SCIL research measures the impact of innovation in learning among local elementary school children

On a sunny spring day the playground at Hawes Elementary School in Redwood City looks like any other traditional public school. But the quiet neighborhood campus is part of a unique partnership with the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning, which is studying how innovation in teaching math concepts to fourth graders may profoundly improve their academic skills.

Guided by School of Education Professor Dan Schwartz, the 9 and 10 year-olds participating in the ongoing study work in small groups to master basic math concepts crucial to problem solving. Graduate students and the regular fourth grade teacher, Gail Debellis, help out as the lesson evolves.

Under the auspices of the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning, Schwartz’s lab, called the CAT2 Lab (short for Cognition and Technology) examines various teaching and learning models in an effort to cull those that most improve students’ cognition. For these enthusiastic fourth graders, the experiments, funded by the National Science Foundation through a two-year grant, are both fun and valuable.

“This year we are exploring how to propel children’s cognitive development and abilities to continue learning,” says Schwartz. “Our particular focus is to help them learn to understand recursive grouping, which is the core of the base-10 system. We believe that a deep understanding of this concept will help them learn how to do a number of standard tasks like estimating, solving multi-digit problems and representing decimals.”

While much of the CAT2 Lab’s research has centered on developing and testing innovative educational software, this year’s project is distinctly non high tech, at least for now. What is learned from the experiments, however, may find its way into software in the future.

For now, Schwartz stands at an old fashioned overhead projector to present his lesson on grouping. He is comparing two methods of instruction, which will eventually help to inform best practices for teaching.

In one group, students are exposed to the “innovation method,” which asks them to invent their own ways to solve problems. After they work and share their ideas, they are taught a conventional approach. The goal, Schwartz points out, is not to have the children find a solution in the first step, but rather to prepare them to learn the standard solution.

“One question is whether children of this age can innovate solutions to problems that depend on finding new approaches,” he says.

The second group of children is taught by what has, up until now, been considered the efficient means – they are assigned the same problem but do not work to invent their own solutions. Instead they are told from the beginning how to solve the problems and then practice this approach.

Researchers are measuring what the children learn with several methods. One measure is to see whether they learn the efficient solution and are able to apply it to similar problems. Schwartz hypothesizes that both groups will be able to do this equally well. This is important, he says, because it shows that innovative activities can lead to good gains on standard assessments.

How well the children learn new ideas on a test is also under scrutiny.

“We expect that the “innovation” students will do better on these assessments,” says Schwartz. “We are also including measures of children’s abilities to innovate given a new situation. Again, we expect the innovation students to do better.’

In the end, Schwartz predicts, combining innovation activities with lectures on standard solutions will give children the best result and will prepare them to learn new ideas more readily, in addition to increasing their abilities at innovating solutions on their own.