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Shoolchildren from small-town Georgia to suburban Baltimore will encounter a new approach to learning when they head back to class this fall—one that makes them partners in their own education, not just participants.
It's called personalized learning, and it has become one of the buzziest of buzzwords in American education in recent years, even though there's no single definition of what it is. A recent RAND study sought to clarify, following dozens of schools to see how educators personalized the learning in their classrooms, and what it meant for their students.
The study found that students in personalized learning classrooms made greater gains in math and reading than their peers in other schools. Yet it also found barriers to fully personalized learning, from rigid state standards to time demands on teachers.
“There's a lot of challenge here, a lot of things to work out,” said John Pane, the study's lead author, a senior scientist at RAND who holds the distinguished chair in education innovation. “But it looks promising.”
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