Is Personalized Teaching a Possibility?

A common complaint about schooling is that different students are at different levels, but the class proceeds at the same pace and style for everyone. I’d always felt this is a stupid complaint, because how on earth can a teacher customize things for every child?

But now after reading about Mindspark, I wonder if computer aided teaching can address that complaint. Here are its 4 main features:
1)      It has more 45,000 test questions that evolved iteratively over the years.
2)     “Teaches at the right level” by starting with an initial diagnostic test and then adjusting based on student performance on each subsequent activity.
3)     “Adaptive in approach”: Essentially, this address the problem that different student may struggle for different reasons, for example:
“If a student makes a mistake on which decimal is bigger (3.27 or 3.3), it may be due to “whole number thinking” (27 is bigger than 3) whereas if they make the same mistake with 3.27 or 3.18, it’s probably “reverse order thinking” (comparing 81 to 72 because the “hundredth place” should be bigger than the “tenth place”).”
4)     It forces constant engagement by complementing videos with steps that students must complete.

You may ask how this system fares in the real world? Turns out this was tested with 600 students in low-income neighborhood schools in Delhi with six 90-minute slots per week:
-         The students were split into 2 groups by lottery, one set who’d continue with regular schooling (the control group) and the other set would be on Mindspark.
-         Average attendance in the Mindspark group was 58% over a 4½ month period.
-         After 90 days, the Mindspark group performed much better (i.e., statistically significant) than the control group. The key point? The performance improvements were measured compared to their levels at the start of the experiment: this took care of the possibility that one set of students were better to begin with.
-         The program covered 2 subjects, Maths and Hindi. It thus helped evaluate if such courses are better suited for some subjects than other. That said, the improvement in Maths was much higher than in Hindi.
-         Another finding was that the greatest improvement due to Mindspark was to the weakest students within each group.

Sounds good, but how expensive is this option? The authors of the 2017 paper on this say it would cost less than “default public spending” on education.

So is this the future of education? Or will it run into the problem of broken down computers, lack of budgetary allocation to fix them, and no power supply in the schools anyway?

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