Our Ideas

Rethinking How We Understand Learning

For generations, schools have leaned on tests and grades to tell us what students know. Those measures have their place, but they’re snapshots. Learning develops over time, and it shows up in a student’s questions, mistakes, and revisions, and in their growing ability to use what they know in new situations.

At The SchoolWorks Lab, we’re asking a different question:

What if we could understand learning by studying the evidence it leaves behind as it develops?

A new test won’t answer that. We have to rethink what we mean by intelligence and evidence, how much weight we give teachers’ professional judgment, what role technology should play, and how teaching and learning relate to each other.

Five Ideas. One Research Program.

Our work starts with the idea that intelligence develops, and it leads to a practical way for teachers to recognize and respond to learning as it happens.

Living Intelligence

Intelligence develops.

We start with this idea: intelligence isn’t just something a person has. It develops.

Human beings continually reorganize what they know as they encounter new experiences, recognize patterns, make connections, test ideas, and revise their understanding.

We call this Living Intelligence.

It shifts the central question from:

“How intelligent is this student?”

to:

“How is this student’s intelligence developing?”

VIA

Understanding development through multiple dimensions.

If intelligence develops, we need ways of describing that development.

VIA (Versatile Intelligence and Assessment) is our framework for looking at learning as a process that develops in many dimensions, not as a single score.

It asks us to look for changes in how learners recognize patterns, organize ideas, make connections, solve problems, transfer understanding, and reflect on their own thinking.

VIA provides the conceptual bridge between the philosophy of Living Intelligence and the evidence educators encounter every day.

Learning Evidence

Looking for evidence of learning as it develops over time.

If learning develops, what evidence tells us that development is actually occurring?

A test result is one form of evidence. But so are student explanations, written work, conversations, observations, projects, revisions, demonstrations, questions, and changes in thinking over time.

Our research investigates how these different forms of learning evidence can be collected and interpreted longitudinally.

The goal is not simply to collect more data.

The goal is to identify the evidence that matters.

Professional Judgment

Helping educators make trustworthy meaning from evidence.

Evidence does not interpret itself.

Teachers continually observe students, notice changes, compare evidence, form hypotheses, make instructional decisions, and revise those decisions as new information becomes available.

This professional judgment is one of education’s most important—and least systematically supported—forms of intelligence.

SchoolWorks is investigating how multiple sources of evidence can help educators make more trustworthy inferences about developing understanding.

Instead of asking only:

“What score did the student receive?”

we can help teachers ask:

“What does the evidence suggest is happening in this learner’s understanding—and what should I do next?”

Pathfinder

Making patterns in learning evidence visible.

Pathfinder is where these ideas become a research instrument.

It is being developed to help organize evidence collected across time, identify patterns in student learning, and make those patterns more visible to educators.

Pathfinder does not replace teacher judgment.

It is designed to strengthen it.

By helping teachers organize and interpret evidence that is often scattered across assignments, observations, assessments, digital tools, and student work, Pathfinder allows us to investigate whether a richer picture of learning can lead to better instructional decisions.

From Ideas to Evidence

These ideas form a connected research cycle:

Better evidence leads to better questions—and better questions lead to better teaching.

The Question Behind Our Work

How do we know when learning is happening?

A new test won’t answer it. We have to rethink intelligence, evidence, professional judgment, technology, and how teaching and learning relate to each other.

That’s the work we’ve taken on.