Kaylin Ratner has been conducting research with a nonprofit for the past four years that essentially turns traditional education on its head.

Instead of devising and delivering a curriculum for students, GripTape puts youth in the driver’s seat, allowing them to choose what they want to learn.

GripTape, a beyond-school-time program, offers youth ages 14-19 to take on a learning challenge over 10 weeks. The students design their own learning experience and receive $500 and a Champion—essentially a cheerleader and encourager—to support them along the way.

“Traditional education uses a top-down approach, where we say this is what you need to know,” says Ratner, an assistant professor in Educational Psychology in the College of Education and a Public Engagement Faculty Fellow in 2023-24. “There’s definitely a place for that, but GripTape is unique in its bottom-up approach, listening to youth and recognizing that learning happens everywhere.”

When she says “everywhere,” she means it—both in terms of geography and content. Since its inception in 2015, more than 3,600 teenagers—“Challengers”—in all 50 states have taken on learning challenges through GripTape, whose tagline, “Youth Driving Learning,” succinctly describes its purpose and its approach to education.

Of those more than 3,600 Challengers, 90% said that taking part in the learning challenge has changed how they will approach learning in the future, 98% said they gained skills and knowledge that will be valuable to their future success, and 100% said they would recommend the experience to their friends.

Researching Students’ Identity, Purpose, and Life Meaning

Ratner began her association with GripTape in 2020. She had just earned her Ph.D. from Cornell University and, partly because of the pandemic, stayed on at Cornell to work with her advisor, who had received a grant to conduct research through GripTape. When Ratner came to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2022, she continued her research through the nonprofit.

GripTape is a perfect fit for Ratner, whose research focuses on how adolescents and emerging adults reconcile their senses of identity, purpose, and meaning in life. To that end, she is also director of the Self and Psychological Well-being Lab, conducting research with graduate and undergraduate students. She is particularly interested in how these psychosocial processes interface with mental health.

“One of the things that attracted me to staying on and working with this project once I came to Illinois was even though GripTape is a self-driven learning program, they are really interested in outcomes that go far beyond whether youth are learning in the program,” she says. “They are interested in how youth well-being and psychological development is changing in the context of the program. Maybe what’s happening to youth as they go through GripTape is more than just education.”

For example, Ratner says, GripTape helps youth feel purposeful. “Youth are allowed to engage in things they’re passionate about, they’re allowed to drive their experience, and these are the ingredients we tend to look for when we think about whether youth are purposeful,” she says.

That sense of purpose leads to happiness, she adds. “We’re seeing on days that youth are reporting they’re feeling more purposeful than usual, they also tend to be happier,” Ratner explains. “They’re reporting more positive affect, lower negative affect, and greater life satisfaction.”

Students in Charge of Their Learning

Anyone aged 14-19 can apply to the program. Applications are evaluated based on goal clarity, and priority is given to youth who are under-resourced geographically, economically, or in other ways lacking the means and support they need to accomplish their goal.

“It’s very ideographic. Youth can design whatever learning challenge they want to undertake,” Ratner says. “It’s totally open and driven by their passion.” Learning challenges are designed both inside and outside of traditional education, with nearly half being interdisciplinary—something that is hard to get in a traditional education setting, she says.

“Some are very narrow, like I want to learn how to do embroidery or learn a foreign language,” Ratner says. “Some are like I want to study African dance. We have one Challenger who looked at solutions for educational support for DACA recipients in higher education. It spans everything you can think of.”

That is the beauty and the intrigue of GripTape: It puts students in charge of their learning. They are free to pursue what they are truly passionate about. And they get a Champion who provides emotional support through weekly or biweekly video calls.

“The Champions help them brainstorm through roadblocks and provide emotional support along the way,” Ratner says. Pointedly, Champions do not act as mentors; Challengers are not paired with subject-matter experts. “They don’t want to create this mentorship or teacher power dynamic,” Ratner explains. That could derail the purpose from “youth-driven learning” and turn it into “mentor-driven learning.”

Still, the Champions play a crucial role. “We’re seeing that on days when Challengers meet with their GripTape Champion, they report a greater sense of purpose, greater self-concept, and higher self-esteem,” Ratner says. “And when they’re feeling more purposeful, they tend to make more progress the next day—and when they make more progress, it makes them feel more purposeful. Youth who feel like they have completed the most across the GripTape challenge have the tightest cycles between purpose and goal progress. So, it underscores how important it is to let youth do things that they find most meaningful.”

New Study Underway

Ratner has been working on a new GripTape project with two other assistant professors in Educational Psychology, Jessica Gladstone and Aixa Marchand. The project focuses on eudaemonia, a concept first developed by Aristotle and centered on achieving happiness through finding your true self.

“Eudaemonia is this sense of authenticity, of personal expression, of doing things that ‘feel like you,’” Ratner explains. “I might eat pizza because I enjoy it, but I don’t think of it as an aspect of who I am. On the other hand, I got a Ph.D. not because it was fun, but because it felt authentic to who I am, it was personally expressive. It felt like me. So, there are these two different types of happiness that you can have.”

Ratner and her colleagues are developing a eudaemonic scale that measure youths’ beliefs to the extent that GripTape can:

• bring out the best in them,
• help them grow and learn about themselves,
• provide the resources to support their pursuit of their life purpose, and
• offer a place where they can be their authentic selves.

“We ask youth to rate their agreement on whether GripTape helps them pursue their purpose in life and broaden their horizons,” Ratner says. “Then we ask them the same question about their own school. And there’s a massive percentage difference—forty to fifty percent—in terms of youth who feel more fulfilled through GripTape.”

She cautions that these responses are coming from students who are already seeking out greater and more purposeful challenges in education beyond their schools but says “youth who find GripTape might be getting something from the program that they’re not getting in other places, and not just in terms of learning content.”

Lessons for Traditional Education

Traditional classroom education obviously can’t operate like GripTape. But traditional education could benefit by emulating GripTape in some ways, Ratner says.

“Students in traditional classrooms might not have entire choices about what they’re going to learn or how they’re going to learn it but giving them a level of autonomy is going to promote their engagement in traditional education,” she says. “In our next grant application, we want to think about what could be extrapolated from GripTape into traditional education. Is it using the Champion model, is it the choice aspect, is it giving students a free period to pursue whatever they want? These are all questions we’re excited to think about in the future.”

One area Ratner believes traditional education should emulate GripTape in is in whole person development.

“Education needs to nurture autonomy, helping youth explore their passions and find their purpose and develop the sense of who they are and where they’re going,” she says. “If traditional education did a bit more of that, then students wouldn’t feel so pushed off a cliff when they graduate from college. If your identity is rooted in more than just your vocation or your career, if you’re more of a whole person when you leave college, it might make the transition easier to navigate.”

Empowering Youth at All Levels

GripTape gives youth a voice. It has a youth advisory board whose recommendations are taken seriously. Some youth act as Champions.

“GripTape empowers youth at all levels,” Ratner says. “It offers them something that they’re interested in and that they might not get otherwise. It gives them a platform to explore their interest.”

The relationship with the nonprofit has helped Ratner explore her own interests as well.

“We understand each other’s goals and we work together to meet those goals,” she says. “It takes a long time to build a relationship with people and to collect data and go through all the processes. But it’s been really rewarding.

“I can’t underscore enough how important it is to get to know a community partner, to engage in the long-term relationship and really understand each other. We know why we’re all here. And it’s important.

“I’m really excited to see where things take us into the future.”