Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance - U.S. Department of ...

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5. Digital Learning Environments, Online Resources, and Tools for Teachers
There is a large and growing array of educational technologies that can be used to support grit,
tenacity, and perseverance. A core recommendation from the experts we interviewed was that
technology to support perseverance should be grounded in design principles aligned with the
general best practices for fostering these competencies. In fact, we found educational
technologies aligned with all aspects of our hypothesized model of grit, tenacity, and
perseverance—promoting both important contextual factors and psychological resources.
Here we present some examples from a range of categories aligned with key facets of the model.
Note that many of these fit in more than one category or categories previously discussed.
• Digital learning environments that provide
optimal challenge through adaptivity. While
students differ in their learning needs and their
responses to learning activities, in a typical class,
teachers have too many students to provide a high
level of individualized support. As discussed in
Chapter 3, digital learning environments provide
great potential for collecting complex, “microlevel”
data about behavioral task performance,
affective responses, and physiological responses
that can be used dynamically within a system or
provided to teachers to adapt instructional tasks to
learner needs. Intelligent tutors such as Cognitive
Tutor (http://www.carnegielearning.com/),
ASSISTments (http://www.assistments.org/), and
Wayang Outpost (http://wayangoutpost.com/) are
examples of digital learning environments that can
analyze students’ responses to questions and
provide adaptive tutoring and practice activities
adapted to individual students’ needs. Technologies
Wayang Outpost
Wayang Outpost is an intelligent tutor
designed to prepare middle school and
high school students for geometry and
statistics on standardized tests. The
system customizes problems and hints
to each student’s cognitive profile and
emotional state (e.g., frustration or
boredom) using inputs from
physiological indicators and facial
expressions. Measurement tools are
discussed in Chapter 3 and shown in
Exhibit 11. Animated “agents” then
respond to the student, for example by
sharing some worked out problems if the
student is frustrated or by praising effort
if the student completed a problem
(Woolf et al., 2009). Researchers at the
University of Massachusetts are
currently evaluating whether affective
agents perceived as caring can increase
the likelihood that students will persist
through frustrating portions of instruction
and exhibit greater mastery of content.
such as Wayang Outpost are beginning to employ affective computing, using inputs from
physiological indicators and facial expressions to collect and utilize data indicating affective
states such as frustration and boredom (see callout box). Reasoning Mind
(http://www.reasoningmind.org/) is a digital math curriculum for elementary school students
that has multiple mechanisms of assessment and adaptation. The system itself can adapt to
students’ learning needs by providing more remedial or more advanced problems as needed.
It also provides immediate feedback to the teacher, making specific recommendations for
small group interventions in complement to online learning. Other online learning platforms,
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