Eighty-seven percent of teachers are overwhelmed with the number of expectations on their practice. Teaching to mixed ability classes where thirty to forty percent of the students are behind, and sometimes up to five grades or more behind, is no small feat. Many don’t make it past the five-year mark as new teachers, and the shortage nationwide means nearly ninety percent of schools are short by upwards of fifteen percent of the teachers they need. School principals are hard-pressed even to find substitutes to cover classrooms.

Many leaders are turning to a matrix view of teaching and learning, find ways to build up human resources on demand to meet student needs. High impact tutoring is a growth arena for edtech that is uniquely highly human as well. Like other industries where “fractional work” is becoming the norm, the human resources field in education has innovative companies coming to the forefront to give the otherwise old-fashioned field of K-12 education a novel solution to many of their woes.

Michael Cohen, Founder and CEO of Cignition is one such innovator. Mike's career straddled academic research and entrepreneurial activity, focused on helping human-centered technologies achieve positive real-world impact.

Mike founded Cignition in 2014, working with educators and a neuroscientist, with a goal of helping all students, especially those from traditionally underserved communities, achieve a deep understanding of mathematics (and extending to English language learning more recently) - both to enable further learning and to be prepared for success in the workplaces of the future. Those goals led to a key focus on students gaining conceptual understanding with collaborative learning, alongside measurement for data-driven improvement in the methods.

Cignition is now a K-12 tutoring program and platform, led by experienced educators who produce proven and repeatable results. The goal is the “I get it!” moment.


What the Matrix Requires

Since schools historically are autonomous units of one-to-many teaching, the initial issues were:

  • How do you “plug in” to help with tutoring as a third-party source?
  • How do you align the research-based methods of Cignition with what the teacher is doing that works for them for their core instruction?
  • How to address tiers of learners and special needs for more individualized instruction at the school’s discretion?
  • How to maintain a high quality of tutors?

All of these main issues have inhibited the building out of a matrix of tutoring and teaching resources.

Through the act of actually partnering at scale with K12 education institutions, Cignition appears to have won great success and also proven that success.

In a randomized control study, students who received Cignition group tutoring learned significantly more math than students who did not.

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A couple of their proof points include:

  • Cignition won a position to deliver rigorous tutoring in math and language arts when Ohio Department of Education made a $26 million investment as part of Future Forward Ohio
  • Cignition implemented a major contract in 2021-22 to serve 1,069 students in Denver Public Schools with high impact tutoring using an outcomes-based contracting model. Sixty-four percent of students increased scores with an average increase of 12.2%.
  • A data dashboard used in any engagement to show progress so that all stakeholders are comfortable with how adding tutoring into their programs is working to accelerate learning.

“Cignition exists in order to bring learning and opportunity to all students,” said Mike Cohen, Ph.D., CEO and founder of Cignition. “Our research-proven, collaborative learning-based, high-intensity tutoring approach helps students achieve deep understanding and skill, prepares them for their current and future classroom learning and for the workplace of tomorrow.”

It is hoped Cignition will continue to build the matrix of help teachers and students need, matching up their unique value with a fractional and outcomes-based model of human labor needed by schools now.


About Cignition

Founded in 2014 with the mission of building conceptual understanding, one engaged learner at a time, Cignition is a K-12 virtual tutoring platform led by experienced educators who produce proven, repeatable results in student success. Its research-based approach focuses on data-informed instruction and collaborative learning, encouraging student-to-student interaction to build deep conceptual understanding. The company’s first offering was the award-winning FogStone Isle virtual world math supplement used by hundreds of thousands of elementary and middle school students and their teachers nationwide. For more information, visit https://www.cignition.com/.

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