At Frontiers, we bring some of the world’s best research to a global audience. But with tens of thousands of articles published each year, it’s impossible to cover all of them. Here are just five papers you won’t want to miss as students are returning to classrooms.

ChatGPT can’t reliably grade math assignments

Grading assignments is a time intensive and high-effort task. Shortcuts to doing it, such as using ChatGPT, may however not bring the desired results, a new study showed.

Writing in Frontiers in Education, researchers in Austria investigated ChatGPT’s ability to evaluate students’ handwritten solutions to math problems – and found that the main issue may not be the model’s math abilities.

The authors trained ChatGPT using 21 student solutions, which were rewritten by hand by one author to make the writing consistent. They then tested its grading performance using a second set of solutions written in the same handwriting. They found that ChatGPT repeatedly ran into problems with recognizing handwriting (e.g. transcribing 2x−1 − 3y as 2x = 1 − 3y), misinterpreting mathematical symbols, and making corrections to the problem even if prompted not to. Until AI models can recognize handwriting reliably, it is not a suitable aid for teachers grading math assignments, the team concluded. The fact that handwriting differs from student to student makes the use of ChatGPT in practice even more difficult, they wrote.

Article link: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2025.1632548/full

Can personality traits predict academic performance?

Performing well in school and university opens doors, but it is unclear if and which personality traits predict educational success. Though many studies have set out to determine this, the findings are not always consistent and warrant further exploration.

To help solve this, a team in Romania collected data from more than 450 students to pinpoint which personality traits and beliefs could impact academic performance. They published their results in Frontiers in Psychology.

Their findings showed that, after controlling for high school type, gender, and whether students lived in rural or urban environments, only rational belief had a significant direct relationship with academic performance. There was a general positive association between rational beliefs and academic performance, but gender and sensation seeking (here defined as the desire for thrills or the willingness to take risks for excitement) moderated this association. In female students, impulsive sensation seeking was positively linked to higher performance, but the same wasn’t found in male students.

Article link: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1650271/full

School meals do more than teach kids healthy eating habits

Lunch breaks in school may evoke images of kids lining up in canteens only to be served a sad-looking meal. These meals, however, have previously been found to increase enrollment and attendance rates, stimulate local production, and strengthen household food security.

In a recent Frontiers in Nutrition study, a team of international researchers laid out how school meals in France do much more than provide nutritious meals to students.

They identified a multi-fold value of school meals, including more protection of the environment and local economy through jobs in canteens, a reduction of plastic waste, and more organic farming. In France, where an annual €2.8 billion is spent on food for school meals alone, 50% of these expenses must come from sustainable supply chains with 20% coming from organic farms. This means school meals support organic farming worth around €560 million annually. Beyond this, school meals may fulfil a social role when communities subsidize them so that families have to contribute just around €1.7 per meal; highlighting their transformative effect, the authors wrote.

Article link: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3389/fnut.2025.1616375/full

Teachers’ facial expressions could make student work harder and engage more

Positive emotional states are thought to facilitate the acquisition or remembering of new ideas and behaviors, unlike negative emotions. In the school environment, the expression of emotions may impact students’ learning behaviors, but thus far only few studies have focused solely on teachers' facial expressions.

Now, in a new study published in Frontiers in Psychology, researchers in Romania examined just how much teachers’ facial expressions may help or hinder students’ classroom engagement and learning process.

The team divided 121 students into groups, with each group being exposed to a teacher's facial emotional display – joy, neutrality, anger, or fear – in a descriptive scenario. In a second step, students rated their responses to different questions about the teacher or about themselves. The findings showed that students respected and liked smiling teachers more than teachers displaying other emotions and that they listed more attentively to smiling teachers. Emotional displays of joy also improved students’ willingness to participate. The team said future studies should include more participants and emotions to verify the results.

Article link: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1613073/full

Playing sports could give students a better sense of belonging at school

Research shows that engaging in sports is critical for teenagers’ health and wellbeing, supporting the prevention of chronic diseases in adulthood and reducing the risk of experiencing mental health problems.

Beyond these positive effects, however, playing sports may also improve students’ sense of belonging at school, a new Frontiers in Sports and Active Living study by authors in Norway showed.

The study included more than 90,000 students aged 16 to 19, some of whom (approximately 32%) were participating in sports at the time of the study and some of whom weren’t (approximately 68%). Participation in sports was associated with favorable school-related outcomes, including students being less likely to suffer school stress and to be tired in school, as well as higher odds of a perceived sense of belonging and perceived care by teachers. Sport-involved boys were twice as likely to perceive a higher sense of belonging than girls, which may indicate differences in how much playing sports is valued in boys and girls, respectively.

Article link: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sports-and-active-living/articles/10.3389/fspor.2025.1613391/full

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