Real Case Stories

In a study, 402 9th- and 10th-grade students from four New York City high schools in low-income areas  were divided into three groups.  Group 1 read an 800-word typical science textbook description about the great accomplishments of Einstein, Curie and Michael Faraday, an English scientist who made important discoveries about electromagnetism. Group 2 read about those scientists’ personal struggles, including Einstein’s flight from Nazi Germany to avoid persecution as a Jew.  The third group of students read about the scientists’ intellectual struggles, such as Curie’s persistence despite a string of failed experiments. The struggle stories included actions the scientists took to overcome these hurdles. At the end of a six-week grading period, students who learned about the scientists’ intellectual or personal struggles had significantly improved their science grades, with low-achievers benefiting the most. The students in the control group who only learne...

How a Girl from a remote Mexican slum won the All Mexico Math exam using the MIE method. Minimally invasive education (MIE) is a form of learning in which children operate in unsupervised environments. The methodology arose from an experiment done by Sugata Mitra while at NIIT in 1999, often called The Hole in the Wall On 26 January 1999, Mitra's team carved a "hole in the wall" that separated the NIIT premises from the adjoining slum in Kalkaji, New Delhi. Through this hole, a freely accessible computer was put up for use. This computer proved to be popular among the slum children. With no prior experience, the children learned to use the computer on their own. This prompted Mitra to propose the following hypothesis: The acquisition of basic computing skills by any set of children can be achieved through incidental learning provided the learners are given access to a suitable computing facility, with entertaining and motivating content and some minimal (human) guida...