Teaching students that their mind can grow and learn more effectively through “brain exercise” has become a focal point for Bay Area educators and researchers at Stanford. The nonprofit Mountain View-based Khan Academy has been supporting the idea through its You Can Learn Anything campaign, and now seeks to up its game through a new math event.
The latest program encouraging this “growth mindset” is LearnStorm, a Bay Area online math program designed by Khan Academy to test student math skills and push children to struggle and work through difficult problems. It’s through these hard problems that kids are able to improve their ability to learn, and distance themselves from the idea of fixed intelligence, according to James Tynan, Partnerships and Community lead at Khan Academy.
LearnStorm kicked off earlier this month, and participation is already far above what Khan Academy was expecting. Tynan said they were hoping to get 1 percent of all Bay Area students signed up by the end of April, which comes out to about 13,000 students. As of this week 34,000 students have signed up.
In LearnStorm, students in 10 Bay Area counties can sign up to take math lessons and gain points for successfully completing problems. Tynan said the students can accrue points and represent their school on a leaderboard on the Khan Academy website, which gives the event a competitive edge as students vie to show off both their math skills and their perseverance through the trickiest of math problems.
The leaderboards are based on two types of scores: mastery points and hustle points. Mastery points are based on student performance on various math skills, which gives students who are already good at math an advantage as they breeze through content. But then there are hustle points, which Tynan said serve as an important counterbalance to mastery points in that the focus is on how hard students work on the problems.
Hustle points are gained through students trudging through problems that LearnStorm’s lesson algorithm determines is working kids at their edge, according to Isaac Durand, teacher community advocate at Khan Academy.
Tynan said students rack up hustle points by showing perseverance, grit and effort in tackling difficult problems to help build students’ metacognitive skills, which is part and parcel to improving how students learn.
On top of hustle points, LearnStorm also introduces weekly challenges that students can participate in to learn more about how their brain works through difficult problems in math and other subjects, and how that struggle turns into growth.
“It could be something like a 10-minute interactive experience where the student watches a video on how the synapses in the brain grow and change based on the effort they’re putting in,” Tynan said.
Khan Academy developed these weekly activities with the Project for Education Research That Scales (PERTS) at Stanford University, which focuses research on improved student achievement through academic motivation and the growth mindset — a concept and approach to learning developed by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck. Growth mindset is the idea that intelligence is not a fixed trait like eye color, and that people can learn and struggle through mental challenges to expand and “grow” how smart they are.
The challenge, Tynan said, was trying to weave the message about growth mindset into lessons during difficult work, which would be much more effective.
“We had videos and messages that encourage it, but it was living on our website and we weren’t able to turn it into a program until now,” he said.
Just as the hustle points are there to encourage everyone — not just the math geniuses — to perform well, Tynan said the goal is to get as many kids signed up as possible. In a traditional math challenge, he said, only a small number of kids are engaged and the students less-inclined to push themselves in math are excluded. But for LearnStorm, Khan Academy has been reaching parents, teachers, students, school administrators and even individually home-schooled kids who aren’t associated with a school at all.
Participation varies widely from school to school, but Durand said Mountain View schools have a fairly high participation rate. Crittenden Middle School, for example, had over 50 percent of its eligible students signed up for LearnStorm as of last week.
Crittenden Principal Geoffrey Chang said he’s thrilled the school is a top participant in the city. He said Crittenden as a whole has been pushing for the growth mindset approach to learning all year, and during Back to School Night the school showed Khan Academy’s You Can Learn Anything video.
“Our staff even received T-shirts from me during the holiday season that say “I will make better mistakes tomorrow. #growthmindset,” Chang said.
The math teachers at the school had been using Khan Academy lessons, which have been been fully aligned with the new Common Core State Standards, in the classroom already, according to Lisa Hennefarth, a Crittenden math teacher. Hennefarth said the growth mindset has had a “tremendous” impact on students and helped them feel positive about their experiences working through math problems and to understand that effort is the most important part of learning math.
“We employ the importance of making mistakes and that with each mistake we make, our brain grows,” she said.
Early leaderboard results show Crittenden Middle School and Edith Landels performing the best in total mastery and hustle points in Mountain View, and Loyola Elementary School in Los Altos ranks in the top 10 schools in the Bay Area by both metrics so far.
Durand said he’s excited to see how the pilot program of LearnStorm works out in the Bay Area. He said a similar Khan Academy program called Mathletes was picked up in Ireland last year, and served as an inspiration for LearnStorm.
In Mathletes, schools competed with one another on a similar leaderboard to see which school could accrue the most points. It turns out that one of the top performing schools was not a fancy prep school in a wealthy neighborhood — it was a school outside of Dublin in a standard, working-class environment, Tynan said.
When Tynan went out to Ireland to visit the school, he got to sit down and talk to the top students at the school who went to the grand finals event for Mathletes.
“I asked them ‘so, are you the new football stars of the school?’ And they said ‘no, we’re accepted,'” he said.
Tynan said the challenge had changed the social fabric of the school. Instead of having a small subset of kids go off to do a math challenge, the whole school had been immersed in Mathletes, and were still working on their points.
“They saw their math geniuses as carrying a torch for them,” he said.
Email Kevin Forestieri at kforestieri@mv-voice.com
