Khan Academy Ed Talks with Chase Nordengren, PhD

Hello and welcome to Ed Talks with Khan Academy, where we talk to interesting and important people in the education space. I'm Kristen Deservo, the Chief Learning Officer here at Khan Academy, and looking forward to a conversation today with Dr. Chase Nordengren, who is a Chief Principal Research Lead at our partner NWEA.

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And with that, let me welcome Dr. Chase Nordengren. Welcome, Chase!

Thanks, Kristen. Uh, thanks for having me, happy to be here.

Absolutely! Let me tell folks a little bit about you. So you are a Principal Research Lead for Effective Instructional Strategies at NWEA. So tell us a little bit about what your job is—what does that entail?

Sure! My background is as an educational researcher. So I went to graduate school studying all different kinds of educational research. I've been at NWEA for about six years. My job is really focused on working with our professional learning and our school improvement teams to understand what great instruction looks like. So, on the best days, I get to get in the classroom, talk with teachers and principals about what's working really well, how they're applying not only our products and services, but also, you know, other useful pieces of curriculum and instructional technology to the work that they do, and try to extract the lessons from that to put it into our professional learning, our school improvement, to the other things that we offer.

How did you decide to go into education research as a career?

It's a good question, and I think I took a kind of roundabout road. So I started my career wanting to work in politics, feeling really strongly that I wanted to make a difference in social policy and construct social policies that were going to help people. I spent enough time there to realize what I didn't know and to understand the kind of central importance of the classroom and what makes for positive educational outcomes for kids. And so I convinced myself as a result of that to make a little bit of a career switch, went to graduate school with that focus in mind, and ended up in a place now where I feel like I have a really strong opportunity to interact with and make a difference in classrooms across the country.

Very cool! So I know you have written a book called Step Into Student Goal Setting: A Path to Growth, Motivation, and Agency. So let's talk a little bit about goals and goal setting. What do effective goals for students look like?

Yeah, I think one of the reasons I really wanted to write the book is that I think goal setting and goals are a great example of the kinds of instructional practices that work really well. One of the things that's true about them is they all look kind of different but follow a set of kind of common principles, common ideas that I hope through the book we can elevate and we can share out with other folks.

Three kind of big principles that are true of really effective goals: First of all, they're individual; they're tailored to the individual student. Second, they exemplify what we call a mastery orientation; they promote learning for learning's sake and get students excited about learning for learning's sake. And then finally, they balance what is meaningful for that student with what is attainable for them. They come with the support and the guidance of an adult who can really help a student pick something that they can accomplish, but there's also enough of a leap for them that when they achieve it, they'll feel really accomplished and really proud of themselves.

That totally makes sense. So it sounds like you need to learn how to set good goals, along with learning other things too. So how does a teacher start implementing this in their classroom? How do they start helping students set goals?

I think it's a great call out. One of the things that surprises a lot of people when they first encounter this work is that goal setting can really start the first week of kindergarten. And, you know, in those early years, I think it's not so much about making sure that we always accomplish every goal that we set, but that students get accustomed to the practice, get into making goal setting part of the culture of the classroom.

And so it can start, you know, with really simple things with little week by week or month by month learning outcomes, you know, the number of letters a student is able to master in those elementary grades or those, you know, simple math facts. But really, it's about giving students an opportunity to see what they're learning week to week, month to month, see how that connects back to the things that they want to do and the kinds of people that they want to be, and eventually giving them enough practice and experience that they can start to take more and more ownership of that process so that they can be more and more responsible for setting their own goals over time.

That makes sense. Could you give us some examples of what a goal would look like for a kindergarten or first grader, or a middle schooler, or a high schooler?

Sure! At the elementary grades, one of my favorite examples from the book is a first grader who was really into frogs. So, you know, teachers in the audience have had this experience—kids who come in with a just kind of dedicated focus. You know, for him, the books that were at his reading level in first grade weren't teaching him anything new. So what his teacher did was she used that as the motivation to say, "Okay, if we work on these three or four reading skills, we're going to build your reading fluency so that you're able to access more complex books about frogs."

I bring up that example because I think we so often default to thinking about goals as related to the colleges and careers that students want to pursue when they leave secondary school, and that's an important piece, but it's not the only way that students start to express the things they're interested in or the things they want to do. So I think at, you know, whatever the grade level is, it's about taking those immediate academic outcomes that you're pursuing for that week or that month and knowing what the student is all about, what they're interested in doing, and helping them make the connection between the two.

Those will obviously get a little bit more complicated as you enter into the middle grades and have some more complex academic outcomes. You know, once you get into high school, ideally students have had enough experience that they can begin to think a little bit longer term and begin to think about how those skills might factor into their college or career readiness. But it's important to demonstrate that it can happen at any grade, as long as it's, you know, tailored to what that student is ready for.

Got it! So I'm the first grader who's going to learn some new reading skills to learn more about frogs. Like, is there a goal that that first grader is going to write down that they, you know, understand and can track?

Yeah! I think this is a really important part of the process of effective goal setting. Across all of the teachers we worked with, is the one-on-one conversation. So the conversation between the teacher and the student where they're in the first class, you know, setting that initial goal, tracking progress on that goal, and eventually celebrating that the student has achieved that goal. We give a lot of different examples in the book of worksheets and tracking documents that the teacher can use to help the student write that down and track it over time.

I think the specifics of those are less important than the general practice of writing that down, of being asked to make the connection between the academic goal and something broader they want to achieve, and being given the opportunity to track and monitor their success with that over time.

That makes sense. I know when I talk to folks here at Khan Academy about motivation, I talk a lot about expectancy value theory. So people do things when they think they're going to be able to be successful at them and when they find some value in doing them. And it seems like goal setting just fits actually in both of those categories. Like, "Hey, I can see I'm starting to have success, and I'm setting goals about things I'm valued at." Does goal setting fit into motivation theory in that way?

Yeah, I think that fits really nicely with that third bullet point that I mentioned before—the idea of balancing what is attainable with what is meaningful. So certainly that meaning part is really important, and you know, asking a student to complete something that they can just kind of do by rote isn't particularly meaningful, right? In the same way that if I asked you to tie your shoes, you're probably not going to remember or take much from that experience.

At the same time, students need to have that ongoing evidence that they are succeeding. And in the course in the classroom, that often means providing a lot of those touchpoints, sometimes called formative assessment, where students can actually take an effort to try out tasks, perform the task, and see themselves getting better over time. I think one sometimes overlooked ingredient is that making sure that students have those really frequent opportunities to see themselves progress.

Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. So does that look like tracking sheets or online tools? Do you have some suggestions for how to track progress?

Yeah, I think all of the above, right? So we have a bevy of online tools; MAP Accelerator is certainly one of them that gives students the opportunity to practice a particular set of skills and to see themselves improve over time. We also have a variety of analog tools. So whether it's, you know, the kinds of project-based activities that are incorporated in a lot of classrooms already, or those online tools, or a combination of both.

I think we're looking for the kinds of classrooms where students individually, in small groups, as a whole group get lots of opportunities to practice with the skills that they're building and have the ability to see those practice opportunities as an opportunity to reflect on what they've learned.

Oh, reflection! That is one of my other things that I'm interested in. So do you think as part of goal setting there's a—for how do you think about that? Encouraging students to think about reflection? Are there questions you can ask to encourage that that teachers can build on?

Yeah! You know, student reflection, I think of as another aspect of that formative assessment cycle that really taps into metacognition—helping students think about their thinking and see their thinking in real time. You know, I don't think the questions themselves have to be that complicated. So, you know, a lot of the worksheets that we include in the book include questions as simple as, “What's one thing you learned this week?” “What's one new skill you've added?” “What are some of the things that you struggled a little bit more with than some of the other things?”

I think, you know, finding age-appropriate questions that are tailored to where kids are, but just that start the train of thinking about how they are learning can really be a way to jumpstart some of those deeper reflections. Obviously, those can come out in conversation as well, and conversation is another important aspect.

One of mine is, “Did you get stuck? And if so, how did you get unstuck?” That's a great one! Having them think about how to persist when they get into difficulty.

I think there's a lot of stylistic elements here too, right? Like every teacher has a slightly different style, they have a different approach, they have questions they like and don't like. The intent of the book and our promotion of this practice generally is absolutely not to try to level those out or make every teacher teach the same way. It's about taking these principles that are backed by research and backed by the conversations that we've had with these really high-performing goal-setting teachers, and thinking about how to apply those principles to your own practice, how to bake them into what you're already doing so that, first of all, it doesn't feel like a kind of added task, another thing for a teacher to do, but second, so that the goal-setting process can really reflect your teaching personality, reflect your style, reflect what's already working for your students.

That makes sense! So we’re in back-to-school season here in Arizona. Kids have been back for about three weeks, but I know in a lot of the country, they're just heading back now. What are your recommendations for teachers around goal setting kind of as we move into early stages of the year?

Yeah, I think now is the time to begin setting that culture! So obviously you'll have a better understanding of whether the students coming into your classroom have had a lot of experience with this or they have no experience at all. If you're starting from ground zero, group goals can be a great way to start.

So thinking about things that the whole class can do together and celebrate, whether those are academic in nature or even whether they're behavioral, but giving students the opportunity to practice engaging in the process is, I think, as important—or more important—at that early stage than making sure they can succeed at every goal they set.

So, for the teachers who are really successful at this, I think a lot of them spend the first month or two just getting students accustomed to the process, showing them what it looks like, giving lots of examples from their own life, times when goals have succeeded for them, and really kind of laying the groundwork, so that by the time we enter into November-December, students can start to think about what their own goals would look like and what they would do to get there.

Great! So let's grab a question from Facebook. John Posey asks, "What are some techniques for how you encourage continuation to strive towards a goal?" So if a student shows interest, for example, in the frog book, how do you get them to keep pushing through that instead of kind of losing interest?

Yeah, this is, I think, the reason why those conversations are really important. And the teachers in the book who are really successful were having one-on-one conversations with students every two weeks or even every week about their goals. That can seem really daunting, but it can be very simple, very informal, very short—just an opportunity to say to the student, "Hey, as an individual, I see you. I know this is where we're working towards. What are some of the roadblocks that you put up and found this week, and what are some of the ways that we can overcome them?"

I think having those individual contact points with students, no matter how kind of short and simple they are, is a really powerful tool in making sure that they're able to persist, and that those little roadblocks don't turn into really big ones.

Yeah, that makes sense! So we've got another question, which I think is our most asked question that almost every expert we have on—we want to tap this. So this answer can be about goal setting or it can be more broadly. But Dio Brando asks, "What should I do to motivate myself to learn more? What's a good way to learn by myself?" And so we get this kind of general motivation question from students, from teachers, from parents. What are some of your just go-to strategies around motivation?

Well, I think this is absolutely apropos goal setting because goal setting is really about, you know, as an individual, taking a really big task—so a big thing that I want to learn—and breaking it down into those bit-by-bit elements that are going to help keep you focused and keep you motivated. I think the most important thing—and you can do this individually, you can do this with someone you're working with—is make really clear why you're doing it. Make it really clear what interests you in learning about this particular area of mathematics, this particular area of history. How does it connect to the things that you want to do and the kind of person that you want to be—whether that's a career orientation or whether that's a personal orientation.

You can think about writing that down in some kind of reflective exercise or a journal. You can think about doing a little bit of research upfront to understand what are the kinds of skills that this particular career requires, or what are the kinds of ideas that they're wrestling with in this area. But I think the most important thing you can do to keep that motivation is to make that relationship really clear, and then set goals that can help you take the kind of big ambition of, you know, "I want to learn calculus," and break it down into the little bit-by-bit pieces that will show that you're making progress and understanding more over time.

Calculus is a good example because I'm going to be honest, I never really could see how calculus was going to be relevant to the jobs that I wanted to do. I thought I was going to be a psychologist, and yes, I use statistics, but I don't really use calculus-based statistics. But one of the things that I found as I was taking my required calculus class was actually if I could also just see it as a way to think about how amazing math is and how it helps explain things in the world, even if it's not necessarily what I'm going to do in my career.

So I also sometimes wonder because it is the case that sometimes in school we have to do stuff that isn't really going to be related to the thing we're going to do when we grow up and get a job. But if there's also some thinking about just how, you know, building that understanding of how the world works and how things go, that we can build on to. For teachers, I don't know if you have any thoughts on things that maybe aren't directly tied to what we're going to want to do with our lives, but we kind of have to do anyway.

One of the interesting distinctions that comes up in the research in the book is the distinction between individual interests and situational interests. Individual interests are those things that you care about already—you probably cared about them for a long time, they drive and motivate you. Situational interests are those things that you come to care about in the moment, in a conversation with somebody else.

I think one of the things that we take for granted is that young kids especially haven't had a lot of opportunity to develop those individual interests yet. They just haven't been around for enough years on planet Earth. And if you think about a lot of the individual interests that you have today, whether they're professional or whether they're personal, you can probably trace those back to some conversation that you had with someone where they made that connection between that particular topic area and something that was going to motivate you and challenge you.

One of the other examples that has come up as I've talked about books around this book is about learning grammar, right? Getting students interested in the rules of grammar is really difficult because it feels really abstract and you don't know how to apply. And the idea this teacher had is starting by talking to students about being good communicators. Most people want to be good communicators; they may want to communicate about different things, but we all have that driver to express ourselves and to be heard effectively. And so just making really clear as the introduction to the lesson why learning those rules and techniques of grammar are going to help students become better communicators for whatever they want to do was a way that this teacher was able to make that turn—that situational interest into an individual motivating interest.

Situational interests! I like it! I'm taking that as a takeaway from today! Excellent! Thank you!

I do want to shift a bit to another topic. So coming from NWEA, as folks may know, NWEA and Khan Academy together have an offering we call MAP Accelerator, where using your MAP growth score from NWEA, we can then find the best placement in Khan Academy math content based on what you know and what you are just ready to learn.

And we have just released a study of some efficacy results from that. So, Chase, you want to tell us a little bit about that study?

Yeah! So, you know, as we mentioned before, MAP Accelerator is a great example of the kind of activity that can result from a goal-setting process, right? That you give a student this place where they can individually practice the math skills that are at their next level of development—what they're ready to learn next—and gives them an opportunity to experience that kind of frequent success over time as they learn more.

So in the study, the group of researchers who worked on it worked with about 99 districts who were using MAP Accelerator in their practice. And they were able to see how much time individual students spent with Accelerator, so we recommend that students spend about 30 minutes a week or more working with Accelerator. And obviously, there were schools and classrooms where students did that, and there were schools where they didn't.

The study finds that students who spend at least 30 minutes a week experience greater than expected growth from fall to spring. So what that means is compared with the average growth that students at that grade level experience over the course of a given year, students who used MAP Accelerator as recommended experienced anywhere from 9 to 43% greater growth than we would have expected.

Now, and those trends were fairly consistent across grade levels, across student demographics, etc. Now, it's difficult to draw what researchers call a causal link between those two, but it does suggest to us that participation in MAP Accelerator as intended is associated with greater growth than would be expected if students hadn't had that engagement or they hadn't used the product for 30 minutes a week.

Yeah! So I know I’ve been excited about this because 30 minutes a week isn't that much! We can find 30 minutes a week to think about this. And one question—when we say greater than expected, so the MAP growth uses what we call norms, right? And so were those norms from before the pandemic time? So we're comparing students before the pandemic?

Yeah, this isn't—this is an important caveat. So the norms were created for the pandemic, and as you may have seen in a lot of the work that we've done since then, student growth generally across the board was lower than expected compared to the norms over time. So the fact that students who were also in the pandemic period during the time the study happened experienced greater than expected growth suggests to us that the margin between students who are using MAP Accelerator and students who are not using it might be even larger than what we found.

Yeah, that's really interesting! So thanks for sharing! For folks that want to read more, we have some links in the chat to those studies where you can dive in and find out some more information and see the results for yourself.

So, fantastic! Before we close out, I have a couple other questions. Cameron, it looks like we answered your question, I think, right before we shifted to this.

Shaheed Khan on Facebook says, "How can we gain the attention of students who may have personal issues that are influencing and kind of interfering with their learning process when there's things going on outside of the classroom or other things? How can we help them stay on track with learning?"

You know, this is one of the reasons why that individual relationship with students is really important, so that you can understand in the course of that conversation what are the kinds of barriers this student might face to accomplishing their goals. And that's going to look different for every student, and as a result, we might set different kinds of goals for every student, right? There may be some goals that are more what we kind of call social-emotional or behavioral, right?

The amount of time, whether or not they're able to come to school on time, whether or not they complete their homework, that sort of thing. I think all of those barriers, whether they're academic or whether they're social-emotional, are barriers to learning. And so we want to find ways to address them. We want to help challenge students to help overcome them.

At the same time, I think it's super important not to write kids off who are experiencing those difficulties. Every student can be challenged from where they are, and while those challenges might look a little bit different based on what kinds of resources students have access to or what's reasonable to expect them to achieve, making sure that all students are challenged in one way or another is part and parcel of making sure that all students are heard when they enter school.

And so I think it's important both to know and to understand what students are going through and to find ways, given those challenges and constraints, to push them to what they're capable of achieving next.

Thank you! One more question that I think is interesting. So Dio Brando says, "I'm almost 15. What should I know? What should I be studying by this age?"

It's a great question, and I think the only real way to respond to that is with another question. So, you know, what do you want to be and what do you want to do? And that doesn't mean to be as specific as, “This is the kind of job I want to talk for what I want to do for the rest of my life,” but there are a lot of different ways to take those things that you want to be and do and convert them back into goals.

And the Department of Labor has a database called O*NET, which is really fascinating. It shows you the skills that you need for just about any kind of career you can imagine. It makes that really clear so that you can understand what are the kinds of things I should be studying in school to get there.

But I, you know, encourage you to keep an open mind, to think about the kinds of things that you want to do and want to be as you get older, and to really look for opportunities that all of the subjects that we focus on in school connect to those things that you want to become.

Me too! So if you see some of those skills on the different sites of the kinds of things you need to know, and you want to test them out, see if those are interesting to you, or see where you are on those skills. You can always also jump on some of our—we have courses in lots of different areas that you can also just dip into a little bit and see how you like them and see where your skills are.

So feel free to explore that way too, but I like the idea of having some targeted based on what you want to, what you might be interested in and want to do in your future.

Fantastic! So, Chase, to close out, what are some things that you're working on right now or that you're looking forward to in the next year in terms of what you're doing at NWEA?

Yeah! So my next line of work, which I think is related, is really helping to understand how teachers tailor their instruction to meet students where they are. So we're working closely with a group of elementary and middle school teachers who have experienced exceptional growth with their students, and I'm working with them directly through interviews and observations to understand what does your instruction actually look like, and what are some bits and pieces, some techniques that we can pull out of this and help to encourage other teachers to use, to think about how they can support students during this particularly difficult time when students in the classroom span age ranges, span ability levels, span grade levels of opportunity. How can we use these techniques to meet students where they are?

Great! We'll look forward to hearing more. Thanks for joining us today!

Thanks so much, Kristen!

Great! And before we leave, we've talked about goal setting today. I want to remind folks that if you are in a classroom using Khan Academy, you can participate in our national LearnStorm fall challenge, which is about setting classroom goals for skills that you have mastered and see together as a class how many skills you can master over the course of this challenge. So check that out, and we look forward to seeing you next time on Ed Talks!