Images

    Hope is fading that federally funded researchers whose grants were terminated by the National Institutes of Health earlier this year will be able to resume their work as planned.

    On Thursday, the United States Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that any legal challenges to the grant terminations should be litigated in the Court of Federal Claims, not the federal district court system they’ve been moving through for months.

    It’s the latest twist in federally funded researchers’ legal fight to claw back nearly $800 million in medical research grants—though accounting for the multiyear grants that the NIH is refusing to fulfill puts that figure closer to $2 billion—the NIH terminated for running afoul of the Trump administration’s ideological priorities. Many of the grants funded programs that advanced diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and research projects focused on topics such as LGBTQ+ health, vaccine hesitancy and racial disparities.

    Researchers sued the NIH in April and got a win in June when a federal district court judge in Massachusetts ordered the agency to reinstate the grants immediately. Although the NIH has since reinstated many of those grants, Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist at Harvard University and former lawyer who’s been tracking grant cancellations, told Inside Higher Ed that after Thursday’s ruling those reinstated grants will “almost certainly” be re-terminated. If that happens, “I don’t think they’ll get their money back.”

    That’s in part because the Supreme Court said researchers will have to re-file their lawsuits in federal claims court, which generally doesn’t have the power to issue injunctive relief that could keep grant money flowing during the litigation process. And it could take months or even years for the claims court to decide if researchers are owed damages.

    “Nobody has that kind of time. The nature of research is that you can’t just stop and restart it many months later,” said Delaney. “Folks have already had to do that once and many aren’t able to—they’ve had to lay off staff and lost contact with study participants. This additional delay probably renders the research unviable going forward.”

    Trump ‘Always Wins’

    Delaney is among numerous experts and advocates who say the decision is both a blow to the scientific research enterprise and the latest evidence that the Supreme Court is inclined to interpret the law to favor the Trump administration’s whims.

    “Make no mistake: This was a decision critical to the future of the nation, and the Supreme Court made the wrong choice,” the Association of American Medical Colleges said in a statement. “History will look upon these mass NIH research grant terminations with shame. The Court has turned a blind eye to this grievous attack on science and medicine, and we call upon Congress to take action to restore the rule of law at NIH.”

    Jeremy Berg, who served as director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences from 2003 to 2011, said in an email to Inside Higher Ed that while “many (but not all) grants from the lawsuits that had been terminated have been reinstated at this point,” the big question the Supreme Court’s ruling raises now “is whether NIH will start to re-terminate them.”

    Although a 5-4 majority did agree on Thursday that the district can review NIH’s reasoning for the terminations and kept in place a court order blocking the guidance that prompted the cancellations, Berg said the mixed ruling is “potentially very damaging” because redirecting the case to a different court means “the stay blocking the required reinstatements could go into effect.”

    He added that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent sums up his interpretation of the ruling’s implications. “This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,” Jackson wrote. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: That one, and this Administration always wins.”

    That’s how Samuel Bagenstos, a professor of law and public policy at the University of Michigan and former general counsel to the Department of Health and Human Services, interpreted the decision, too.

    “The message the courts sent yesterday is very strong that they are going to let the Trump administration shut down the grants right now and remit grantees to the really uncertain process of going to the Court of Federal Claims and potentially getting damages in the future,” he said in an interview with Inside Higher Ed Friday.

    “But that’s really cold comfort for the grantees,” Bagenstos added. “If they can’t get the grants restarted right now, they probably can’t continue their research projects, and the prospect of maybe getting damages in the future doesn’t keep those research projects alive. It’s a bad sign for the entire research community.”

    The NIH is far from the only federal agency that has canceled federal research grants that don’t align with the Trump administration’s ideologies. The National Science Foundation, the Education Department and the National Endowment for the Humanities are all facing legal challenges in federal district courts after freezing or canceling grants.

    And the Supreme Court’s ruling on the NIH’s terminations has implications for those cases, as well.

    “The message seems to be pretty clear that if you have an ongoing grant that’s been terminated and you want to go to court to keep the money flowing, you’re out of luck,” Bagenstos said. “It’s got very bleak implications for all researchers who are depending on continuing the flow of federal grants.”

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  • Racial bias affects early math education. Researchers are trying to stop that

    Racial bias affects early math education. Researchers are trying to stop that

    The early years are a critical time to teach the foundations of math. That’s when children learn to count, start identifying shapes and gain an early understanding of concepts like size and measurement. These years can also be a time when children are confronted with preconceived notions of their abilities in math, often based on their race, which can negatively affect their math success and contribute to long-standing racial gaps in scores. 

    These are some of the motivating factors behind the Racial Justice in Early Math project, a collaboration between the Erikson Institute, a private graduate school focused on child development, and the University of Illinois Chicago. The project aims to educate teachers and provide resources including books, teacher tips and classroom activities that help educators combat racial bias in math instruction.  

    I sat down with Danny Bernard Martin, professor of education and mathematics at the University of Illinois Chicago, project director Priscila Pereira and Jennifer McCray, a research professor at the Erikson Institute, to learn more about their work. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

    What are some of the key examples of racial injustice that you see in early math education?

    Martin: If I say to you, ‘Asians are good at math,’ that’s something that you’ve heard, we know that’s out there. When does that kind of belief start? Well, there’s something called ‘racial-mathematical socialization’ that we take seriously in this project, that we know happens in the home before children come to school. Parents and caregivers are generating messages around math that they transmit to children, and then those messages may get reinforced in schools.

    Even at the early math level, there are research projects beginning to construct Black children in particular ways, comparing Black children to white children as the norm. That is a racial justice issue, because that narrative about white children, Black children, Asian American children, Latinx children, then filters out. It becomes part of the accepted truth, and then it impacts what teachers do and what principals and school leaders believe about children.  

    What does this look like in schools?

    McCray: Perhaps the math curriculum doesn’t represent them or their experience. We all know that often schools for children of color are under-resourced. What often happens in under-resourced schools is that the curriculum and the teaching tends to focus on the basics. There might be an overemphasis on drilling or doing timed tests. We also have those situations where people are doing ability grouping in math. And we know what the research says about that, it’s basically ‘good education for you, and poor education for you.’ It’s almost impossible to do any of that without doing harm. 

    One line of research has been to watch teachers interact with children and videotape or study them. And in diverse classrooms with white teachers … often it is observed that children who are Black or Latina aren’t called on as often, or aren’t listened to as much, or don’t have the same kind of opportunity to be a leader in the classroom.  

    What should teacher prep programs, administrators and families do to address racial justice issues in early math? 

    McCray: Maybe the white teacher is reflecting on themselves, on their own biases … trying to connect with families or communities in some way that’s meaningful. We want teachers to have that balance of knowing that sometimes you do want to teach a procedure, but you never want to be shutting down ideas for creative ways to solve a math problem, or culturally distinct ways to solve a math problem that might come from your students.

    It might be something like, you’re working on sorting in an early childhood classroom. And what if a child is thinking about a special craft that their parent does that’s like the [papel picado], or papers that get cut in very elaborate designs in Mexico. … If the teacher doesn’t have space to listen, it could be a shutdown moment, instead of a moment of connection, where the child is actually bringing something … that is associated with their own identity.

    Pereira: I do feel that sometimes the conversations of racial justice really put the weight on teachers and teachers alone. Teaching is part of a larger structure. Maybe your school will not allow you to do the work that is needed. I’m thinking about [a teacher] who was required to follow a scripted curriculum that did not promote the positive math identity for Black children. It needs to be a whole community effort.

    How is your initiative changing this?

    Pereira: There are resources in terms of opportunities that we offer to teachers to engage with our content and ideas: webinars, a fellowship and an immersive learning experience in the summer of 2026. These spaces are moments in which educators, researchers and people that are engaged in the education of young learners, can come together … and disrupt mainstream notions of understanding what is racial justice and how one gets that in the classroom.  

    Right now, research and initiatives zeroing in on race are under scrutiny, especially at the college level. Do you foresee any additional challenges to this work?

    Pereira: There was a National Science Foundation grant program focused on racial equity in STEM and we had been planning to apply for funds to do something there. … It’s gone. … The only place we’re welcome is where there’s a governor who is willing to take on Trump. We just have to keep doing the work, because we know what’s right. But it is challenging, for sure.

    Contact staff writer Jackie Mader at 212-678-3562 or [email protected]. 

    This story about racial justice in math was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Early Childhood newsletter.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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