Personalization in Education

Abstract

In today’s increasingly competitive world, the concept of “one-size-fits-all” has become anachronistic and unproductive. Today’s reality requires educational organizations to rethink the services they give to meet students’ individual needs, as well as the ways available to enable them to reach their full potential. The current review aims to examine the most recent studies on the subject including the doubts, tensions, and ambiguities they raise.

1. Introduction

In today’s increasingly competitive world, the concept of “one-size-fits-all” has become anachronistic and unproductive. Today’s reality requires organizations to rethink the services they provide to the consumers of their services in order to meet their individual needs. At the same time, these consumers have expectations that organizations will be instrumental in helping them to realize goals that reflect their personal values in line with their understanding and preferences.

Yet, there are certain areas in which the principles of personalization are either not applied at all or only partially applied despite their enormous potential in promoting the field in question.

In recent years, the perception among education experts has been that personalized education is the way to enable students to reach their full potential and that it is an approach that represents an optimal investment of the system’s resources. Personalization can even help narrow gaps between students in important and challenging disciplines. If, in the past, there were no tools to do so, today, technology may be a crucial factor in the implementation of personalization in education.

Along with its analysis of personalization in education policy as a modern but controversial reorganization, this chapter also reviews some of the latest studies on the subject including the doubts, tensions, and ambiguities they arouse.

2. Personalization

2.1 Definitions and designations

Personalization should be clearly distinguished from customization. Both customization and personalization are based on the assumption that a uniform offering is not sufficient to meet everyone’s needs. As defined by Webster’s Dictionary, to personalize means “to make something individual; specifically: to mark as the property of a particular person” [1]. This definition implies that the goal is to first become aware of the needs and then effectively meet them [2].

The major result of personalization in education is the maximization of motivation, resourcefulness, and creativity of students and teachers alike, teaching and learning through measures, such as implementing individualized educational programs, designing individualized learning goals and methods, and finally, meeting individual special needs [3]. Personalization of learning is intended to create a situation that helps the learners realize their potential and reach expertise in various fields by choosing appropriate learning strategies from a wide range of possible pedagogical strategies [4]. Students are empowered and hence expected to take responsibility and ownership of their learning in accordance with their interests and personal goals and finally, to understand its unique value for them. For the personalization process to succeed, students should regularly receive feedback, in real-time, to promote their learning and develop independent learning skills [5].

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), developed by Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers, has helped people to understand themselves and their behaviors. It is based on typological theory (2014), which posits four essential psychological functions through which we see the world: sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking. All of us rely on one function more than others. The MBTI identifies our preferences which are driven by our interests, values, needs, and motivations. It describes personality preferences rather than measuring skills or abilities and suggests that there are no “good or bad” preferences, rather, that all the personal preferences are equally important [6]. This has been well documented and researched in hundreds of scientific studies over the past 40 years [6, 7, 8]. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator reports a person’s preferences on four scales as follows:

1. Extraversion or introversion -where a person prefers to focus attention

2. Sensing or intuition - how a person prefers to absorb information

3. Thinking or feeling - how a person deals with the external world

4. Judging or perceiving - how a person understands external messages

The concept of personalization derives from two significant origins sources: the theory of multiple intelligences developed by Howard Gardner [9, 10] and the theory of meaningful learning [11].

2.1.1 Gardner’s theory as an underpinning of personalization

Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences revolutionized the definition of intelligence. For decades, intelligence was seen as a uniform entity: general fitness (g) that can be measured using the IQ scale, the location along which people are rated as more or less intelligent.

According to Gardner, humans have multiple, largely autonomous intelligences, which are not simple to measure quantitatively. The theory is based on a simple insight: people are not generally intelligent in all areas of endeavor rather, people are intelligent in certain fields. A person can be very intelligent in certain areas, and not in others. In other words, each person has an “intelligence profile.”

The message of the theory of multiple intelligences to educators is that students differ from one another. Each student is intelligent in their own way and therefore, everyone deserves an education tailored to their skills and tendencies.

The theory of multiple intelligences has great educational promise of which only a small part has been realized so far. Many educators around the world, influenced by this theory, have developed ways to diagnose the profile of student intelligences, organize educational content, and evaluate and design spaces and materials in ways that suit the different intelligences [12].

2.1.2 The theory of meaningful learning as another underpinning of personalization

Correspondingly, meaningful learning is a personal knowledge-building process during which the learner raises questions, locates sources of information, processes information, and creates personally relevant new knowledge. According to Ausubel [11], the most important factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Meaningful learning seeks to enable the student to fully realize personal potential and develop excellence. Meaningful learning provides an experience of growth and development, while deepening the topics that interest learners and are suitable for their needs.

Within the meaningful learning process, the pedagogical and psychological experiences of learning complement, influence, and empower each other. To ensure meaningful learning and achieve its goals, teachers are required to re-examine many components, including learning objectives, learner characterization, learning processes, teaching and assessment methods, the nature of the educational organization, and training of staff entering the profession. The curriculum of meaningful personalized learning should be linked to real life whenever possible, helping students to connect their education to the future. Each school at any level identifies a set of essential studies – in literature and language, writing, mathematics, social studies, science, and the arts – in which students must demonstrate achievement in order to graduate [13].

Meaningful learning, which leads to longer retention than memorization, occurs when students relate new concepts to pre-existing familiar ones. Changes then occur in our cognitive structure, concepts are modified, and new links are created. It is a useful tool because it enables real learning, generates greater retention, and facilitates transfer to other real-world situations [14, 15].

2.2 Personalization and technology

Personalized learning employing computers and mobile devices such as phones and tablets is one of the latest trends making a global impact, promising to deliver new methods that enhance and promote learning. Nevertheless, there are some concerns around access, security, affordability, teacher expertise, and learner proficiency in using digital tools. The devices and practices connected with their use have been appealing to education stakeholders for a variety of reasons, yet personalization has been the dominant motive in e-learning research and practice, even if it has not always been identified this way. The technology helps to ensure that students are not held back or left behind by larger groups.

2.2.1 Personalization and cognition

Personalization in education refers to tailoring educational capabilities and instructional strategies to meet the individual’s cognitive level. Hence, it involves adapting instructional strategies, content, and pace to optimize learning outcomes for each learner. The connection between personalization in education and cognition is multi-faceted and refers to the mental processes and abilities involved in acquiring, processing, storing, and using information.

Personalized learning approaches consider students’ anticipatory schemata, namely, their interests, goals, and prior knowledge, which can significantly enhance their motivation [16]. When learners are actively interested in and motivated to learn, their cognitive processes become more efficient and effective. This heightened engagement facilitates attention, memory encoding, and information processing.

Everyone usually has his/her own learning style. Studies show that individuals will learn the different methods and have their own preferences and ways to receive and process information [17]. Personalization recognizes that learners have different learning styles and preferences. Some students may excel in visual learning, while others may prefer auditory or kinesthetic learning. By aligning instructional methods with cognitive individual learning styles, personalized education can optimize cognitive processing and improve information preservation and understanding.

Cognitive load theory [18] suggests that learners have limited cognitive resources available for processing new information. Cognitive load may be viewed as the level of “mental energy” required to process a given amount of information. As the amount of information to be processed increases, so the associated cognitive load. Cognitive load theory suggests that effective instructional material promotes learning by directing cognitive resources toward activities that are relevant to learning rather than to processes that are adjunct to learning. Personalization can help to manage the cognitive load by presenting information in a way that matches each student’s current knowledge level. By building upon existing cognitive schemas and scaffolding new information, personalized education reduces cognitive overload and promotes deeper learning.

Moreover; personalization also empowers students to take ownership of their learning process [19]. When learners have choices and control over their educational experiences, they develop self-controlled learning skills. Self-regulated learners actively monitor their own thinking, set goals, plan strategies, and reflect on their cognitive growth. Those processes enhance cognition by promoting self-awareness, strategic thinking, and adaptive learning.

Personalized education often incorporates mastery-based learning, which allows students to progress at their own pace and advance upon mastering specific skills or concepts. Mastery learning is an instructional philosophy based on the belief that all students can learn if given an appropriate amount of time as well as appropriate opportunities [20]. Mastery-based learning aligns with cognitive theories of expertise development, emphasizing deliberate practice, and gradual knowledge construction. By enabling learners to focus on individual areas of improvement, personalized education fosters deeper understanding and expertise development.

2.2.2 Personalization and mobile devices

Because mobile devices are generally owned by their users, are highly customizable, and carried by their person throughout the day, they lend themselves to personalization in a way that shared and secured technologies do not. While PCs have offered similar affordances for years, the technology came with serious limitations: learners could not easily carry computers to and from education centers, and many learners could not afford them, so the technology – even when available in computer labs – was not truly personal. Mobile technologies, by virtue of being highly portable and have become a necessity of life, and most students have one, have enormously expanded the potential and practicability of personalized learning. Learning that is both mobile and personalized holds many attractions [21], for instance, applications on mobile phones and tablets enable the selection of more difficult or easier texts for reading assignments depending on the learner’s skills and background knowledge. The conclusion in the policy guidelines is that over time, the adoption of personal mobile technology in learning “will supersede one-size-fits-all models of education” [22].

To date, developments have focused on technology rather than on learner-centric issues. Indeed, each person has a preferred learning style and ignoring this can lead to unstable or ineffective online learning solutions. In fact, it is commonly believed that most people prefer ways of interacting with, absorbing and processing stimuli or information, or simply using a visual medium [8].

2.3 Personalization and educational assessment

Personalization in educational assessment aims to provide parallel pedagogical considerations with respect to student characteristics. A teacher who individualizes instruction identifies the learners’ needs through assessments based on their challenges or disabilities. The teacher analyzes the findings and then formulates recommendations emerging from the assessment. Recommendations are made with or without other professionals’ input in adapting materials and instruction for the different learners with cognitive or neurological diversity [23].

The relationship between internal assessment, which is a prerequisite for personalized evaluation, and external assessment has long been a topic of discussion with regard to the issue of quality assurance in education [24]. External assessment in the form of school inspections appears to have always enjoyed a somewhat distinguished existence due to their ascribed attributes of objectivity, reliability, and comparability [25]. While there is consensus regarding the need for them, their execution has always been heavily criticized [26]. In response to this criticism and in line with recent trends of decentralization and increasing school autonomy, the discussion of personalization assessment methods has become broader. Moreover, some have even suggested [27] adding sections to the Psychometric University Entrance Test, considered one of the most standardized tests, that would reveal a range of aptitudes as well as expose multiple intelligences such as emotional intelligence and creativity.

2.3.1 The value of online assessment to educational assessment

Online assessment, when done via computer or mobile phone, becomes an important component of personalized education. It is currently used as part of the learning process, not only in e-learning but also in blended learning.

Online assessment is utilized both for self-assessment and for exams and tends to replace or complement traditional methods of assessment of the student’s performance [28]. Providing formative and summative feedback is especially crucial in online assessment as students need to be informed about the results of their performance in real-time. Personalized feedback aims, on the one hand, to prevent destructive feedback and on the other, to provide a student with the feedback that is most suitable and useful for their personality. The development of personalized feedback requires having the answers to the questions of: what can be personalized in the feedback and, to which type of user or performance characteristics should feedback be personalized? [29].

2.4 Personalization and student achievement

Personalization is associated with accomplishments that are significant, worthwhile, and meaningful for learners in the realm of both academic achievement and emotional growth [30].

2.4.1 Personalization and recall

Studies on personalization and academic achievement show that during personalized learning, students exhibit better achievements over time [31, 32]. Miller and Kulhavy [33] hypothesized that personalization improves memory by increasing the associative strength of the personalized material and students’ existing schemata. They found that integrating personalized representations during encoding led to significantly greater recall. The meaningfulness of a task may increase when its context is personalized, thereby enabling pupils to mentally place themselves in the situation. Personalization may not only build stronger associations related to the task, but in doing so it may ease the cognitive demands of the problem-solving process [34].

2.4.2 Math and reading improvement through personalization

The achievement was examined in 62 US public charter and district schools pursuing a variety of personalized learning practices, and details of implementation were examined for 32 of those schools. The results were described in a report entitled “Continued Progress - Promising Evidence on Personalized Learning” [35]. Researchers obtained achievement data for personalized learning students and a matched comparison group of students attending other schools serving similar populations. It was found that students’ achievement growth in mathematics and reading over 2 years exceeded that of the comparison group, overall, and compared to a majority of schools. A large proportion of students with lower starting achievements, experienced greater growth rates than their peers, particularly in mathematics. Growth continued to accrue in schools over 3 years of implementation.

A study conducted by Bloom and Unterman [33] provides solid evidence that going small – when the schools are startups, nonselective, and entered by choice – has substantial effects on academic achievement. The researchers found that enrolling in a small school of one’s choice rather than in a comprehensive high school, significantly improves graduation rates for a large population of low-income, disadvantaged students of color. Personalization also improves students’ attitudes toward the subject matter. The teachers’ attitudes toward personalization, which evolves in positive student-teacher relationships, also help students struggling in specific subject areas. For instance, Midgley, Feldlaufer, and Eccles [36] discovered that, after controlling for students’ initial mathematics performance and interest, students in classrooms with high levels of personalization showed more excitement for mathematics, and their willingness to engage with the material remained high when compared to students with low levels of personalization. Moreover, students who move from low- to high-support classrooms improve their self-efficacy and enjoyment with respect to mathematics [37].

Studies regarding personalization and emotional growth validate the psychological theory of self-determination. The important concept of self-determination refers to each person’s ability to make choices about and control their own life. This ability plays an important role in psychological strength and well-being. Self-determination allows people to feel that they have power over their choices and lives. It also impacts motivation – people are motivated to take action when they feel that what they do will affect the outcome. The concept of self-determination has been applied to a wide variety of areas including education, work, parenting, exercise, and health. Research suggests that having high self-determination can foster success in many different domains of life [38, 39].

Moreover, an overwhelming majority of students accept responsibility and ownership over their learning when it is personalized [40].

It has been found that the students exhibit effort and work harder to solve complex and challenging problems, give up less often in the face of difficulties, and learn more profoundly, both in comparison to students in a control group who studied in a traditional education setting, and to their own prior functioning in a former traditional education framework [41].

2.4.3 Personalization and the role of teachers

The process of the personalization of learning has significantly changed the role of teachers. The teacher is no longer the main source of knowledge but rather a moderator and learning navigator [42]. Teachers’ attitudes toward this kind of change and their readiness to become active partners is considered a factor critical to success [43]. Similarly, resistance to change is considered one of the main reasons for the failure of change processes in organizations in general and in education systems, in particular [44]. In the case of innovative technology implementation in schools, which is most often a crucial element in personalization, teachers’ resistance is reported by some studies to be the most dominant contributing factor to the project’s failure [45].

2.4.4 Teachers as the main axis of personalization

School improvement and school turnaround efforts rest largely on the shoulders of the teachers since these are the individuals who can most immediately bring about change in their students and hence, affect both the climate and culture of their school. There are five types of power in teachers’ educational environment. The first is the legal power granted to teachers due to their appointment and permission to make decisions affecting their students. The second is the power of expertise since only teachers who are experts in their field are permitted to teach and provide students with professional knowledge. The third is the power of charisma; that is to say, their authority stems from their personality and their investment in their job. The fourth is the power of reward, based on teachers’ ability to reward good behavior, excellence, and appreciation. The fifth is the punitive authority, i.e., teachers’ authority to punish students according to school rules [46]. The teacher’s role in personalized learning sometimes needs the “courage to forget” those convenient and conventional origins of power and turn to the power of “relational persuasion” [47]. In personalized learning, the teacher organizes an infinite mass of potential content into an orderly and discernible curriculum, explicitly teaches new concepts and skills unique to the audience, enlarges the student’s scope of individual interests, and fosters logical thinking through questioning and particular dialogs [48].

2.4.5 The multifaced role of teachers

Bishop et al. [49] examined the roles of teachers in personalized learning environments regarding statewide legislation of personalized learning plans, flexible educational pathways, and proficiency-based assessment. The study used data from interviews with a purposefully selected group of 20 elementary and middle school teachers. Findings revealed that teachers’ perceptions of their role included four components: (a) empowerment, (b) scouting, (c) supporting, and (d) assessing. Even though all those components lead to the personalization of learning, there is potential for intra-role conflict and role tension between and among these sub-role components.

One way to overcome this conflict of sub-roles may be following the ethos of Dweck [49], who argues that connecting the performance of learning tasks to personal aspirations rather than to past performance or group stereotypes frees the teacher to engage in personalized learning. This appreciation for what Dweck calls “incremental intelligence,” the notion that the ability to achieve is not fixed but is incrementally improved, contributes not only to a student’s motivation to learn but also to a teacher’s more effective response to the student’s learning needs.

3. Conclusion

In response to individual needs, personalization in education facilitates not only students to learn better by using different strategies but also provides teacher’s instructional needs in designing varied teaching platforms. Overall, personalization in education and cognition are closely intertwined. By adapting educational experiences to align with individual learners’ needs, preferences, and cognitive processes, personalized education optimizes engagement, motivation, learning styles, cognitive load management, self-regulated learning, mastery-based learning, and feedback – all of which significantly influence cognitive development and academic achievement. Moreover, personalized learning using computers and mobile devices is one of the latest trends making a global impact, promising to deliver new methods that enhance and promote learning. Nevertheless, using the technologies without considering pedagogical theories and models often may lead to malfunction.

This review offers both the opportunities and necessities of personalized education as well as the essential criticism of its function for future research papers about this important topic.