Adaptive learning was an effort first made by Kaplan. Kaplan, a big education company in New York City, poured in millions of dollars but was not successful in pulling it off. It was not before 2008, when Knewton, an adaptive learning company, started building an adaptive learning platform that people started noticing.
Google the term adaptive learning, and you’ll find millions of results. “Adaptive”, “personalized” and “machine learning” have become education buzzwords. These terms get used so often and for such a wide range of products and services that you could almost think that any learning tool with a digital component could be considered “adaptive.”
So what does adaptive learning mean? No two students come from exactly the same background or learn exactly the same way. Teachers have long understood the importance of differentiated instruction.
Adaptive learning is an educational method, which uses computers as interactive teaching devices. Computers adapt the presentation of educational material according to students’ learning needs, as indicated by their responses to questions and tasks. The content is personalized.
The technology encompasses aspects derived from various fields of study including computer science, education and psychology. Adaptive learning has been partially driven by a realization that tailored learning can’t be achieved on a large-scale using traditional, non-adaptive approaches. Teachers do not have the ability to replicate what computers can do.
Adaptive learning allows teachers to assesses what each student knows and how each student learns best down to the atomic concept level. Teachers can track everything each student does and how each progresses over time, empowering teachers to design lessons customized to each individual student with Edu-tailors homework becomes a unique personalized experience.
Adaptive learning enables teachers to:
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- Create personalized rewards for students to earn.
- Know exactly what their students have mastered and how they learn best. With Edu-tailors teachers don’t have to design a one size fits all curriculum but can tailor the material to challenge each student at the appropriate level.
- Cluster students with similar learning profiles then teachers can develop unique instruction for those groups to keep them challenged.
- Collaborate extensively with each other and they can share practice questions or lesson plans with the community.
- Statistically determine which community created material is most effective so that teachers can incorporate these materials into their lesson plans.
- Assess their students concept mastery compared:
- To that of the rest of the class
- To the region or
- To all students on Edu-tailors.
Earlier research looked at how, on average, students performed better in courses with -powered adaptive assignments than in those without. Further analysis shows that -powered adaptive assignments for struggling students narrow the gap between them and high-performing students on subsequent assignments. Closing this gap is one of the biggest challenges instructors can face in the classroom.
In “Reducing the Gap: How Adaptive Follow-Ups Help Struggling Students,” Hillary Green-Lerman and Kevin Wilson of looked at 48,202 students who used an online homework tool for college-level science textbooks in the spring of 2014. Beyond ordinary homework assignments, students who didn’t show mastery of the concepts they were learning received adaptive follow-up assignments. These adaptive assignments present a personalized sequence of questions designed to address each student’s individual strengths and weaknesses.
Research performed by Knewton shows that students who were assigned an adaptive follow-up after struggling on a first assignment showed improvements of between 4 to 12% points on subsequent assignments relative to their classmates who did not have adaptive follow-up assignments.
Students with a lower score will have more room to improve than high-performing ones. So Green-Lerman and Wilson corrected for initial differences in grade distributions between the higher- and lower-performing students. When taking this correction into account, they still see an average improvement of 3 points, and as much as 8 points.
