THE PROJECT
The Navigate Project
Supporting Students’ Learning Mindsets in Advising
THE CONTEXT & CHALLENGE
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, persistence in higher education, and well-being.
THE PARTNERSHIP & APPROACH
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, especially for students who are historically underrepresented in postsecondary success outcomes.
From 2019 to 2026, Motivate Lab partnered with the Gates Foundation to bridge the gap between innovative practice and rigorous research in order to accelerate the adoption of learning mindset-supportive messages and practices in postsecondary education and career contexts.
The Navigate Project is dedicated to developing and adapting evidence-demonstrated practices in the postsecondary access and success space by:
- Codifying existing practices from innovative programs
- Building capacity to integrate new practices into the advising space
- Laying infrastructure for infusing practices into programs more broadly
Together, these activities synthesize key practices across research and practice to inform the field of advising and related programming.
OUR FOCUS
In partnership with advising programs, researchers, funders, and leading experts across the country, The Navigate Project is working to:
Empathize & Learn how advising programs support—or unintentionally undermine—learning mindsets
Co-create and disseminate a suite of tools advisors can use to support students through new challenges
Test & Evaluate high-leverage practices for supporting students’ learning mindsets
Increase awareness of ways advising programs can support learning mindsets in a way that amplifies student identity, voice, and agency on their path to education and career success.
THE LEARNINGS
The Navigate Project has:
- Developed a suite of tools and resources that can be utilized, created by a team of researchers and practitioners:
- People Connections
- Values Connection
- Motivating Futures Course
- Learning Mindset Climate Survey
- The Navigator Toolkit
- Hosted six network convenings
- Partnered with 30 advising organizations across the country over the past seven years to inform the design and test the implementation of our tools and services
- Measured the psychological air that students experience with over 17 advising organizations and over 1,448 students and staff
The Navigator Toolkit
The Navigator Toolkit houses evidence-based resources and activities that highlight learning mindset supportive practices.
Values Connection Activity
Values Connection is a FREE activity based on Motivate Lab’s relevance affirmation intervention research, in which students explore their personal values and connect these values to their education and future goals.
People Connections Activity
People Connections is a FREE extension activity to Values Connection that seeks to ground students in a sense of purpose as they explore the value of social capital. Instead of connecting who they are to their education and career goals, as students do in Values Connection, People Connections facilitates students’ connections to other people in support of their goals, thereby helping them in the social capital-building process.
Motivating Futures Course
The Motivating Futures Course is an asynchronous online course grounded in learning mindset research to equip practitioners with mindset-supportive practices as they guide students through the postsecondary transition and planning process. Request a free demo today!
The Learning Mindset Climate Survey
A program improvement tool for schools and postsecondary advising programs to gather input on how effectively they support students’ learning mindsets during the transition to postsecondary contexts.
Next Steps
The Navigate Project seeks to scale our mission toward a future where every advising program has the tools, knowledge, and capacity to foster adaptive learning mindsets—ensuring that all students, especially those who are underrepresented in postsecondary education and career settings, receive the support they need to navigate their postsecondary journey with confidence and purpose.
We seek to implement this vision in partnership with organizations from a variety of contexts, including dual enrollment, higher education advising, K-12 advising, work-based learning experiences, and community-based organizations. For example, with support from the Lumina Foundation, we are currently partnering with state-level advising programs in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Florida to help them integrate learning-mindset supportive practices in their work.
Navigate Project Partners
This work was funded by the Gates Foundation. The findings and conclusions contained within are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of the Gates Foundation.
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Bridging learning mindset research with advising practices