Student Learning Tool That Gets Results — Branching Minds
The United States spent $68 billion on education last year, splurging an average of $12000 per high student alone. This amount goes up significantly for post-high school students.
While a large amount of its budget being spent on students, US students’ academic achievements still lag behind many peers globally. Much of this can be attributed to the system’s failure to identify failing students before they reach a certain learning stage. Many students excel in one learning skill but lag in others. The situation, however is not diagnosed as no actionable data is present to educators, teachers and school management.
The need of a diagnostic tool for student and learning intervention is direly needed and thats where one startup has decided to step up.
Virtual Force is a favorite for all education startups. Founders love us for our product-first approach. Interested? Give us a shout here.
Branching Minds is a cloud-based application that uses the most advanced learning science and academic research to help schools transform student learning.
The platform helps school teachers to identify learning disabilities in students through proprietary algorithm and suggest intervention tools and mechanisms for teachers and parents to address child learning.
Branching Minds addresses 3 core problems. First is figuring out why the student is having a particular problem. Second part is figuring out what will help the student overcome that particular problem. Third part is collaborating and sharing the solution with all the stakeholders.
Branching Minds needed a system that could effectively gather, record and show actionable intelligence for the teachers and other stakeholders could act upon. This meant that the software had to unite learning science and artificial intelligence. This would, in turn, help identify students’ cognitive and behavioural changes, allowing teaching staff to overcome problems and effectively monitor student progress along the way.
We, as the technology partner of Branching Minds, identified 4 main features to translate Branching Minds working philosophy into a full-blown software to address the core problems. Our working mantra was simple; Identify problem, find relevant support, collect observations and monitor corresponding progress of the student. The application was to be initially made for web. Further scalability was kept in mind for other platforms.
Identify Struggling Students
Branching Minds uses its proprietary algorithms along with universal screeners and benchmarking exams to find out the students, in need of supervision or extra learning support.
Collect Teacher Observations
Observations and notes from teachers regarding particular students can be examined to understand student strengths and challenges. These include academic, cognitive, social-emotional and behavioral skills.
Find Learning Supports
Each student’s challenges can be dealt with head-on, using evidence based interventions. Each intervention is matched according to students particular needs.
Plan and Monitor Progress
Branching Minds gives you the option to create collaborative intervention plans, track students’ progress, and communicate effectively with stakeholders (staff and family).
New Profit Makes Six New Incubation Investments including @BranchingMinds https://t.co/rbo3KEz0tP
— New Profit (@newprofit) July 12, 2016
Branching Minds showed 228% year-over-year growth in revenues between 2015 and 2017, and the company’s web-based platform has served more than 65,000 students.
Apart from the phenomenon growth, the application is likely to be scaled in anticipation of large number of deployments forecasted in the coming years. Virtual Force is proud to have partnered with Branching Minds as its technology partner.
READ MORE:
http://www.virtual-force.org/blog/matters-of-heart-how-moving-analytics-empowers-your-health/