This week, Bob Wise, former governor of West Virginia and current president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of the funding of the PROMISE scholarship, signed into law by Wise during his first year as governor. The PROMISE scholarship is a state-sponsored, merit-based scholarship program that enables eligible West Virginia residents to attend any public or private college or university within the state. Wise, West Virginia University (WVU) President Gordon Gee, and several current and former PROMISE recipients gathered on Tuesday for a roundtable discussion and cake-cutting celebration at WVU to mark this milestone anniversary.

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a triennial, global test of fifteen-year-olds in mathematics, science, and reading abilities taken alongside a questionnaire about their school experiences. The assessment also surveys principals about their students’ learning environments, from the physical location of the school to the activities offered. Since the test’s first administration in 2000, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has collected PISA results from millions of students representing seventy different countries and economies.

The Alliance for Excellent Education is in the process of redesigning the DeeperLearning4All.org website, and is seeking feedback from the deeper learning community! Please take ten minutes to fill out this short survey prior to August 31.

How are different states helping to promote deeper learning? The Great Lakes and Midwest Regional Deeper Learning Initiative at American Institutes for Research  shows how state education agencies are enhancing competency-based education initiatives, personalized learning, flexible learning pathways, and more to help expand deeper learning opportunities in more schools. The figure below shows deeper learning approaches happening at the state-level (click the image to expand).

As part of the Alliance for Excellent Education’s (Alliance’s) ongoing series about how districts and schools foster deeper learning outcomes for students, the Alliance contacted Greg Toppo, the national K–12 education reporter for USA Today and author of the book The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter, to discuss the impacts of game-based learning on teachers and students. Below is an excerpt from the discussion with Toppo.