The Knewton Blog

A thorough and nuanced understanding of educational content is central to the Knewton approach to adaptive learning. Every time we generate a recommendation for a student in a Knewton-enhanced course, we rely not only on data about that student’s activity, but also on a comprehensive understanding of the conceptual relationships that exist among the various pieces of content within the course. The Knewton Adaptive Instruction Team works closely with subject-matter experts at our partner companies… Read more

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I’d like to paint a scenario that reflects a common occurrence in classrooms nationwide. A student in an introductory algebra class — we’ll call him Stu — receives a score of 63%, a D, on his quiz from chapter 13 on adding and subtracting polynomials. The teacher — let’s call her Mrs. T — has several decades of experience under her belt and knows that if Stu simply moves on to the next topic without… Read more

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Check out the latest post on the Knewton tech blog, written by one of our star summer interns, Harvard student Joy Zheng. Here’s a sneak peek: THE PROBLEM How do you quickly visualize and validate data in a large-scale, distributed, and real-time system? How do you make it deployable in multiple cloud environments? And how do you track changes to this data over time? These are questions that I set out to answer in my… Read more

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The following experience is common to most teachers: a meticulously planned class activity succeeds in capturing student interest for a few minutes, but attention evaporates quickly and afterward no one can remember the point of the lesson. Despite the flashy visualizations, the expensive 3-D models, the age-appropriate allusions (references to Justin Bieber and Lindsay Lohan), the clever asides, and sensational content, the material failed to stick. What went wrong? According to Daniel Willingham, cognitive scientist… Read more

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Whether or not you’ve heard the term “mastery-based learning,” you’ve probably encountered it in practice, in school or on the job. In any situation where you’re given a set of labs, problems, or activities where your progression is dependent on successful completion of various tasks rather than seat time, you’re engaging in mastery-based learning–a teaching method premised on the idea that student progression through a course should be dependent on proficiency as opposed to amount… Read more

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A version of this article originally appeared on Getting Smart (http://www.gettingsmart.com). Self-perception, social expectations, and previous experiences shape our academic ability more than we realize. Just think: how many times does your belief that you are gifted at something combine with positive external validation to help you overcome challenges in that area, increase your confidence, and lead you to explore that area more thoroughly and take more risks than others might? Similar dynamics apply to… Read more

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Miss Part 1, 2 or 3 of the series? Check it out here. I recently read Daniel T. Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. As I was reading Willingham’s investigation, I noticed that most of the real reasons Willingham argues that students don’t like school can be eliminated or reduced through continuous adaptive learning technology. In my first… Read more

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Miss Part I or Part II of the series? Check it out here. I recently read Daniel T. Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. As I was reading Willingham’s investigation, I noticed that most of the real reasons Willingham argues that students don’t like school can be eliminated or reduced through continuous adaptive learning technology. In my first… Read more

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Miss Part I of the series? Check it out here. I recently read Daniel T. Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. As I was reading Willingham’s investigation, I noticed that most of the real reasons Willingham argues that students don’t like school can be eliminated or reduced through continuous adaptive learning technology. In my first post of this… Read more

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In our sixth and final installment of our Adaptive Learning Roundtable discussion, Len Swanson, the former Executive Director of ETS and the designer of Knewton’s testing algorithm, shares some insight into integrating technology into schools. Did you miss the other videos? Check them out here.

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