MindLog™—A curve for every child

Rationale & evidence for our nonprofit mission

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 and other vital capabilities [1,9] and recent efforts to improve the system have not succeeded [2]. Lectica has developed a solution that leverages a robust theoretical framework and new educational technology to foster systemic change [3]. Lectica’s lever—MindLog for Educators™ [4]—will catalyze the widespread adoption of educational practices that provide optimal support for the development of effective and successful 21st-century minds [5].

Team purpose

The purpose of the MindLog Initiative (previously the DiscoTest Initiative) is to prepare K-12 students for the 21st century by allowing all children to see themselves as learners:

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.

Over time, MindLog will achieve these goals by gently nudging students and teachers toward increasingly optimal ways of learning and teaching.

Problem & solution

Problem

Our current educational system, as a whole, falls short of supporting optimal mental development [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 correctness 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].
• Until MindLog, there was no parallel incentive—no fully scalable assessment 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—such as complex issues that lack simple “right answers”.
• MindLog will 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, MindLog will catalyze the widespread adoption of educational practices that support robust learning [2,3]. References

Solution: MindLog for Educators

MindLog is an innovative technology that supports optimal mental growth.

• MindLog helps 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].
• It is formative [5]:
  • MindLog provides feedback in the form of a constantly evolving growth curve and supports regular reflection as well as educator and peer feedback [5,11,12].
  • It optimizes learning by supporting Virtuous Cycles of Learning—cycles of goal setting, information gathering, application, and evaluation [11,13].
• It is calibrated to to a single theoretically derived learning metric—making it possible to track growth on a universal developmental scale [14,24]. All students, regardless of their rates of growth, literally see themselves as learners [5,6,14].
• It can be used in grades 5 and up.
• Our goal is for every child to have access to MindLog—A curve for every child.

Impact

1. Testing drives instruction. Tools 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 developmental 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 VCoLing produce more learning than programs incorporating fewer VCoLing [16].

1. 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 developmental scale are more likely to be promoted into higher paying or more sophisticated jobs [18].

1. The MindLog Initiative is about much more than testing—it’s about a new way of understanding and supporting learning. The research program that led to Mindlog:

• first 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; and
• allows us to rapidly document, in detail, how learners build particular meanings over time.

We’re confident that there is more to come.

References