The Chan Zuckerberg Foundation

CHALLENGE

• CZI champions a world where every student is ready for the future and created the Summit Platform, a technology that activates Whole Child Personalized Learning (WCPL) to enable dramatic outcomes for every student. 

• To further develop the platform, CZI needed to more clearly understand student needs by gathering feedback from parents and teachers.

• Parents and teachers are known to inflate their feedback, leading to flawed existing data and requiring a unique research design to accomplish this task. 

STRATEGY

• Kirstyn led a team to structure a custom qualitative research tool in the form of exercise workbooks.

• Research questions were translated into creative exercises that required collages, drawing and other approaches to relieve participant performance related stress and mine compelling insights grounded in truth.

• 100 workbooks were completed by a sample of parents and teachers across the US.

RESULTS

• Completed workbooks revealed an accurate depiction of:

  • challenges that teachers face in the classroom and parents face at home.

  • students’ current interactions with technology as well as pros and cons to use.

  • teachers’ and parents’ ability to support students with technology.

  • unmet student needs and opportunities for the Summit Platform to offer solutions.

  • personas across a spectrum representing parent and teacher receptiveness to the Summit Platform and Whole Child Personalized Learning.

• Study data also informed development of a second phase quantitative survey that mined information from a larger pool of participants.

• Kirstyn facilitated a workshop with CZI EDU Leadership to explore resulting data and insights and create a foundation for qualitative research and product development.