Two Yidan Prize laureates, Professor Michelene (Micki) Chi and Professor Carol Dweck, have explored this question from their different perspectives for a combined total of over half a century. Both have expertise rooted in developmental psychology, but Micki is a cognitive psychologist while Carol studies motivational factors that affect learning, a topic she explored in her book Mindset. These complementary contributions make them an excellent pairing — so how could we integrate both their approaches for an even greater impact in the future?

With ICAP, Micki Chi reveals a key to engaged and deeper learning

While many classrooms make students into passive learners, Micki’s research shows how instructors can boost students’ STEM performance by improving how students engage in active learning.

Micki’s powerful ICAP framework defines students’ behavioral engagement with instructional content along a continuum. ICAP stands for Interactive, Constructive, Active, and Passive. Passive learning mode is attentive, but students don’t manipulate learning content as they do in active learning. Beyond that are learning modes in which students go deeper: in constructive mode, they generate knowledge beyond the content they’re given, and in interactive mode, they collaborate with each other as they perform the learning tasks. Students are more engaged in these learning modes, and the interactive mode uncovers potentially the most active and effective ways to learn.

Hundreds of lab studies support predictions about learning differences between the different modes of engagement. They weren’t designed to test ICAP’s predictions, but the results are completely consistent with ICAP’s predictions.

Teachers can use ICAP to both switch modes and assess engagement

ICAP’s four engagement modes can be used to classify instructional activities, including how teachers raise a question, use educational technology tools, set homework, and carry out assessments. Small changes can make a big difference, for example, changing a passive homework assignment to a constructive activity by inserting pauses in an online video lecture and prompting students to ask questions.

ICAP can also be used to determine if students are actually working in the deeper learning modes. If two students are talking about a subject, one might just be in active mode: repeating or summarizing their partner’s comments. For the conversation to be interactive, both students should be speaking in a constructive mode, expanding or elaborating beyond what their partner said.

Carol Dweck’s work shows that a growth mindset can be infused into classrooms to create a culture of learning.

In their earlier research, Carol and her colleagues showed that when students are taught a growth mindset — the belief that intellectual abilities are not fixed but can be developed — their overall academic performance can be enhanced, and they are more likely to choose advanced math courses. But it can’t stop there. Their research with high school students also showed that when students return to a math classroom that doesn’t support their growth mindset, they don’t show its benefits.

For this reason, Carol and colleagues began to research ways to help math teachers create a growth mindset “culture of learning” in their classrooms. In these new programs, teachers are shown how to convey, through their words and actions, the idea that every student is valued, can do well, and has the teacher’s full support —  regardless of their past performance. Before and after each exam, teachers also emphasize that a test need not predict a student’s long-term ability. It simply reflects their knowledge at that moment and offers a basis for the teacher to best support the student’s future learning.

These studies are ongoing, but the results to date with hundreds of teachers and thousands of students are encouraging. In these classes, students from underrepresented or under-resourced groups earned higher math grades and felt respected and supported by their teachers, compared to students in the control groups. The teachers, in turn, were substantially less likely to report feelings of burnout. That is, they were far less likely to feel inclined to stop teaching math or to leave the teaching profession entirely.

These programs have, so far, been developed and tested in the US, but Carol and her colleagues look forward to working with educators around the world to adapt them and test them in their local cultures.

Cognition and motivation always work together to create successful learning

These are important advances in our understanding of the educational environments that foster optimal learning and how to create them. Although much more remains to be discovered, it’s an exciting prospect to create the classrooms of the future: classrooms in which we foster both students’ cognition and their motivation using cutting-edge research.

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Professor Jill Koyama
Vice Dean, Division for Advancing Education Policy, Practice, and Leadership; Professor, Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation, Arizona State University