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) wher...