The Navigate Project
The Navigate Project is a collective of educators, advocates, funders, and researchers dedicated to developing and adapting evidence-demonstrated practices in the postsecondary access and success space.
Postsecondary Settings
As students progress through high school and make decisions about their postsecondary plans, they receive numerous messages from other students, instructors, and mentors that shape perceptions of whether they belong in postsecondary settings and have the potential to succeed. Those perceptions, in turn, can affect students’ achievement in their high school classes, decisions to pursue postsecondary options, and persistence in higher education.
Postsecondary advising programs, designed to help students prepare for and navigate the transition to life after high school, can play a critical role in fostering the learning mindsets students need to be successful in their new learning environments. Along with equipping students with practical knowledge, leading innovators in the postsecondary advising space have begun focusing on how to foster adaptive learning mindsets among students. However, the strategies they use to do so have yet to be documented in a way that they can be readily shared among programs or directly connected to research evidence on learning mindsets.
Evidence-based Learning
This project seeks to accelerate the adoption of evidence-based learning mindset-supportive practices among postsecondary advising programs by codifying existing practices among innovative programs, building the capacity to integrate new practices into the postsecondary advising space, and laying the infrastructure for infusing practices into advising programs more broadly. Together, these activities will synthesize key practices across the research and practice spaces to inform the field of advising and related programming.
Through support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we are working to:
- Understand how postsecondary advising programs support or unintentionally undermine learning mindsets, especially for students from historically marginalized and underserved groups.
- Test high-leverage practices for supporting learning mindsets, especially for students from historically marginalized and underserved groups.
- Co-create and disseminate learning mindset supportive tools advisors can use to model strategies students can activate when they encounter new challenges along their postsecondary journey.
- Increase awareness of and value for implementing learning mindset supportive practices that a) amplify student identity, cultural background, interests, strengths, and voice in their advising; and b) create opportunities for students to build social capital in their current and future learning contexts.
