I want to introduce you to a weird grammatical trick that has really helped us orient ourselves properly when designing for students. Ready? We don’t “teach students a skill”: we help students build a skill. We don’t “explain to students”: we offer explanations. We don’t “build student understanding”: we support…

Our most interesting and pressing problems require people to apply their understandings creatively in unfamiliar contexts. Maybe we have some sense of what it means to “master” a specific skill — like “classifying triangles by type.” …

Though everyone seems to draw it slightly differently, the coarse shape of this diagram shows up ubiquitously when designers describe their process (including us!): This squiggle beautifully captures the nonlinear shift from early messiness to later neatness, but—almost with a wink—it willfully obscures what’s happening during those up-and-down loops. …

How might we empower learners to think critically and creatively via open-ended activities like writing and drawing online? The Early Product Development group worked with teachers across the country to explore possible solutions. Read on at our full report!

We’re exploring a student-driven engine for supporting open-ended problem solving. This is the theme underlying many variations: The third step is particularly tricky because, as we all know, people are awful on the internet. Even without anonymity, bullying is a problem in schools. If we’re only asking students to grade…

We’d just invited a few thousand students to try our latest experiment in online open-ended response activities — a controlled trial with pre- and post-test questions focused on concept transfer. We started reviewing their work, but the data from the control group stopped us in our tracks. …

We’re excited to share a user research method that helped us bridge the gap between wide-ranging behavioral interviews and detailed validation of specific value propositions. …