A study of 36,000 students just backed Bill Gates' favorite style of education

pulse

September 6, 2017 8:21 PM

"Personalized learning" has become one of the most highly praised styles of instruction in Silicon Valley. New evidence suggests the endorsements hold water.

Former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates has said repeatedly that one of his favorite ways of teaching kids is by letting them guide their own education, typically with laptops or tablets, and moving the teacher more into the role of coach.

The style is known as "personalized learning," and a study involving 36,000 students just upheld it as a major driver of improvement in reading and math skills.

Since personalized learning has had scant formal evidence showing its success as a teaching method, the new study also adds some empirical support that Gates and many other techies have been on the right track in their endorsements.

Conducted by the education consulting company Education Elements, the study spanned five districts across the US for 2-3 years, tracking how students performed on the NWEA MAP test. On average, personalized learning led to 130% growth in reading and 122% growth in math.

Certain districts saw outsized improvement from the new method. In Alabama's Piedmont City School District, for instance, 72% of students in grades 3-8 hit their target scores on the ACT Aspire standardized test compared to 28% in the 2014-2015 school year.

Both have research behind them suggesting that kids make noticeable gains in proficiency when they don't feel rushed to keep up with their peers.

Kids who use Newsela for four months jump up to 12 percentile points on in-app reading quizzes, regardless of the student's initial ability. DreamBox, in use by 2 million kids, helps kids make bigger improvements in math the longer they use it, a 2016 Harvard study found.

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