Summary

Many 21st century challenges are highly complex, contested, and time-sensitive. To address them, democratic societies need citizens whose mental models and reasoning skills make it possible for them to (1) appreciate the complexity of these challenges, (2) take into account both short and long-term implications, (3) envision tradeoffs among personal, local, and global interests, and (4) thrive in rapidly changing environments. Unfortunately, our current educational system falls short of supporting the optimal development of these capabilities [1,9] and recent efforts to improve the system have not succeeded [2]. Lectica has developed a solution that leverages a robust theroetical framework and new educational technology to foster systemic change [3]. Lectica’s lever—the DiscoTest Initiative[4]—will catalyze the widespread adoption of educational practices that provide optimal support for the development of effective and successful 21st century citizens [5].

Team purpose

The purpose of the DiscoTest Initiative is to prepare K-12 students for the 21st century by taking formative assessment [5] to scale:

1. rewarding educational practices that reinforce students’ inborn passion for learning;
2. equipping students with skills and dispositions for negotiating the complexities and challenges of today’s world—skills for thinking, learning, evaluating, deciding, acting, communicating, interacting, and creating;
3. documenting the development of these skills [6]; and
4. providing students, teachers, and parents with feedback and resources that support optimal development.

We do this by building and delivering online learning tools called DiscoTests, each of which gently nudges students and teachers toward more optimal ways of learning and teaching.

DiscoTests will address many of the “big ideas” captured in state and national standards, including math, the sciences, social studies, literature, and the arts.

Problem & solution

Problem

Our current educational system, as a whole, falls short of supporting the optimal development of essential 21st century capabilities [1].

• Most students spend too much of their time learning facts, procedures, rules, and vocabulary, and too little of their time building the kind of knowledge required for thinking, learning, evaluating, deciding, acting, communicating, interacting, and creating [2].
• Today’s high stakes standardized tests, which were developed to improve public education by holding educators accountable, are more right answer focused than skill focused. They tend to encourage teaching that prepares students to provide enough right answers [2].
• Too great a focus on right answers produces shallow learning—learning that doesn’t go deep enough to become “sticky” or useable [7].
• There is no parallel incentive—no fully scalable technology—that systematically encourages students to learn in ways that support deep, highly networked, embodied [8], useable knowledge—what we call robust learning [9].
• Robust learning not only results in useable knowledge, but also provides the foundation for a lifetime of learning and development—the kind of learning that allows people to grow into complex thinkers equipped to grapple effectively with 21st century [7,9] challenges—complex issues that lack simple “right answers”.
• Lectica plans to transform educational practice by rewarding robust learning—at scale. Just as conventional high-stakes testing has produced an increased focus on pedagogy that rewards shallow learning, the right kind of learning tools can catalyze the widespread adoption of educational practices that support robust learning [2,3]. References

Solution (2002-2024)

Our solution is an innovative technology that builds unprecedented knowledge about the development of skills and knowledge while delivering powerful learning tools called DiscoTests.

• DiscoTests help to ensure that what a student learns today is learned deeply and richly enough to be useable and enduring. This kind of learning, which we call robust learning, also provides a foundation for future learning that, over time:
  • supports increasingly complex, sophisticated ways of understanding our world; and
  • builds skills for putting those ways of understanding to work [4,7,9,10].
  • DiscoTests are richly diagnostic, providing information about students’ learning edges—what they’re poised to benefit most from learning next [11].
• They are radically formative [5]:
  • They provide immediate feedback, triggering the dopamine-opioid cycle that reinforces our inborn motivation to learn [5,11,12].
  • They optimize learning by supporting Virtuous Cycles of Learning—cycles of goal setting, information gathering, application, and evaluation [11,13].
• They are all calibrated to a single theoretically derived learning metric—making it possible to track growth on a non-arbitrary scale [14,24]. All students, regardless of their rates of growth, will be able to see themselves as learners [5,6,14].
• Each DiscoTest can be used in multiple grades, often grades 4–12.
• The results of research we conduct to build each DiscoTest is stored in a knowledge base (developmental dictionary) we call the Lectical Dictionary [15]. It is used to trace learning trajectories, build learning resources, and score assessments.
• All DiscoTests are free to individual K-12 educators everywhere.

Impact

1. Testing drives instruction. Tests that measure robust learning reward teachers for fostering robust learning [2,5].
2. We have authored peer-reviewed articles about several validation studies [16].
3. Higher scores on our learning scale predict greater literacy [21].
4. Virtuous Cycles of Learning (VCoLs) support robust learning [7]. There is growing evidence that the more students use VCoL, the more effectively they grow.

• On average, high school seniors in programs that do the best job supporting robust learning are about 3 years ahead (on our learning scale [14]) of seniors in schools that do an average job—after taking SES into account [9].

• Even in adult contexts, educational programs that incorporate more VCoLs produce more learning than programs incorporating fewer VCoLs [16].

5. Robust learning matters.

• Students in programs that do the best job supporting robust learning are more likely to continue developing well into adulthood [9].

• Adults who score higher on our learning scale are more likely to be promoted into higher paying or more sophisticated jobs [18].

6. The DiscoTest Initiative is about much more than testing—it’s about a new way of understanding and supporting learning. What we are learning has:

• allowed us to build highly effective learning tools;

• led us to the mighty micro-VCoL;

• made it possible to create the world’s first developmental dictionary and electronic developmental scoring system [15];

• provided us with an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the shape of development;

• allowed us to rapidly document, in detail, how students build specific meanings over time; and

• has even allowed us to create an improved spell checker.

We’re confident that there is more to come.

References