All too often these days, we hear certain buzz words: “personalized learning,” “individualized learning,” “customized learning.” Usually they are used all together, as in “personalized, individualized, customized learning.”
Buyer beware! What these words usually signify is that some corporation is selling a computerized learning program with pre-set questions and answers. The students will click through the questions to find out at what step they are on, until they reach the point where they get the wrong answer. Then the computer will respond with a pre-set instruction about what to do next.
Like everything else in the faux-reform vocabulary, this is the opposite of what is meant by personalized, customized, and individualized. This is mechanized teaching, with nothing individual, personalized, or custom about it. At bottom, the goal is to sell stuff to schools and make money. The hope: computers will replace teachers, won’t ever get a pension or a raise, and can save money.
Here is a comment from a reader, who sees what is going on:
“personalized learning” is a code word for kids in front of computers with a classroom aide running the shop and no teachers
It’s a tutoring centered approach to education, as tutors typically play a supporting role and often don’t choose problems or course materials, but help a student through problems and materials chosen by someone else.
Except, in this format, instead of being chosen by a teacher, the problems and course materials are chosen by the technology. This can work for about 10-20% of students, but most students need a human teacher making day-to-day and long-term decisions about content and learning activities.
Replacing human teachers with computers is a recipe for failure. The human interactions that are the foundation of our public education system have been around for thousands of years and can’t be replaced by technology. In the same way that the printing press didn’t replace human teachers, neither will computers.
But that doesn’t mean they’ll stop trying to replace teachers.$$$$$
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is one-hundred percent on target. I am currently required to use one of Pearson’s “personalized” software programs in my classroom. It has completely taken away my autonomy and professional judgement. To make matters worse, the data it produces -which I never trusted anyway-is so convoluted, with so many different types of measurement and reports being available. I am only slightly exaggerating when I say it takes hours and hours of intelligent, experienced educators sifting trough the reports, trying yo make sense of it all. After nearly a year if use, we STILL don’t all agree on how the program is supposed to be used or what exactly the data is indicating.
“. . . it takes hours and hours of intelligent, experienced educators sifting trough the reports. . . ”
It shouldn’t.
It should take all of a minute or two to invoke the BSI/BSO principle and be done with it.
To paraphrase Willy Wonka: “So much mental masturbation, so little time or. . . is that so little mental masturbation and too much time.”
It is fitting that these teaching schemes were called “programmed learning” well before the advent of personal computers. Didn’y work then, won’t work now, unless you define “to work” as “making profits for the company pedalling this bilge.”
And this raises another concern I’ve been having…I hope thus us not too “off-thread”. I would really like to pinpoint the actual reason we were first required to use “research-based” and “peer-reviewed” interventions in Tennessee. I believe thus is another of those things that sounds great on paper, but…..In my quest to identify all acceptable interventions, the common denominator seems to be MONEY. Unless I’ve really missed something, every single program, curriculum, etc listed as acceptable is one which has profited someone.
When someone says that “research based/peer reviewed” steer (double entendre meant) them toward Noel Wilson’s truly researched base and peer reviewed and never refuted nor rebutted tome “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Everything you want to know about the problems with educational standards and standardized testing is found in that amazing work!
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
I hold a Doctorate in Instructional Technology and am very familiar with the key word “personalized instruction” that corporate reformers use and you are correct to say that it does not increase achievement. But let me caution you there. Technology when used appropriately such as a tool that offers learning a teacher cannot or immerses kids in a learning environment that can not be created in the classroom, does “individualize” learning and does improve “achievement”. There are research studies that support this. The problem lies in inappropriate use of technology and in the heavy-handed ways the corporate reformers try to portray technology’s advantages. Technology will never replace teachers but critics lose credibility when they criticize without all the facts.
“. . . immerses kids in a learning environment that can not be created in the classroom”
Yep, immersed, mind melded into a computer screen. See: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-reading-brain-in-the-digital-age-why-paper-still-beats-screens
“. . . does improve “achievement”. There are research studies that support this.”
DrBob, define “achievement”, please.
And links for that research, please.
Duane, dynamic geometry software, for example, has had a huge impact on the way geometry is taught and allows for more interactive visualisations of key concepts and thus better understanding and retention of concepts. You could try doing a cursory search through the literature, or even Google, to verify this.
Señor Swacker: careful or you are going to called a “Luddite” rheeal soon.
😎
I know this is a bit of a quibble, but I am increasingly uneasy when I read or hear the Psychometrically Correct [yes, PC aka Politically Correct] terms like “achievement” and “performance” instead of “learning” and “critical thinking” and such. I start to tune out. I should be more patient—the owner of this blog sets a good example—but those two words (in present circumstances) carry a lot of toxic baggage.
Let me put this another way. The greatest “thinking machine” I know of—so complex that we can hardly quantify even a small fraction of its many qualities—is
A HUMAN BEING. TEACHING. LEARNING.
IMHO, everything else is just an add-on.
I feel an anti-techno blast coming my way.
😱
But I take my inspiration from that Mexican super-hero of yore, El Chapulín Colorado, and stand at the ready: “Todos mis movimientos están fríamente calculados.” [All my movements are coldly calculated].
😎
“Psychometrically Correct”
TAGO
Especially considering that much of psychometric work consists of minimizing, hiding and/or fudging all the errors and invalidities involved in the psychometric process of producing, giving and scoring standardized tests.
Amy,
I can visualize how geometry software could help students to “see” the three dimensionality of certain figures.
Did you catch the irony in that statement?
Reblogged this on Roy F. McCampbell's Blog.
Another term from Ted Sizer expropriated by profiteers.
This information is easily confirmed by reviewing the inBloom website….the technical jargon and mechanical explanations are completely detached from the art and science of teaching and learning. The human element is completely removed, and preordained programs drive “individualized” instruction. It is an autocratic set-up, reminiscent of an authoritarian, dystopia society. In Bloom should scare us.
THIS IS Personalized learning and has been for 40 years for over 40,000 High School Seniors.
Check for yourself. It is for any high school and any high school senior.
http://www.wiseservices.org
MANY years ago our foreign language department used something like this. The kids had an individualized computer and “learned” at their own pace. Sounds great. It did not work for us. The kids were isolated, soon became bored etc and was not even effective in learning the foreign language, let alone the skills learned in interactions with other kids and their teacher. That was our experience and it happened quite a number of years ago.
Yes, IF, big IF, some of these things are used in a manner which supplements other kinds of interactive learning in some instances it may work.
As an administrator with my teachers, the garbage that was out there at that time was a waste. We did NOT use it. I expected my teachers to teach and a major part of that was to interact and build “educative” skills, not just perceived academic achievements. People may argue and have different views and situations differ to be sure but I have always believed that a good teacher can never be replaced with technology. Technology can supplement but never supplant a great teacher.
So here is one area where I will disagree with Diane and others who feel that personalized learning is simply sitting “kids in front of computers with a classroom aide running the shop and no teachers.” Are there many companies looking to profit from the new potential that technology offers? Yes. Is the current schooling environment setup to support “personalized learning?” No. Is most current personalized learning that utilizes tech tools as explained in this post above terrible? Yes (stated with no evidence, just experience.)
I think the issue here is the definition of personalized learning. Does it have to include some shiny new technology tool, app, program, or integrator? No, of course not. But in most cases, right now, it will. I use this expression often: these are solutions for problems we don’t have. Where is the evidence that any new Pearson app or program will improve anything? If the evidence is probably not there, then don’t buy the program/app. Test it out perhaps and pilot it here and there, but there is no need for widespread adoption … yet. Sounds familiar, right … I’m look at you SMART Boards.
I don’t see the rush to new personalized learning tools as an attack on teachers or public education by corporations. Or as a way to get teachers out of the classrooms. I just don’t see it. I see this as simply a series of big mistakes made by teachers and admins. You are being sold a bill of goods that may or may not provide value for your students. Schools are buying into it because a neighboring school does, or because they want the shiniest tools on display for the board, parents, and the community to see. I see it now in higher education circles where they are struggling to figure out what to do, or how to best use, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). But if we use MOOCs we don’t need faculty anymore, kids will never come to class, these are free and then our college will close, etc.. are all concerns of the higher ed community. All based strictly in fear and not fact. The focus, mistakenly, is on what the tools can and can’t do, not what the overall experience brings to the learning environment.
Personalized learning that uses technology tools is not a bad thing. Heck, here we are reading Diane’s thoughts in her blog as we comment away after doing our own Internet based research. Personalized learning on display. Who is to say that students can’t use technology to create their own blogs and interact with THEIR world? That is personalized and relevant learning.
Let me ask you this: when the kids go to gym class, is there a time when the gym teacher just throws the basketballs all out on the floor and says, “Go ahead, grab a ball and start shooting baskets for the last 15 minutes of class.” Of course there is. Some kids will dribble it, shoot it up to the hoop, find a friend to have a catch, organize a quick 2-on-2 game, while others avoid it like the plague. That’s personalized learning.
Instead of buying the techno-nonsense from the big companies, we should be teaching kids how to leverage technology to make their own personalized learning experiences, their own apps that solve a real world, or classroom, problem. Maybe it’s a home grown attendance or fund raising app, or a project tracking app or web site, or the more advanced kids making a tutorial that helps to explain tough math concepts to the students who are struggling. It can be anything but the “click-and-kill” approach so often used as the silver bullet in education right now. Our current educational system is not setup for this, does not support this, and does not encourage this type of technology infused environment. I’ve watched for 5 years now as my elementary aged son has done literally nothing with technology. All because it can’t be tested … and if it can’t be tested, it can’t be taught.
I taught developmental reading and writing colleges (as well as Comp 1) at a community college for 11 years. A year ago, our department adopted Pearson online reading and writing components, which totally changed the structure of the class. Students would now work at their own paces, and I would work one-on-one to help them journey down their “learning paths” of instruction. Other than the first four classes, I was NOT allowed to lecture or do anything that would be “detrimental” if students missed class. Sooooo why have class? Anyway, I played their game for two semesters.
In theory, students work diligently at their own paces. In reality, most students do nothing and wait and try to cram an entire semester or work in the last two weeks.
In theory, students can benefit from some group work. In reality, NO ONE is at the same place, so it is impossible to do any kind of beneficial group work.
In theory, students ask for help when they need it. In reality, I spent hours combing through data trying to figure out who was struggling with what because they sure weren’t asking for help.
In theory, students cannot earn a failing grade, merely the ability to learn from their mistakes and re-do the assignments. In reality, students read/listen to feedback, change a few superficial errors, turn the assignment back in, get more feedback, and repeat the process until they finally have changed enough junk to earn a passing grade. They learn NOTHING from the process. In fact, I spent 20 minutes going over a paper with a student one day, only for her to look me in the eye, and say, “Do I have to make these changes?”
I teach at a small-town satellite branch of the community college, so I would have many of the same students in developmental and then in Comp. The few students who did transition from developmental to Comp were nowhere near as prepared as when I was allowed to teach developmental “my” way. I refused to teach the class this semester, and I’m only teaching Comp. I felt like I was doing a disservice to the students. In the more traditional class, the class had a bond, and I knew my students. In this new format, I had no connection with the students. None. And they didn’t know each other at all. This was all detrimental to the learning process.
Granted, this new way was easy in a sense. I didn’t prepare lessons to teach. I didn’t work out group assignments. I managed their “learning paths” and I held one-one tutoring sessions.
At least we got a great dinner out of Pearson when they “trained” us. They took the entire department to one of the nicest restaurants in town and wined and dined us.
see also: http://bit.ly/OPJwYS
This vision of what it means to “personalize” learning is what the whole deform movement is about. Gates has a vision of every student doing computer-adaptive learning. That’s why he, Murdoch, and Klein created the inBloom portal and database of student responses. That’s why Gates paid for the Common Core–because a single set of national standards was needed for these computer-adaptive programs and the diagnostic tests within them to be correlated to.
Now, there is, in fact, great promise for personalizing learning using, in part, the resources of the Internet. But turning a PULL medium–in which the learner seeks out the information that he or she is looking for, as, for example, one uses a library–with a PUSH medium, in which canned curricula (worksheets on a screen) are served up based on a list of skills–in that direction lies in the end of education as we have known it.
And, incidentally, the folks who control the database of responses/curriculum portal will make an ENORMOUS amount of money. Trillions, over time.
ALL OF THIS is about creating a monopoly position.
As Arne Duncan’s Chief of Staff put it, the common core was created to create “a national market for products that can be brought to scale.”
If you like the idea of individualization, of creativity, of VARIED outcomes of educational experiences–that is, if you have ANY CLUE what REAL EDUCATION is about–then you will oppose this scheme.
Our educational system should be producing extremely diverse, self-motivated learners. We are not in the business of turning out widgets. Schools are not milling machines for producing identical replacement parts. The children entering our schools today are going to see more change in their lifetimes than was experienced by humans in all of our preceding history. Education by bullet list–the Powerpointing of education–is not going to produce the sorts (plural) of people who will be able to cope with that and not only cope but thrive.
But it will produce obedient do-bots–which is perfect if your vision of the future is of a small group of rulers who do the thinking and a whole lot of people who do precisely and only what they are told to do.
There are two very different visions of the future at stake here.
And it all begins with whether we accept having a small group of self-appointed folks producing the list that we are ALLOWED to teach to. Accept that, and you will accept the rest–all the little increments that will give you, in the end, Orwell’s IngSoc.
“There’s no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list.” –Edward Tufte
“I believe in standardizing automobiles, not people.” –Albert Einstein
The idea of children having their own personal choice how they will learn is being redesigned as increasingly data driven, standardized, and mechanized learning systems. Children should not be treated like automated teller machines or credit reward cards where companies can take their valuable data. It is all about control and saving money. But who’s money? Yes, technology can help personalize learning, but what technology and how? And who’s data?
Read more: http://barbarabray.net/2013/12/30/this-time-its-personal-and-dangerous/
and check out the Personalization vs Differentiation vs Individualization chart comparing the terms – http://www.personalizelearning.com/2013/03/new-personalization-vs-differentiation.html
Go here to read more at This Time It’s Personal and Dangerous
http://barbarabray.net/2013/12/30/this-time-its-personal-and-dangerous/
Excerpt:
The idea of children having their own personal choice how they will learn is being redesigned as increasingly data driven, standardized, and mechanized learning systems. Children should not be treated like automated teller machines or credit reward cards where companies can take their valuable data. It is all about control and saving money. But who’s money? Yes, technology can help personalize learning, but what technology and how? And who’s data?
Let’s be real: adaptive learning systems are for those things that can be easily digitized and tested like math problems and reading passages. They do not recognize or encourage high quality learning environments that are creative, inquiry-based, active, relevant, collaborative, and what our children need to be global citizens who are critical thinkers and problem-solvers.
Check out the differences between Personalization vs Differentiation vs Individualization http://www.personalizelearning.com/2013/03/new-personalization-vs-differentiation.html