蜜桃影视

Personalized learning programs in Chicago are helping to boost reading scores for students by an amount equivalent to 13 percentile points of growth, a recent .

The private, charter, and traditional public schools studied are part of a Chicago cohort that鈥檚 been working with , a national personalized learning organization, to individualize student instruction by pairing schools with education technology and coaches who help teachers reimagine their instruction and classroom design.

This improvement in reading scores is promising not just for students but also for LEAP鈥檚 work. This is the second cohort LEAP has studied since it began partnering with Chicago schools in 2014. The first cohort saw a literacy growth that would be equivalent to 6 percentile points, half of what the 2015鈥�16 cohort achieved.

鈥淟earning is personal, and every student is unique,鈥� said Phyllis Lockett, founder and CEO of LEAP Innovations. 鈥淲hen you think about the future of work and the level of agility and creative problem-solving required for our students to be successful in the workplace, what is helping educators to be able to teach in that paradigm is really important.鈥�

Lockett attributes the growth in scores to LEAP鈥檚 work improving professional development for educators. LEAP works with schools to make their instruction more personalized, consulting them on everything from school scheduling to how to use student data and best practices to help encourage student-driven learning.

However, LEAP still has work to do when it comes to figuring out how to improve math scores. The Chicago students were the first who tried its personalized math instruction, but they didn鈥檛 improve any more than their peers who didn鈥檛 use this technology. To address this, Lockett said LEAP will bring in experts to collaborate with teachers on math instruction.

Chicago principal Juan Gutierrez runs Patrick Henry Elementary, a pre-K鈥�6 school of more than 500 students that was part of the new study. LEAP helped Gutierrez select several personalized learning technologies for some of the school鈥檚 classrooms. Under this personalized learning system, Gutierrez said, he has seen students transform from passive learners waiting for lecture-style instruction to engaged learners making choices in their lessons and accepting more responsibilities.

鈥淚t allows for them to focus on the things that they are more motivated to do at a particular time,鈥� Gutierrez said. 鈥淭he joy of learning and the opportunity to engage in a task has changed dramatically.鈥�

For this analysis, LEAP used data from the NWEA Measures of Academic Progress, the accountability test used in Chicago for grades 3鈥�8. Using a quasi-experimental design called propensity score matching, the analysis compared students in the schools who used the personalized learning tools with others who didn鈥檛, controlling for factors such as race, poverty, and prior test scores.

Disclosure: LEAP Innovations and 蜜桃影视 both receive funding from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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