Abstract:

Just like physical skills, cognitive skills grow rusty over time unless they are regularly used and practiced. This means that school breaks can have quite negative consequences on student learning. Indeed, by a conservative estimate, summer vacation sets K-12 students back by one month of instruction; that is, it causes them to lose one month of grade-level equivalent skills relative to national norms. Although this “summer gap” effect has been documented for many school subjects, it is most pronounced for mathematics which requires a strong foundation of prior knowledge. And the summer gap effect extends into higher education too. We now know that having breaks between sequential closely related mathematics courses significantly lowers performance in the second course at the university level. How can we bridge the gap between courses and stem the loss of learning over school breaks for students who have busy lives and do not wish to spend their breaks from school studying and preparing for the upcoming semester?

The Keeping in School Shape (KiSS) intervention is an engaging, innovative and cost-effective program that uses push technology to help students maintain proficiency over breaks from school, while also promoting a growth mindset. Theoretically, the KiSS program draws on the well-documented benefits of retrieval practice – the notion that recalling previously material is a very effective way of maintaining cognitive performance. The KiSS program embodies retrieval practice by sending students a multiple-choice mathematics question daily via text messaging. The problems are chosen specifically to be skills that are requisite for success in the course following the break from school. After judging their confidence in being able to solve the daily problem and responding with an answer choice, students receive feedback on their response and access to a solution. The feedback is designed to support a growth mindset and encourage students to persist and challenge themselves.

In this talk, I discuss the evolution of the KiSS intervention over several iterations and share results of its implementation at a large university in the US. Measures include participation amounts and patterns, confidence ratings, and accuracy. In addition, I will share feedback from a survey delivered to students who were participating in the program as a lead in to a discussion of future design and development decisions.

Keywords:

Push technology, retrieval practice, student engagement, mathematics learning, summer slide.