Visible Learning and personalized learning

Around where I live there has been a move toward personalized learning using Education Element's Core Four. Two elements of the program are flexible content and student reflection. Flexible content leans heavily on student voice and choice. Reading Visible Learning and the Science of How we Learn by John Hattie and Gregory Yates has made me think about these two concepts.

Hattie and Yates point out:

Anxious students respond well to strong guidance, direct supervision and a restriction on choices. But non-anxious people respond well to almost the opposite conditions. It is also well established that in acquiring knowledge, beginners benefit from clear step-by-step instructions and an absence of problem solving tasks. On the other hand, highly knowledgeable learners may benefit from working on problems to solve and are held back by step-by-step instructions. (p. 181)

This has interesting implications for personalized learning. The CDC says that in 2012 over 8% of students had an anxiety disorder (increasing every year) with approximately 60% receiving treatment. A Pew study indicated that  70% of teens felt anxiety was a major problem among their peers. This being the case, that idea of choice is a concern. Perhaps a very limited choice of two or three might be valuable, but a list of 10 project ideas would clearly be too many. In our zeal we may make things more difficult for a large number of our kids. Balancing choice lists for anxious and not anxious students may mean separate lists.

This also has implications on our students by ability level. More knowledgeable students benefit from problem solving approaches but our struggling learners do not. We need to adjust presentation of information to fit the knowledge level of our students. The use of pre-assessments could determine who would benefit from problem solving and who needs a more direct approach. We need to be flexible, but it may not be the students themselves who are best able to determine what the best learning approach would be.

Self-reflection seems like an innately useful skill. Socrates admonished people to know thyself. If you have ever asked a student how they did on something, the typical response is ok. Many studies identify self-assessments as poor indicators of ability or success (p. 231). The top quartile of students tend to underestimate achievement and difficulty of a task and everyone else overestimates their ability- often grossly (p. 233). This means that blanket self-reflection tasks are likely to be poor measures. In order to make self-reflection valuable, we need to make it far more objective and pointed. For example, if we want students to self-reflect on their ability to utilize a strategy to solve a word problem we probably do not want to ask "Can you solve the problem on your own?" We probably want them to attempt the problem, compare with a correct example and then answer a series of questions:

• Did you dissect the question- (circle the numbers, underline what you need to find,...)?
• Did you write the correct number problem?
• Were you able to solve the number problem correctly?(This might be broken into the steps to solve the particular problem.)
• Did you check your answer?
• Did you write your answer in a sentence?

This allows students to see where they made a mistake. It could be followed up with if you did not get the correct number problem, go to station number one. If you missed a step in solving the problem, go to station number two. If you made a math error, go to station number three. If you completed all the steps correctly, go to station number four. Each station could have an activity to work on the troublesome skill. Itemizing the self-reflection allows for more accurate understanding of the success of the learning level.

We need to be very careful with personalized learning so that we do not hinder progress of students. Personalized learning has had very mixed results. I suspect part may be relate to choice availability for anxious and non-anxious students and students with varying knowledge levels as well as a poor ability to self-reflect. We need to apply this well-researched information in the arena of how we teach, especially as it applies to the "fad of the day" as is so often the case in education.