Enlearn’s Spring 2014 Classroom Trials Demonstrate More Effective Teaching Plus Increased Student Problem-Solving and Mastery
Seattle, Washington (PRWEB) July 14, 2014 -- Enlearn (enlearn.org) – a not-for-profit K-12 company that is partnering with the University of Washington’s Center for Game Science (CGS) to harness real-time classroom data to automatically optimize learning for each unique student, teacher and classroom – today announced the results of its Spring 2014 classroom trials.
During the trials, each participating teacher taught one or more classes using the tablet-based version of a math curriculum powered by Enlearn’s generative, adaptive platform; the same teachers also taught classes using the curriculum in its original paper form. The primary goal of the trials was to identify and measure any effects provided by Enlearn’s platform in three areas – teacher effectiveness, student learning and student engagement.
The three central findings of the trials were:
1. The platform’s real-time data enabled teachers to assist individual students three times more frequently than occurred in the traditional paper-based classrooms. The continuous formative feedback also enabled the teachers to target their assistance to the students who needed it most at that moment, versus a more random delivery of assistance in the paper classrooms.
2. Students in the Enlearn classroom solved 4.5 times more problems on average, despite the fact that paper classroom students were demonstrably stronger in pre-tests. Some Enlearn students solved 6.5 more problems than the best performing paper classroom students.
3. Students in the Enlearn classroom had better collective scores on exercise problems (an improvement of 2.5%); and over 75% of the Enlearn classroom had a score over 90% for the five-day period.
Conducted in nine 6th grade classrooms within the Seattle School District, the trials focused on ratios and proportional relationships, one of the key domains that need to be mastered in the 6th grade Common Core State Standards.
“One of the key aspects of the Enlearn platform is that real-time data of continuous student performance is always available to the teacher, and this clearly indicates the best ways the teacher can assist the individual learners during practice problems,” explains John Mullin, CEO of Enlearn. “Our findings show a very strong impact on both the amount of teacher assistance in the classroom, as well as the more effective use of the assistance on behalf of the students that can benefit from it the most.”
Adds Zoran Popović, Founder and Chief Scientist at Enlearn, and Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Center for Game Science: “The Enlearn platform provides adaptive problem progressions that are generated and specialized for each student and are aimed at maximizing persistence. If we can achieve similar results over an entire school year to those achieved in this trial, we’re providing a fourfold increase in math practice per student per year. This is a potentially huge win for students.”
Building on Previous Results
The recent Spring 2014 trials build on previous results from Enlearn and CGS that were equally encouraging.
For example, during the Washington State “Algebra Challenge,” a one-week event that introduced algebraic concepts through a game-based, adaptive platform, students achieved an average mastery rate of 93% after only 1.5 hours of participation. Students from more than 70 schools across 15 districts joined in the challenge. Although the content was 7th grade algebra, this outcome was achieved by all participating classrooms across grades K-12, including early elementary.
In a similar algebra challenge in Minnesota, student participation was 50% higher than in Washington State, and the average mastery rate increased from 93% to just below 95%.
And, in an algebra challenge in Norway, students voluntarily used 10x more material, while over 40 percent of them did work at home without teacher prodding.
About Enlearn
Enlearn was founded as a not-for-profit corporation with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support data-driven optimization of the learning ecosystem, including optimization of student learning, teacher effectiveness and courseware efficacy.
Steven Gottlieb, Enlearn, http://www.enlearn.org, +1 (206) 427-9591, [email protected]
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