Our Rooms Are Full of Collective Intelligence. We Need Collective Measurement.

By: Jane Shore

Imagine two students working on the same group project.

The first student knows every fact about the subject. She remembers every date, understands every concept, finishes her section early, and scores a 96% on the test. During the project, she mostly works alone because everyone else is slowing her down.

The second student knows slightly fewer facts. His understanding of the subject is still emerging. But when the group gets stuck, he asks the question that helps everyone see the problem differently. He notices that one person has not spoken. He translates a difficult idea into language the group can understand. When a classmate wants to give up, he helps her find another way in.

At the end of the project, the first student gets the higher grade.

That seems …expected maybe. But should it be?

The first student demonstrated that she was smart. The second student made the entire group smarter.

And we barely have a way to describe what he did, much less count it as evidence of learning.

Our assessments are based on a narrow theory of intelligence

Traditional assessment begins with an assumption: knowledge, skills and dispositions live inside individual people. The job of assessment, therefore, is to open up each student’s head, metaphorically speaking, and determine how much knowledge is there, how many skills have accumulated, and how individuals are connecting those dots. This is why we separate students, silence the room, remove access to other people, and ask everyone to produce answers alone. We call this an authentic demonstration of learning, but it may be an unusually artificial demonstration of thinking.

Anita Woolley, Thomas Malone, and their colleagues at Carnegie Mellon studied how groups performed across a variety of complex tasks. They found evidence that contributed to what they call collective intelligence, a group-level capacity that helped predict performance across different challenges.

The smartest groups were not just those containing the “smartest” individuals. Group performance was associated. (Source)

In other words, intelligence was not only something people brought into the room, it was produced between them.

Science writer Annie Murphy Paul makes an even larger argument in The Extended Mind. Thinking, she suggests, is not confined to the brain. We use our bodies, physical surroundings, tools, and relationships as resources for cognition. Other people do not merely encourage or support our thinking, our interactions with them can become part of the thinking itself.

Embed: https://www.gettingsmart.com/podcast/annie-murphy-paul-on-the-extended-mind/

You have probably experienced this. You begin explaining an idea and discover what you believe halfway through the sentence. Someone asks a question, and suddenly you understand your own argument. A colleague makes a connection you could not see. A student’s confusion reveals that the explanation, not the student, needs work.

Nobody inserted new knowledge directly into your skull, the thinking happened in the exchange with another person. 

Schools praise collaboration and measure isolation

Schools routinely say they value collaboration, communication, empathy, belonging, and collective problem-solving. Then, when something really counts, we move the desks apart. We say, “Eyes on your own work.”

We say we value the collective, but then when it sounds, we make it impossible to consult, collect other perspectives, tap into available resources.

Even if these actions appear to be hypocritical, they are really a symptom of a measurement problem. Individual knowledge is easier to count. We can assign it a number, rank it, average it, and place it neatly into a spreadsheet or a learning management system.

A student’s effect on other people is harder to see.  We need to observe behaviors.

• Did she improve the quality of the group’s questions?
• Did he help a peer persist?
• Did she synthesize two opposing ideas?
• Did he notice an assumption everyone else had missed?
• Did she make a difficult idea more available to the group?
• Did he create room for a perspective the group was missing?
• Did the people around this student leave more capable than they arrived?

These things are not unmeasurable, they are just currently unmeasured. There is a meaningful difference between those two things. 

We know that assessment does more than record what students have learned, it sends a message about what counts. When we measure recall, but leave questioning, synthesis, persistence, and contribution unrecorded, we teach students that those capacities are secondary.

So a response is to make these valuable demonstrations visible because what becomes visible becomes valuable. And what becomes valuable begins to shape how people learn.

There are places where we already understand this. We do not evaluate a string quartet by placing each musician in a separate room and asking them to play as loudly as possible. A theater production is not merely the sum of its individual line readings. A basketball player can improve the team without scoring the most points.

In these settings, individual thinking still matter, but collective contribution includes what your performance makes possible for others., 

In many academic classrooms, however, we behave as though this would contaminate the results.

We measure moments, but learning is movement

Our assessments isolate learning not only from other people, but also from time.

Most assessments capture snapshots of what a student could produce on a particular day, under particular conditions, at a particular stage of development. But we know learning is a trajectory and, to describe it, we need to more closely capture progress.

What does this mean? A student struggles, seeks help, tries an approach, abandons it, borrows an idea, revises an assumption, explains something to a peer, and returns to the problem differently.

If we measure only the final answer, much of the learning disappears. If we measure only occasionally, the movement disappears, too. A score can tell us where a student landed. It cannot, by itself, show us how the student changed, what conditions supported that change, or what growth the student helped produce around them.

A system designed for cultivation would need different information. It would need to notice not only where a learner landed, but how the learner moved, what helped that movement happen, and where its effects traveled next.  It would need more frequent, smaller, lower stakes points in time, over time, to tell the true story.

What if contribution were evidence of learning?

At the Workshop School in Philadelphia, students regularly participate in public exhibitions. They present evidence of the skills they have developed, reflect on their successes and challenges, and articulate how their learning has evolved.

Reflection is not an activity added after the “real” learning. It is part of how students demonstrate it. This asks students to do something harder than receive a score: understand what changed.

The same principle could be extended from individual growth to collective capacity.

Traditional assessment asks: What knowledge resides inside this learner?

A more human assessment system might also ask: What capacities has this learner increased within the community?

And because learning unfolds over time:

What changed, what contributed to that change, and where did its effects travel next?

These questions are not opposites. Students still need to write, calculate, analyze, remember, and create, but knowledge is not diminished when it becomes useful to someone else. It is just that its value becomes visible.

Imagine graduating a student who can:

• ask extraordinary questions;
• explain difficult ideas;
• help others persist;
• synthesize disagreements;
• notice who has not spoken;
• change her mind when the evidence changes;
• recognize how other people have shaped her thinking;
• and make groups more intelligent.

Would we call that student educated? Almost certainly. Would her transcript show it? Well, probably not.

What might we learn to notice?

In our work with People-Based Learning, we have been thinking about what it would mean to reimagine KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, as Key PeBL Indicators.

These would be signals of belonging, agency, contribution, connection, and reflection. They would help us notice the human conditions under which learning thrives and the capacities learners develop within those conditions.

Some of these indicators are already intuitive, even if they are not regularly tracked:

• How often do learners feel seen, valued, and safe enough to show up fully?
• How many self-initiated questions are students asking?
• Are those questions becoming more complex over time?
• How often do learners invite a missing perspective?
• How often do they help a group move through confusion?
• How many cross-role, cross-age, or cross-disciplinary teams are forming to address real problems?
• What ideas, relationships, or actions spread beyond the classroom?
• Can learners recognize their role in a learning community and that community’s role in shaping them?
• Are the people around a learner becoming more capable because that learner was present?

These indicators would not replace academic knowledge. They would help us understand what students do with that knowledge, what conditions allow it to grow, and what becomes possible around them.

Collective measurement also does not mean giving every student the same group grade. Nor does it mean awarding points for being agreeable, sociable, or easy to work with.

It means gathering evidence at more than one level.

Curiosity can become evidence

Consider something as simple as an “I Wonder” wall.

Students post their questions as they emerge. At first, the wall may contain only a handful. But over time, the questions multiply, deepen, and begin to connect. One question inspires another. A curiosity that begins in science finds its way into mathematical modeling, engineering prototypes, historical research, or persuasive writing.

If we pay attention only to the final projects, we miss part of the story.

But if teachers and students periodically return to the wall, they can notice:

• how many questions students initiated;
• how those questions changed;
• which questions generated further inquiry;
• which students connected questions across subjects;
• and what new work grew from the group’s collective curiosity.

Curiosity becomes evidence of learning rather than merely a precursor to it.

This does not require reducing curiosity to a single score. It requires gathering traces: questions, revisions, connections, reflections, and resulting actions.

The goal is not to turn every meaningful human capacity into another standardized metric.

It is to create ways of seeing what our current systems leave invisible.

Learning leaves ripples

We have also been developing Ripples of Impact Mapping, a participatory method for tracing the effects of learning beyond its most immediate or easily counted outcomes.

Inspired by the University of Minnesota’s Ripple Effects Mapping approach, it asks participants to reflect on and visually map changes that traditional metrics often miss:

• an assumption reconsidered;
• a new sense of agency;
• a relationship strengthened;
• trust built across differences;
• an idea carried into another setting;
• an action taken by someone outside the original experience;
• or a community becoming more capable of addressing a problem.

It reimagines ROI not as return on investment, but as Ripples of Impact.

Traditional measurement often looks for a straight line between an intervention and an outcome.

Human learning rarely moves that way.

It travels through people. It changes direction. It combines with other ideas. It appears in new contexts. Sometimes its most consequential effects emerge in another person, another room, or much later.

Ripples of Impact Mapping does not ask only: Did this work? It also asks: What changed? Who helped produce that change? Where did it travel next?

This is not assessment done invisibly to learners. The people involved help identify, interpret, and map the effects themselves.

That participation matters. Learners should not merely generate data for someone else to interpret. They should have opportunities to recognize how they changed, what shaped that change, and how their presence affected others.

Placing a second question beside the first

Schools do not need to invent an entirely new accountability system tomorrow.

They can begin by placing a second question beside the first.

These questions could appear in exhibition rubrics, project reflections, student-led conferences, peer feedback, advisory check-ins, and portfolios.

Students might document one moment when they:

• changed someone’s understanding;
• invited a missing perspective;
• helped a group move through confusion;
• offered an idea another person developed further;
• revised their thinking because of someone else;
• or carried something they learned into another setting.

Teachers might look for these moments not only to describe what happened, but to decide what to cultivate next.

Does this group need more ways to distribute participation? Does this student need an opportunity to lead through questioning rather than presentation? Are learners forming meaningful connections across roles and disciplines? Is an idea gaining enough momentum to travel beyond the classroom?

The value of assessment should not end with a description of where students are. It should help us understand what to make possible tomorrow.

The goal is to make learning between people visible.  Outside of school, we know these paths are essential. One of the most important outcomes of an education is not merely becoming a person who knows more, it is becoming a person whose presence helps more knowing happen.

About the Author

Jane R. Shore, Ed.D., is an accomplished education researcher, idea visualizer, and community builder with over two decades of experience as a student, teacher, and high school co-founder. As the founder of School of Thought PHL, she is dedicated to fostering meaningful learning by bridging the gap between rapid knowledge growth and essential human connection. Her work is characterized by an interdisciplinary approach that blends learning science with storytelling and visual art to make complex research findings accessible and actionable for educators and organizations alike.

Dr. Shore is the author of People-Based Learning: The Future of Learning is Human (Routledge, 2026). This work serves as a guide for leaders and lifelong learners to shift from system-focused models to those rooted in the understanding that humans are biologically wired for connection. Her model, which weaves together the three core moves of “Connect, Reflect, and Affect,” provides a framework for creating learning environments that are intentional, inclusive, and capable of translating deep insight into lasting, meaningful change.

Links

• Jane Shore LinkedIn
• School of Thought PHL
• Jane Shore Edutopia Profile
• School of Thought Substack
• Revolution School Research
• People-Based Learning: The Future of Learning is Human