Improvement Research Carried Out Through Networked Communities: Accelerating Learning About Practices That Support More Productive Student Mind-Sets

• In Event: Measuring Motivational Processes and Other Noncognitive Factors: Challenges and Advances in Connecting Research to Practice

Abstract

The research on academic mindsets shows significant promise for addressing important problems facing educators. However, the history of educational reform is replete with good ideas for improvement that fail to realize the promises that accompany their introduction. As a field, we are quick to implement new ideas but slow to learn how to execute well on them. If we continue to implement reform as we always have, we will continue to get what we have always gotten. Accelerating the field’s capacity to learn in and through practice to improve is one key to transforming the good ideas in the field into tools, interventions, and professional development initiatives that achieve effectiveness reliably at scale.

Toward this end, this theoretical paper discusses the function of networked communities engaged in improvement research and illustrates the application of these ideas in promoting greater student success in community colleges. Specifically, this paper:
• Introduces improvement research and networked communities as ideas that we believe will be helpful for the educators to learn in and through practice.
• Explains why improvement research requires a different kind of measure—what we call practical measures—that are distinct from the measures commonly used by schools for accountability or by researchers for theory development.
• Illustrates through a case study how improvement work to promote academic mindsets can be done based on the Carnegie Foundation’s effort to address the success rates of students taking developmental math at community colleges. Specifically, this case study outlines:

o How a practical theory and set of practical measures were created to assess the causes of “productive persistence”—the set of “non-cognitive factors” thought to powerfully affect community college student success. In doing this work, a broad set of potential factors was distilled into a digestible framework that was useful to practitioners working with researchers, and a large set of potential measures was reduced to a practical (3-minute) set of assessments.
o How these measures were used by researchers and practitioners for practical purposes—specifically, to assess changes, predict which students were at-risk for course failure, and set priorities for improvement work.
o How we organized researchers to work with practitioners to accelerate field-based experimentation on everyday practices that promote academic mindsets, and how we organized practitioners to work with researchers to put their everyday practices to the test (using plan-do-study-act cycles) so as to accelerate the expansion of a list of effective practices to affect academic mindsets.

While significant progress has been made, the use of improvement research to address student outcomes by improving academic mindsets is just beginning. We hope the ideas presented here are an instructive starting point for new efforts that might attempt to address other problems facing educators, most notably issues of inequality and underperformance in K-12 settings.

Authors

• David Scott Yeager, Stanford University

• Anthony S. Bryk, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching