What makes Ellie’s experience so compelling? Ellie was the most improved of all of the students in camp, moving from one of the lowest scores on the pretest at the start of camp to one of the highest scores eighteen days later. She started in seventy-third position but ended in an impressive thirteenth position, moving up sixty places in the process—and improving her score by 450 percent! Ellie was working in Coyle’s “zone of accelerated learning”13—pushing at the edge of her understanding, making mistakes and correcting them, and developing her understanding at an accelerated rate.
