A key project of the Center for Effective Learning (C4EL) at New Roads School is The Learning Tool. The Learning Tool software has been developed over the past fifteen years as a means of effecting paradigm shifts in the way students, teachers, and parents think about and assess “learning”. In active use at New Roads over the past six years, the Learning Tool is now being made available as open-source programming to schools and educational entities nationwide.

Key Goals of the Learning Tool include:

Attribution

Providing proper feedback in the learning process so that students attribute “success” to hard work and diligence rather than to genetics and luck

Meta-Cognition

Improving each student’s ability to look at and evaluate his/her own learning process, including recognizing distracting stimuli, planning effective approaches to learning, monitoring comprehension and lapses in comprehension, evaluating progress towards task completion, maintaining motivation, etc. Research indicates that meta-cognition is a critical component of learning and should be demonstrated by both students and teachers.

Knowledge Transfer

Enabling students to “generalize” and transfer knowledge across settings and experiences. The Learning Tool maintains a collection of student work from concurrent classes and from prior years so that this work can be referred to and incorporated into novel settings.

Formative Assessment

Makes assessment of student work an essential and ongoing part of the learning process rather than an afterthought. Too often, assessment is a culminating activity (“summative assessment”) that leaves little room for students to refine, develop and improve their understanding of key concepts. Formative assessment provides rapid and continuing feedback so that missteps can be corrected before they become habit. It has been shown to be by far the most effective method of evaluating “learning”.

Distributed Instruction

Allows students within each class to work at different levels and on different tasks, commensurate with their abilities and needs. Use of the Learning Tool facilitates this kind of individualized instruction without placing unmanageable burdens on teachers’ time and attention in the classroom.