“Stuck in Place”: Mindsets and Habits of Struggling Math Learners in a Self-Directed Environment
By Trey Lacker, Dr. Caleb Collier, and Dr. Tyler Thigpen
When the Problem Isn't Resources: What We Found When We Studied Struggling Math Learners
We've spent the last couple of years at the Institute for Self-Directed Learning studying how kids learn math at The Forest School, our learner-driven microschool in Atlanta. Last year we published a study on the learners who thrive. This spring, we asked the harder question: what about the ones who don't?
"Stuck in Place," our new study, looks at learners (grades 4-12) who scored more than one grade level below where they should be on our math diagnostic. We surveyed learners, then sat down with them for in-depth interviews. We wanted to understand what it actually feels like to be a struggling learner in a self-directed environment: what they believe about themselves, about math, and about the help available to them.
What we found surprised us, at least a little.
The conventional story about struggling learners focuses on what they don't have. Not enough support, not enough time, not enough resources. That story doesn't fit here. These kids aren't resource-poor. 78.4% of them said their Studio peers could help them with math. Most could name specific friends who were good at it and willing to help. They had access to digital platforms, a math specialist, office hours, and Math Labs. Several had outside tutors.
And yet 72.6% of them rarely or never work alongside anyone else. They know the help is there. They just don't reach for it.
That gap, between resources and action, turned out to be the whole story.
When we dug into the interviews, we found two overlapping sets of barriers. The first was mindsets: ways of thinking about math and about themselves that made progress harder than it needed to be. The most common was what we're calling "fixed math identity," the belief, often held for years, that being bad at math is just part of who you are. "Math has never been my strong suit." "I've always struggled with it." Fifteen of the 20 learners we interviewed described some version of this. If you believe you can't, you stop trying new strategies. You stop asking. You stop pushing through the hard part.
Close behind was what we're calling the completion mindset. Many of these learners had replaced the logic of learning with the logic of finishing. Get the badge, move on, graduate. Understanding was secondary.
Shame was the third major mindset theme, and it was everywhere. Fourteen of the 20 learners described situations where they needed help, knew it, and didn't ask. The barrier wasn't the absence of someone to ask. It was the fear that asking would reveal something embarrassing about them. One learner told us that she prefers using ChatGPT because "a computer will never get tired of you asking questions." That comment is not really about AI—it’s about what asking for help feels like in a human context when you've been made to feel like you should already know things.
The second set of barriers was habits: behaviors that, compounded over time, kept learners from making real progress. 56.8% of learners surveyed spend fewer than 2 hours per week on math. The school's recommendation is closer to 4 hours. Most describe their math time as improvised. They do it when they feel like it, right before bed, when nothing else is going on. A few hadn't done any math in several weeks. In a traditional school, the structure is external. At a self-directed school, learners have to build it themselves, and many of these learners haven't.
The comparison to our first study is stark. Among the thriving learners we studied in 2025, 72% regularly turned to peers when stuck. In this group, it's 27.5%. Thriving learners use multiple resources: Math Labs, YouTube, peers, whiteboards, worked examples. Most learners in this study use only their assigned platform, or the platform plus ChatGPT. Physical materials, writing things down, working problems on paper: almost absent.
The findings push back on something we hear a lot in self-directed learning circles: the idea that if you just give kids freedom, they'll naturally flourish. Some do. But these learners show that freedom without the right internal infrastructure can also produce stagnation. Self-direction isn't a condition. It's a set of skills: knowing how to set goals, seek help, push through confusion, and use your time well. Those skills don't emerge automatically. They're built, and they need the support of the adults around a learner to develop.
The good news is that none of what we found is permanent. Fixed identity, completion mindset, shame around help-seeking: these are all learnable. The thriving learners we studied aren't smarter. They've developed a different set of beliefs and habits, mostly with the support of the people around them.
The paper closes with concrete recommendations for educators, families, and learners themselves. For educators: teach an explicit "getting unstuck" routine, build peer learning into the structure of the school day, help learners find genuine personal reasons to care about math, and normalize asking for help as an act of courage, not a confession of inadequacy. For families: allow productive struggle without rushing to rescue, respond to questions with curiosity, and help create consistency around when math happens. For learners: name your stuck pattern, write things down, reach for peers before you're desperate, and find one real reason math matters to you.
You can read the full paper at here. We're sharing it because we think the story it tells isn't just about one school or one subject. These patterns show up anywhere learners are expected to take ownership of their learning without being explicitly taught how.
Self-directed learning doesn't mean learning alone. It means learning with ownership. These learners have the potential for that ownership. They need the people around them to help them build it.
