Our Ideas

Rethinking How We Understand Learning

For generations, education has relied heavily on tests, grades, and other snapshots of performance to tell us what students know.

These measures can be useful. But they capture only part of the story.

Learning develops over time. It can appear in a student’s questions, explanations, mistakes, revisions, connections, strategies, creations, conversations, and growing ability to use knowledge in new situations.

At The SchoolWorks Lab, we are investigating a different question:

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

Answering it requires more than a new assessment. It requires us to reconsider intelligence, evidence, professional judgment, technology, and the relationship between teaching and learning.

That is the work of The SchoolWorks Lab.

Five Ideas. One Research Program.

Our work begins with a conception of intelligence as developmental and leads toward a practical way for educators to recognize and respond to learning while it is happening.

Living Intelligence

Intelligence develops.

We begin with a simple proposition: intelligence is not merely something a person has. It is something that 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 is our theoretical framework for examining learning as a dynamic, multidimensional process rather than reducing it to a single measure.

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?

Answering it requires more than a new assessment.

It requires us to reconsider intelligence, evidence, professional judgment, technology, and the relationship between teaching and learning.

That is the work of The SchoolWorks Lab.