Mastery Takes Effort

Successful athletes are made by the blood, sweat, and tears they put into honing their natural talents. Chess masters have played tens of thousands of games of chess. A concert pianist practices his craft every day, sometimes for hours on end.

Hard Work, Practice, and the Right Tools

Cognitive scientists are finding that mastery in almost any subject area looks the same. Hard work, practice, and the right tools pave the road to success in every field—easier things become fast and fluent, while the conscious mind has conceptual tools to tackle the toughest parts of problems.

Over the last 50 years, scientists have been studying the difference between how experts and novices work on problems, and have discovered some key things about expertise and what it takes to get there. One thing that happens when you practice is that some tasks become so natural you don't even think about them anymore. Some skills and conceptual frameworks are moved below the level of conscious thought—below the part of your mind that "talks" to you all the time.

Think about bicycle riding: after a few months of practice, a child no longer has a panicked internal conversation about, "What am I doing with the handlebars? How do I stop? Will I die?"

Instead, subconscious mental processes grow up, through practice, to handle the basic chores of keeping upright, steering, balancing, braking. This leaves the conscious mind free to focus on more complex goals, like "What's the fastest way to Billy's house from here?"

All experts wind up with key, subconscious frameworks of understanding within their discipline. These frameworks are usually common to folks in the same discipline, trained in the same way. And these frameworks really do become subconscious—experts are often no longer even aware their expertise is organized along these lines, just as you may no longer know how to describe "how to ride a bike," or "how to read" in words.

We call these frameworks the Big Ideas, and our curriculum provides the right content and tools to ensure that with the right amount of practice, all kinds of minds can wrap themselves around and internalize the Big Ideas in each subject area.

The "Big Ideas" Will Set Them Free

All experts wind up with key, subconscious frameworks of understanding within their discipline. These frameworks are usually common to folks in the same discipline, who are trained in the same way. And these frameworks really do become subconscious—experts are often no longer even aware that their expertise is organized along these lines, just as you may no longer know how to describe "how to ride a bike," or "how to read" in words.

By actually watching experts work and talk together, someone on the outside can begin to describe what these frameworks look like. The reason it's so important to understand these subconscious expert frameworks is that for most people, these frameworks will not emerge without systematic teaching and practice over time. It's incredibly important to us to understand what these frameworks look like, so that we (and you) can make the right down-payments on future expertise.

We call these frameworks the "Big Ideas" in a subject area, and we use them to help organize the content and provide the focus for every new course we build.

This is another way that we are different from other curriculum companies, and why we think working hard on our programs will pay off for your students. In addition to what we can find from existing studies, we actually do the interviewing work ourselves with experts to find out the Big Ideas. We've done this with physicists, mathematicians, historians, writers, and more.

Once we have a structure of the Big Ideas from the experts and our own reviews of cognitive science literature, we put it to work as we develop courses across grade levels. We want to make sure we are making early down-payments on these Big Ideas, so that your students can choose what areas to become experts in later—not be blocked out because they simply didn't get the right starting points.

For example, quantum mechanics is a core Big Idea in physics. But we haven't found any way to teach quantum mechanics to anyone under 18! What we have done is make a down payment on something that can be a stumbling block: waves. Waves are wet and fun and engaging. And while we have your students' minds engaged in thinking about and making waves, we are actually making the first down payment—in elementary school—on quantum theory! Imagine! We don't know of any other curriculum that has taken this approach.

Fractions and Other Train Wrecks

One other important piece we bring to bear when helping kids master the Big Ideas is a clear understanding of what's hard for kids. In certain subjects there is good research on kids' misconceptions—careful survey work that looks closely at how kids learn and what's really hard for them, and, ideally, ways to break these misconceptions.

It turns out that the research on this is pretty clear—kids may do their work correctly for the duration of a course, but if their deep misconceptions are not broken down, kids will revert back to them for guidance within six months after the course.

For example, fractions in this country are a complete train wreck. A survey of tenth graders a few years ago asked this fractions question:

What is the same as 5 1/4?

A. 5 PLUS ¼

B. 5 MINUS ¼

C. 5 TIMES ¼

D. 5 DIVIDED by ¼

Forty percent of the kids who answered got this question wrong. That's seriously bad performance! To not understand fractions even to this level means these kids have no conception of what a fraction is at all. The problem is huge; in fact, many folks say that their math skills died in algebra, when in fact they died with fractions.

So, realizing how hard fractions are, and working with education research done by our own people, we focused a lot of time and resources on compelling, engaging, interactive animations that implement what research showed as a successful way to break down misconceptions around fractions.

This again illustrates how our curriculum is different, in several ways: we actually look at the research on misconceptions to help us know where to spend more time, and then we work to invest our most compelling content in these critical but tricky areas, to give your children the best possible chance to understand them.

That's what K¹² does better than anyone—we use the right research, the right visuals, the right interactions, and the right use of technology to make key learning really come alive for kids.

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