Next Two Level Learner Moves Project: Acting Like Fast Fish

Project Description

What if learners had a user’s manual for their minds? How might it change their learning and performance—in life, at school, and on the job? What if they could modify these contexts to support their best learning? This project seeks to help learners, as embodied in social and emotional beings, understand the cognitive architecture of their minds to bring their learning and work to the next level and to function effectively in a dynamic and complex workforce landscape. Research has demonstrated persuasively that effective thinking can be taught. However, the teaching of thinking has failed to produce the broad benefits to society that one might expect. This work seeks to align the skills of thinking with cognitive neuroscience findings and to make the resulting approaches more accessible and relevant to the most vulnerable populations.

The NLL Moves Project is developing and testing moves that Next Level Learners can engage in to support their most effective learning and work performance. Using a mixed methods approach, we are studying pre- to post-intervention changes in how learners frame and process tasks involved in thinking, learning, and workforce performance. For instance, in one study, we designed two versions of a reflection survey to be used as part of a summer internship program for opportunity youth at a large consulting firm. We are examining how the interns’ reflections changed over time and how their reflections varied depending on whether their version of the survey explicitly emphasized elements of contextualized agency.