Personalized Learning for the College Math Classroom
Author: Arlene Vinion Dubiel
With the anticipated learning loss due to the pandemic, forced remote learning, and the ubiquitous use of technology for the classroom, there has been considerable talk about personalized learning. What exactly is personalized learning? What are the advantages and disadvantages of other strategies? And, most importantly, how do you implement personalized learning in the college math classroom?
What is personalized learning?
Personalized learning has been touted as a way to improve a student's educational experiences and increase learning. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative have invested funds to support personalized learning in K-12. With this gain in popularity, the meaning of personalized learning has become somewhat diluted, needing to be clearly defined.
The U.S. Government defines personalized learning as “instruction in which the pace of learning and the instructional approach are optimized for the needs of each learner.” (p. 7). It goes further to say that “learning activities are meaningful and relevant to learners, driven by their interests, and often self-initiated.” The Rand Corporation, which publishes research and reports from personalized learning initiatives funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, defines personalized learning as a “broad set of strategies intended to make each student’s educational experiences responsive to his or her talents, interests, and needs.” These broad definitions need further refinement, so we must look at common themes in personalized learning research.
An introductory article in the Journal of Research on Technology in Education on personalized learning, published in 2020, describes how researchers have defined personalized learning. It's clear that personalized learning, in practice, is a continuum of approaches that can vary in depth, grain size, and ownership. From the definitions and discussion, two key elements emerge. First, personalized learning puts the student first, considering their learning needs, interests, strengths, personal experiences, etc. Second, students are given ownership over their learning, allowing them to make choices that fit their individual needs.
Despite the investment from technology-based foundations in personalized learning, technology is not a requirement for learning to be personalized. Many technological advances in education, like adaptive learning platforms and access to multiple modes of instruction, have made implementing personalized learning easier. However, it is still possible and encouraged to engage students in personalized learning without technology. Personalized learning is distinguished from differentiation by requiring student choice and ownership, while differentiation adapts instruction to fit students, rarely allowing student choice. The bottom line is that if you want to implement personalized learning, you must recognize and support each student as an individual and enable the student to choose their education. In this way, personalized learning sounds like a daunting task, but with the ideas shared in this blog and elsewhere, it can be possible.
Benefits and Challenges of Personalized Learning
We want to implement personalized learning because the benefits appear to be obvious. Addressing an individual student’s learning needs can fill deficits without wasting time on topics the student has already mastered. And allowing students to choose learning experiences to fit their interests and talents can motivate them to learn what and how they want to learn. Indeed, some studies and reports demonstrate the success of personalized learning in various situations and with different student populations. However, some barriers prevent personalized learning from being implemented with fidelity. More research needs to be done to show that it is beneficial and can work in multiple situations.
One of the barriers to personalized learning is competing requirements and expectations. For example, K-12 teachers, administrators, and students had positive experiences with a technology-based, adaptive, personalized learning math program. However, the program was discontinued because accountability requirements required high-stakes testing on students’ given grade level, not their content level. The concepts of the personalized learning program were undermined by outside accountability pressures, forcing teachers to make instructional decisions that would benefit the school (accountability) over individual students (personalization).
Even when all stakeholders support personalized learning, the implementation can be a challenge. Educational programs, even when well-developed, will be ineffective if not implemented with fidelity. Teachers must understand and adopt the underlying premises of an educational program. Without teacher buy-in, the program will not work, no matter how good it is. This holds true for all types of educational initiatives, including personalized learning.
Seeing Students as Individuals
With personalized learning, it is critical to see each student as an individual. This is intuitive until you have several dozen students in different class sections or even a couple hundred in a single large lecture hall. There’s a real practical challenge to addressing each individual with unique strengths, prior experiences, and learning needs when you have many students. It’s impossible for you, as a single instructor, to address every student’s individual needs. Instead, you need to make a few general but accurate assumptions about your students and prepare learning experiences to address those assumptions.
One accurate assumption is that your students’ experiences are not like your own experiences. This is the crux of recent education reform laws in states like Illinois and Virginia, addressing culturally responsive teaching. While there has been some controversy with these laws, you’ll find that if you read them, they are logical and mild in their directives. In short, they say that as an educator, you must acknowledge that your background and life experiences are not like the vast majority of your students. Further, it would be best if you respect your students’ differences. These differences can come from location (rural vs. urban), socioeconomic status, perceived (and present) racial injustices, language barriers, cultural understandings, and even age. For example, see how many of your students react when you ask a question, receive silence, and then say, “Bueller… Bueller…” Yes, this is a reference to the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” which many of your students may not get due to age and culture differences!
In addition to making accurate assumptions about your students’ backgrounds, it’s important to measure where they are with understanding content. A diagnostic pre-assessment can identify students’ strengths and weaknesses concerning content. Pre-assessments ideally address readiness, ensuring students have the needed background knowledge and skills to engage in new content. Some textbook publishers have online programs or tests available that can be used for this purpose. You may also create your own pre-assessments for particular topics that can be incorporated into instruction with an entry ticket and subsequent discussion.
After giving a diagnostic pre-assessment, it's vital that each student knows and understands the results. Students are not always aware of their own strengths and weaknesses concerning content knowledge and skills. Giving them access to results and providing feedback can help students determine their next steps in learning. This self-awareness is critical for personalized learning to work. If students cannot accurately identify what they need, they will be unable to choose the learning experiences that work for them.
A Student’s Choice: Engaging in Learning
In addition to addressing students as individuals with unique learning needs, you must allow students to choose how they engage in learning. It is not your responsibility to give each student what they need. Instead, you can provide students with options for engagement. In this way, students take ownership of their learning, identify learning gaps from pre-assessments, and choose how to fill those gaps with experiences that work for them.
At a basic level of personalized learning, you can provide content in different formats. A colleague created short topic-based videos to use in her flipped classroom. She provided students with the completed videos, the lecture slides as note sheets, and a copy of the video transcript. Providing these three options proved to be very little additional work for the instructor, but it did allow students various ways to access the content. Students with audio and visual impairments especially appreciated having the different formats available, as they could access the content in the form that works best for them.
Having students work in groups to complete tasks and projects can also give them some choice and ownership over their learning. When students work together, they can draw upon each other's strengths and help each other fill possible gaps. This does not mean that students who understand concepts teach those who are struggling. Instead, tasks and projects are robust and allow students to use their unique perspectives to engage and contribute to the group.
If you or your institution allow access to yourSTEM.net, there is an excellent series of videos from Lee DeWitt on differentiating STEM. Lee shares how she addresses her students’ unique needs by giving them options for accessing content. She also allows her students to demonstrate their learning, from completing book problems and writing definitions to creating physical models or writing and performing songs. Each learning and assessment option is given a point value, and students are required to complete a certain number of points each week. Giving students these choices lets them take ownership over their learning, empowering them to be engaged and learning.
By addressing students’ interests, you can personalize students’ learning experiences. One of the articles published in the Journal of Research on Technology in Education looked at the effect of student choice based upon interest in a college algebra classroom. Students who were given a choice in what data sets to analyze had higher gains on pre- to post-test measures with a small but positive effect size than those given a data set by the instructor. This example of giving students a choice based upon interest is a simple way to introduce personalized learning into your own math classroom.
Grading with Personalized Learning
When you engage students in personalized learning, you may need to modify your grading system to allow for individual student situations. Some students may demonstrate mastery of the content with a single robust assessment, while others may need multiple attempts or varied formats to show their understanding. To ensure your grading system can accommodate personalized learning, you must first analyze your course objectives and identify what types of evidence you will accept (that can show each objective has been met). This evidence can be tests, individual projects, problem sets, or more. Then, consider the quality of the work that needs to be demonstrated for different grades to be given. With personalized learning, the quality of the work takes precedence over the quantity of the work submitted.
Mastery or standards-based grading systems are ideal for personalized learning. A colleague in English uses a single large project as the final course grade for an upper-level course for pre-service teachers. Throughout the semester, students submit portions and drafts of this project for which they receive feedback but no grades. As detailed on a large rubric, the final grade is determined by how well their project meets or exceeds expectations. The concept of ungrading also fits well with personalized learning. With this system, students can choose how many learning activities they engage in, setting their grades accordingly with more activities equaling a higher grade. This gives students ownership over their course engagement as well as their learning.
However, few colleges allow mastery of standards-based systems, and as instructors in math, we prefer to use numbers to determine grades. When the pandemic started, my students struggled to complete all of the learning activities provided. So, I reduced the point values for learning activities to only 10% of the overall grade, with the other 90% coming from assessments that demonstrated mastery. This allowed my students to choose what learning activities they would engage in while not unfairly penalizing them in their grades. The grading system shifted from quantity of work to quality of work, which can support a personalized learning approach.
Can personalized learning work for you and your students? You won’t know unless you try it. Be sure to recognize and support students as individuals, allowing them to have choices in their learning. Let your grading system focus on quality and not quantity. Don’t give your students what they need. Instead, give them options to empower them to make the learning choices that work for them. You don’t need to have a full-course overhaul, but start small and see how well your students can soar if given a little freedom. Good luck!
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