Cignition delivers high-impact K-12 virtual tutoring, led by experienced educators who produce proven, repeatable results in student success. Tutors complete internal assessments, broken down by grade level, to validate their qualifications. Using classroom data, students are initially matched for tutoring. Teachers and tutors then utilize data from mastery progress, surveys, and online activities to continuously track and enhance student progress within the established groups.
Cignition’s research-based approach focuses on data-informed instruction and collaborative learning, encouraging student-to-student interaction to build deep conceptual understanding. Instead of the traditional model of learning through repetition, Cignition tutors focus on the conceptual goals of each topic. Teachers tell Cignition they can see the change in their students’ engagement and participation after receiving tutoring.
Making dashboards and tools available to help tutors understand each student’s most immediate needs also contributes to the success of the thousands of virtual tutoring sessions delivered by Cignition. Research on Cignition’s learning model, backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates and Overdeck Family Foundations, shows an effect size indicating dramatic student growth. The amount of growth shown in the study suggests that students complementing their learning with a year of Cignition tutoring would advance by up to two years’ learning gain with their robust intervention model.
In addition to the collaborative learning model, Cignition is committed to connecting students with certified educators who have experience crafting personalized learning experiences. Keeping instruction inquiry-focused empowers students to build academic confidence and critical 21st-century skills.
For these reasons and more, Cignition was named “Best Collaborative Learning Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more.
A comprehensive K-12 Project-Based Learning (PBL) solution serving over 120,000 teachers in over 7,500 schools nationwide, Defined Learning engages students in high-quality projects that are based on careers to deepen understanding, enhance engagement, and build necessary future-ready skills.
The platform provides teachers with the essential curriculum and assessment tools they need to engage students in PBL, including a library of standards-aligned projects, career-focused videos, research resources, editable rubrics, and more. Defined Learning’s interdisciplinary projects are based on careers and provide opportunities for students to apply their knowledge and skills to real-world challenges. It excites students about their future and empower them to build the critical future-ready skills they need to succeed in college, careers, and life.
It is the mission of the company to drive student engagement and achievement through real-world PBL. Through career exploration and experiences coupled with hands-on, real-world PBL, they want to ensure that all students have visibility into the limitless world of opportunities ahead of them. Their content leads to enhanced student skills such as: 21st Century & Workplace Skills, College & Career Readiness, Social Emotional Learning & Standards Mastery.
Research by Mida Learning Technologies showed that after utilizing PBL through Defined Learning for one year, teachers saw improvements in students’ engagement and motivation. In addition, students who used Defined Learning outperformed their peers in critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
Defined Learning gives educators all they need to facilitate deeper, career-connected learning through high-quality PBL instruction that engages students and empowers them to build future-ready skills. For these reasons and more, Defined Learning is a Cool Tool Award Winner for “Best Skills Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more.
YouScience® Aptitude & Career Discovery, the pillar product within YouScience Brightpath solution, helps students discover their natural aptitudes, connecting them to highly personal and relevant pathways for success. Students who understand their aptitudes are empowered. They find relevance and a meaningful direction in school and beyond. YouScience Aptitude & Career Discovery is the only personalized aptitude-based college and career guidance solution available on the market today.
Students complete a series of brain games to discover their aptitudes, interests, and matching best-fit careers. Often uncovering careers they never knew of or thought possible for themselves. It’s not magic. It’s 50 years of scientific proof and proprietary algorithms that unlock career success.
YouScience Aptitude & Career Discovery enables:
Improved student engagement: knowing aptitudes makes the connection between education, career, and life relevant. Student empowerment: equalize the playing field to support and improve diversity, equity, and inclusion. Personalized guidance: help each student discover the best-fit pathway that’s as unique as they are with more than 87 billion possible Aptitude & Career Discovery aptitude results. Problem solving: use results and the features in Aptitude & Career Discovery to support student engagement, work-based learning, connections with employers, and community-building.
After completing the assessment, students’ results are aligned with more than 600 real-world, in-demand career opportunities from ONET OnLine. They also have access to a personalized ‘describing me’ section based on their aptitudes and interests, social and emotional learning reflection statements, and a resume builder to translate their skills into actionable steps to achieve their goals. YouScience Aptitude & Career Discovery is a Cool Tool Winner for “Best Personalized Learning Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more.
Something crucial was missing from classrooms over the past school year: millions of students who were part of the chronic absenteeism crisis that plagued districts large and small.
Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.
Could better communication between schools and parents alleviate the problem?
That’s the theory one nonprofit has. It partnered with Google for a massive, AI-powered analysis of 40 million messages in its app to find how parents and teachers are exchanging information.
The organization, called TalkingPoints, is betting that helping parents — especially those who are immigrants or are low-income — feel engaged with schools will increase both attendance and students’ academic performance.
Through its new analysis, TalkingPoints set out to find what educators and parents were most commonly talking about via messaging and the tone of those conversations. The messages analyzed were sent through the TalkingPoints app by administrators, teachers and parents over 15 months.
The results found that 44 percent of the messages were around logistics — things like school closures on snow days, says Heejae Lim, TalkingPoints founder and CEO. The next largest class of messages was what the report calls standard replies — responses like “thank you” or “have a good day” — at 34 percent.
Only 8 percent of messages were about academics, followed by homework at 5 percent.
To Lim, that means there’s a lot of room for improvement in how educators and parents are communicating. In an ideal world, she explains, most of those electronic conversations would center on learning.
“We know that research shows that there needs to be more conversations about student learning, behaviors, engagement,” Lim says. “All the other higher-quality conversation topics that we think should happen comes back to: there might be a lot of quantity [of] the conversations. But are they quality conversations? Not necessarily.”
Part of why Lim wants to change how educators and parents talk to each other is because TalkingPoints is turning its attention to how communication can potentially lower chronic absenteeism. The app’s use for that purpose is being piloted in 29 districts with a collective 89,000 students.
The hope is this creates a digital trail of an absent student so that the principal or other specialists can figure out the root cause for why they’re missing.
“We see ourselves as being in this really critical moment, where education inequities are rising,” says Laila Brenner, TalkingPoints’ head of philanthropy. “We have chronic absenteeism, we have decades of learning loss, and then we have this wave of advances in technology and AI that are giving us the potential to really scale, personalize and customize communications in a way that was never possible before. So how do we bring these two things together and really drive the impact?”
Past research that TalkingPoints undertook on its app use in a large urban school suggests that the approach can work, Lim says.
And other research has pointed to the importance of improving parent-teacher communication. For instance, a report from the Carnegie Corporation called engaging with immigrant families essential to students’ academic success.
“Given that students spend far more time at home and in the community than they do at school, building strong connections between diverse families and educators is essential to supporting student learning, especially as immigrants and children of immigrants are some of the fastest-growing populations in the country,” the report says.
What Does ‘Best Practices’ Mean?
One of TalkingPoints’ guiding principles is that opening up the lines of communication with parents — and what Lim calls “high-quality” communication that focuses on academics — ultimately benefits students. Those conversations should be centered on learning, generally keep a positive tone and start early in the year.
According to the analysis, only 31 percent of messages sent by educators and parents of secondary school students met those guidelines. At the elementary level, it was 19 percent.
The roots of the nonprofit were seeded when Lim was growing up in a London suburb, where her Korean immigrant mother worked hard to overcome the language barrier to ask teachers what she could do to support her daughter’s education. Other Korean parents who were likewise eager to help their children do well in class flocked to Lim’s mother to ask what teachers had said.
“My mom became like a parent spokesperson, interpreter, kind of a communications person for the school’s Korean parents, and that I think it really impacted my academic career trajectory and my sisters’ at the time,” Lim says.
It left an impression on Lim, how those parents separated from the school by language still sought ways to be involved.
“Later, I found out that family engagement truly has so much potential to drive and impact student outcomes — there's a ton of academic research that shows this,” Lim explains. “But the blueprint of how to do that well, in terms of best practices, doesn't quite exist, and families and schools face a lot of barriers in engaging and building relationships with each other in ways that can really support the student.”
In some cases, teachers may feel nervous or avoid interactions with parents, worried that it could be too time-consuming or contentious, Crystal Frommert, a middle school math teacher who wrote a book on the topic, told EdSurge in a podcast interview earlier this year.
Meet eGlass Station, a wireless lightboard podium that allows teachers to face their students while the write, from anywhere in the room. eGlass is an illuminated transparent writing board with an attached specially-designed camera, which captures a teacher’s face and writing in the same window. The camera image is then flipped and projected onto a classroom display, allowing every student to see the lesson content along with their teacher’s glowing ink writing, facial expressions, gaze, and gestures. eGlass simulates eye-to-eye contact with each and every student, drawing them into the lesson and significantly boosting engagement. This one-to-one connection creates a social-emotional partnership between instructors and their students. With eGlass, teachers never have to turn their backs to write on the board again, and can see their students reactions and gauge their understanding—making classroom management a breeze.
The included eGlass software incorporates advanced A.I. that allows teachers to drag and drop any digital teaching content (including 3D objects, images, documents, webpages, etc) directly into the eGlass camera window, automatically removing the background so the teacher can annotate on the digital content with glowing ink. The entire lesson can be captured with eGlass’s built-in recording, and it works with most video conferencing software for hybrid learning scenarios.
The new eGlass Station supports the lightboard with a battery-powered, height-adjustable sit/stand podium, along with other convenient features like 360º locking swivel wheels, a laptop stand, keyboard tray, and optional WiFi-free gigabit wireless HDMI casting.
Teachers can use eGlassStation to boost student engagement through embodied teaching. For these reasons and more, eGlassStation Portable Lightboard Teaching Station is a Cool Tool Award Winner for “Best Hardware for Education Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more.
Is the same pattern of absenteeism playing out at colleges, too? If so, what’s driving the trend? And what can professors and higher ed leaders do about it?
To find out, EdSurge interviewed Terri Hasseler, a professor in the Department of History, Literature, and the Arts at Bryant University in Rhode Island. She’s also director of the Center for Teaching Excellence there, which provides faculty with support for instruction, edtech, course design, classroom management and grading.
That vantage point gives her insight about what’s keeping students from feeling fully invested in showing up for class ready to truly participate in the learning process. She believes contributing factors may include a lack of ‘academic stamina’ among today’s students, changing parenting practices and inadequate explanations from faculty about why showing up actually matters.
The following interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
EdSurge: Why is student disengagement or absenteeism something that you’re thinking about?
Terri Hasseler: One of the things that I spend a lot of time with faculty on is things that they're seeing in the classroom. And over the last year, as we see things that are happening nationally in other institutions as well, we're seeing higher levels of absenteeism [and] greater elements of disruption and distraction in the classroom that are manifesting in all sorts of different ways. And in my position, I've been working with faculty to find ways to navigate those problems.
Is absenteeism a problem in college as well as at the K-12 level?
In terms of measuring absenteeism in college or university settings, it's harder because most schools don't have university-wide policies on absences. Some schools do, but a lot of schools generally leave absence management up to individual instructors. And so, much of the information that we find about whether people are engaging in classes … is primarily anecdotal — though I will say we hear this pretty broadly across the United States, but in my own institution as well, we hear that students are absent from class.
And then when we talk about absence or distraction — and I would argue that distraction and disengagement is still very much an issue, and we can talk a little bit about why that may continue to be the case post-pandemic — but distraction, absenteeism manifests itself perhaps differently.
So a student may not come to class or a student may come to class and then walk out of class five minutes into class and then be gone for 20 minutes and return sometime within the midst of that. They may disengage by being physically in the classroom, but on their phones or their laptops feigning attention, feigning participation in class, but they're really in their Amazon cart or they're in their email or they're someplace else.
They may disengage by being physically in the classroom, but on their phones or their laptops feigning attention, feigning participation in class, but they're really in their Amazon cart or they're in their email or they're someplace else.
— Terri Hasseler
So this kind of absenteeism may not be just not being physically there. It might be also the disengagement we're talking about, of not being mentally or emotionally available or present in the classroom.
Do you find that professors take attendance? Do they count that as part of a grade or is it more like if you choose not to show up, you're not going to learn?
It depends. I think some professors have very clear absence policies. I have an absence policy in my class. Though I think many people's absence policies are more lenient of late because of what the pandemic did for thoughts about health and well-being in the classroom. We don't want students in the classroom when they're not physically well. We don't want them getting other students unwell or getting us unwell. So the definition of being in the classroom, or the leniency of coming into the classroom because of health, has I think changed a lot. The pandemic did a lot in that way — in some ways in a good way — because I think people dragged themselves to places they didn't belong because they were unwell. And now we have more humane guidelines around that.
To your point though, more broadly, I think one of the issues is that we can no longer assume that it's a shared belief structure that we all think being in the classroom is the thing to do post-pandemic.
I mean, from the pandemic we've learned, ‘Oh, I can get lecture notes, I can get slides, I can get a video of the classroom, I can get all of the content that I need outside of the classroom, so why do I go to class?’ And a lot of that material that you can get outside of the class is really important for lots of reasons. It's good to support learning, it's important for accessibility, it's important to address accommodations for students. So that stuff is really important.
But faculty have to do a much better job of articulating why do you show up in the classroom now? What is the reason that you come to the classroom?
And for me as an educator, I always really subscribe to Paolo Freire's thoughts on the idea that you build knowledge together in the classroom with students. And the idea that 50 percent of the knowledge, 50 percent of the content enters the classroom when the students enter the classroom.
Students may not necessarily see it that way. It has to be articulated to them. They have to learn that a lot of the learning happens in context. A lot of the learning happens in relation to peers, the exchange of ideas, the importance of practicing ideas in a classroom and trying them on with your peers, with your instructor, the immediate access to the instructor that you get in the classroom and hearing ideas articulated in new ways that may be different from the external materials that you might get [from] the lecture slides or the PowerPoints. You can hear those articulated in different ways in the classroom. The iterative process of learning; the fact that you can't just read one thing once and know it, you have to go through it over and over again.
And I think some other things that we need to be better at communicating with students are the intangibles. Just showing up somewhere, practicing being present, practicing being on time, establishing a sense of responsibility to your peers that you are there being with other people.
Can you say more about that?
So I asked my students. I was thinking a lot about this kind of work and related to the question of how does physical absence affect other students in the classroom? If your classmate doesn't show up, how does that affect you?
And some of the things that I was thinking about and observing and seeing in my work and having a lot of faculty talk with me about this too, is that if students are distracted or physically present but not mentally present — they're on their laptop, for instance, and they're shopping in Amazon and you're sitting next to them as a student and you see this other student is clearly not there — that's very distracting. It's hard to focus if the person next to you is distracted, it distracts you. And it takes a while to get yourself back into the conversation. And there may be feelings about that, like ‘this is unfair, and why do I have to be there?’
And there's also a permissiveness about that. If it happens, it gives other students permission to think, ‘Well, maybe I should be on my Amazon account,’ or ‘I should be shopping.’
And I asked my students about that just recently. What do you think about students who don't show up? And it was really interesting because they got into a conversation about it, and they're very aware that others are not there, and they're very aware that some students who show up aren't there either.
And they immediately wanted to write those students off. They were frustrated with them, they wanted nothing to do with them. Some of the phrases were, ‘I'm glad when they don't come because they don't participate, and they just make it worse.’
And as I reflected on that, I thought it was sort of an interesting reaction because it seems to me it's almost a sense of betrayal, that their classmates have betrayed them in the learning environment. And if you're going to betray me, I don't want you here, just go away.
So students recognize this social contract — of the importance of being in space and learning together. But they're still trying to learn to articulate why it's important. And I think that's why faculty need to be better at articulating: You come to class for these reasons. This is why we spend time together in a room.
For students who don’t show up or who don’t engage, do their grades suffer?
My previous position was as an associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, and I will say that our DFW numbers [the percentage of students in a course who get a D or F grade or who withdraw] do increase across areas where students aren't engaging. But I can't put exact numbers on that.
Logically it follows that if you don't come, you're more likely to fail. You're more likely to not do well. You fail to establish your relationship with your instructor that could be your support system. If you're not doing well in the classroom, you lose access to the information that would prepare you.
Presumably higher education is voluntary. You've signed up to go to college. You've paid money to be there. You think there might be an economic prompt, if nothing else, to maximize this experience, but it sounds like that's not the case for everybody?
You would think. Certainly my background, where I came from, a lower-economic, rural farming community, I thought about the money that was invested and involved in the process of going to college. And I think our students do too. I mean, I think they're very aware of the economic reality. They see the student loans and the financial obligation of all of this.
And at the same time, we have students who are still disengaged.
Now, whether this is also something that can be tracked socioeconomically, I think that's an important question to ask.
Is disengagement a product of privilege? Possibly.
People who have more access to wealth, more opportunity to fail because financial support structures are there to help them if they fail, they may be more disengaged because of the product of that privilege. I have no evidence to support that, but it's certainly a reasonable question to ask.
Parenting practices have changed across time, too. … We've talked about helicopter parents for a long time. Now we're in that phase of talking about snowplow parents, too — parents who remove all obstacles for students. And we're talking about that in my own Center for Teaching Excellence right now. We talk about that within the framework of the problem of kindness. How do you build a kind environment but don't interpret kindness as doing the work for them — doing the snowplow that removes all the obstacles — and still keep the necessary stress and discomfort of learning in place in ways that are supportive for students to manage that stress and discomfort? And I think that there's some arguments out there that because there's been so much work to remove some of those obstacles for students, they're less equipped to manage them.
A colleague in the CTE that I work with, Mary Boehmer, she uses the phrase ‘academic stamina.’ They haven't built the academic stamina because of the pandemic, because of, perhaps, parenting structures that move obstacles out of the way of students. And so we've done a disservice to students in not giving them the opportunity to fail. … And I think schools see that at this time of year especially, they really start losing that ability to get themselves through to the end.
Is there also an uptick in people not doing their academic work, not turning in assignments and expecting infinite extensions?
That could be a product of that sort of snowplow conversation we just had. And also the necessary part of teaching during the pandemic, which is giving people multiple opportunities, making space for them to do it at their own pace because who knows what trauma they're dealing with in their family or in their home, and trying to build a space that gives them the time to do what they need to do.
And I would add that, we talk about being outside of the pandemic, but we're not outside of this heightened state of unrest, right? We are dealing with declining enrollments, the precarity of the world, the sense of people questioning the utility of education. So it may be that we're outside of the more formal frameworks of the pandemic, but we're still in discomforting times, and that's a part of the angst that students are in and that faculty are in, and people who work in academic settings are a part of the world, and they're experiencing that too.
So there is definitely noticeable anecdotal evidence to suggest that students are not coming to turn work in.
One of the things we noted in the fall is that we saw students coming back, they were more engaged, they were really excited. We thought, ‘OK, maybe we've turned the tide.’ Students were participating in much more events on campus, so we saw an increase in activity.
But then as the semester went along, that academic stamina issue arose. Less papers coming in. Students not following up. They would disappear. So there was sort of this performance of engagement that diminished as the semester went along because the stamina wasn't there to keep it.
Is Student Absenteeism a Growing Problem at Colleges, Too?
Throughout this academic year, I facilitated a training session on social-emotional learning (SEL) strategies for educators at a high-needs elementary school. During one of the sessions, a seasoned teacher's candid remarks struck a chord. He explicitly stated, “I know that that is what the book says we should do, but these kids are from Brownsville. We tried that, and it hasn’t worked.”
At that moment, it dawned on me that traditional SEL approaches might not suffice for students entrenched in adversity, necessitating a more nuanced and culturally sensitive framework to effectively meet their emotional needs.
When I looked for research on the effectiveness of SEL in impoverished neighborhoods serving Black and Latino students, I found limited data. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there is a growing demand for support among black and brown students in these communities, leading to an increase in programs and professional development opportunities for staff. However, these efforts have not effectively addressed the underlying issues.
Despite the availability of professional development opportunities, many programs seem disconnected from the realities faced by Black and Latino students, perpetuating the existing challenges. As a result, the problem persists, and the need for targeted, impactful programs and services remains unmet.
As a Black social work supervisor who has navigated the educational system — and now works directly with students from underserved communities — I intimately understand the chasm between SEL ideals and our students' lived experiences.
Many of our students, despite their resilience, face immense challenges beyond the scope of conventional SEL strategies. For example, a child raised in an environment filled with violence and neglect may find it difficult to relate to SEL activities that presume stable family structures and access to emotional support.
In this situation, it would be unjust of me to expect children to embrace themselves when feeling overwhelmed or to recite affirmations when they've never experienced such gestures or words of encouragement from authoritative figures or felt loved throughout their lives.
I remember several occasions when I discussed coping strategies with students, often suggesting techniques like breathing exercises, journaling, meditation or talking to someone. However, many students have told me directly, "Miss, that doesn't make me feel better." Some have tried journaling but struggle to express themselves in writing. Breathing exercises didn't always help them de-escalate as expected, and meditation seemed irrelevant to their lived experiences.
This disconnect shows the urgent need for SEL initiatives to not only be culturally responsive but also adaptive to the diverse realities of our students.
Collaborative, Student-Led SEL
I am committed to advocating for holistic approaches that prioritize equity and inclusion. I want to ensure that SEL initiatives resonate authentically with every student, regardless of their background or circumstances. Rather than imposing our theoretical knowledge and professional competencies in social work and mental health, we should prioritize student-led approaches.
When I ask students about what they believe they need to effectively cope with stress, I often hear responses like, “I simply don’t know, Miss." Despite this sentiment, I believe there is still power in giving students the space to reflect, even if their initial response is rooted in uncertainty. By doing so, we empower them to recognize that healing and coping strategies can be personalized and do not have to conform to pre-established norms or expectations. This approach acknowledges the uniqueness of each student's experience and fosters a more inclusive and responsive environment for their well-being.
Whether through cultural expression, music therapy, peer support groups or other innovative methods, the key is to help students tap into coping strategies that align with their experiences and communities. This personalized approach validates their individuality and fosters a deeper connection between educators, counselors and students.
While research on SEL has provided valuable insights in the past, it's crucial to recognize that the field is dynamic. Just because there was research conducted before doesn't mean we can't adapt and refine our methods to ensure they are inclusive and relevant to all students today. This continuous evolution is essential to meet the unique challenges and realities faced by our students.
Moreover, it's essential to acknowledge our own limitations as adults and professionals in the field of SEL. Even with our expertise, we don't have all the answers. At the end of the day, students are the true experts on their own experiences, irrespective of their age. Their insights, perspectives and feedback are invaluable in shaping effective SEL practices that resonate authentically with their lives.
This requires us to challenge existing paradigms, listen intently to our students' voices and collaborate across disciplines to develop tailored strategies that honor their lived experiences. By doing so, we not only acknowledge the resilience and strength inherent in each student but also create pathways for genuine healing, growth and empowerment.
All in all, we must shift our focus from imposing solutions to empowering voices, ensuring that every student feels seen, heard and valued as we journey together toward holistic well-being and success.
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