The CourseKata Approach to Learning Difficult Subjects

The Better Book Approach: Working together to understand, innovate, and improve students’ learning experiences

The development of transferable knowledge in challenging, complex domains such as mathematics, science, and statistics takes place over long periods of time — weeks, months, or even years. Yet most research is carried out in short-term, lab-based studies, and doesn’t necessarily apply to the environments in which students learn.

The Better Book approach focuses research on the authentic educational settings where students learn, partnering with educators, technologists, and curriculum designers to create and implement curriculum that works for all students.

What is the Better Book Approach?

This collaborative, community approach to curriculum development and improvement involves three critical stages of work: 

1. Design and develop fully-instrumented online course materials in a hard-to-learn subject, replete with interactive exercises and formative assessment questions.
2. Implement the materials, widely, in the context of actual college or high school courses, with constant collaboration among developers, educators, and researchers.
3. Improve the materials, continuously, by applying well-validated methodologies for improving complex systems based on student-generated data as they engage with our materials.

We borrow heavily from the field of improvement science. The word “kata” is a Japanese word meaning “routine” as explained by Mike Rother in his 2009 book, Toyota Kata, where he does a deep dive into the continuous improvement kata as practiced at Toyota. Educational environments are complex systems, and methods for systems improvement have a lot to contribute to the work of improving student learning.

Applying the Toyota Kata framework, we start by formulating a long-term direction or challenge. For us this is the challenge of helping all students develop flexible, lasting, and transferable knowledge, especially in domains, like mathematics and science, where learning is notoriously hard.

With this direction in mind, we started by working to understand how the system functions now (what Rother calls “grasping the current condition”). As part of this work, we developed a working theory of how transferable knowledge develops, which we call the practicing connections hypothesis (detailed in “Practicing Connections”).

This theory guided our initial development of Version 1 of the CourseKata statistics and data science materials and continues to inform our work. At each step, we analyze student-generated data to understand what is not working, set new goals, and then continuously experiment our way toward achieving each new incremental improvement.

Some of the things we learn during our improvement work can be generalized to other learning contexts and published to the field. But everything we learn can result in improvements to CourseKata materials.

Why CourseKata Is So Passionate About the Better Book Approach

We have seen firsthand that when students practice connections that make knowledge coherent, the result is flexible problem solving, transfer to new situations, and preparation for more advanced learning. 

Our first materials are in the fields of statistics and data science — watch the video to learn why our collaborative approach to curriculum development has helped thousands of students learn essential skills.