The Power of Personalised Learning: Tailoring Homework for Every Student

In this post, our in-house neuroscientist, Alice Little, delves into a phenomenon every teacher witnesses daily – the extent to which student understanding can vary. She explores the cognitive science behind why a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to teaching and learning doesn’t work, and how solutions like CENTURY’s Smart Assignments are specifically designed to meet each student where they are, fostering deeper understanding and long-term retention.

In any classroom, educators intuitively know that even after the most expertly delivered lesson, students have varying levels of understanding. Some learners have readily grasped the new concepts, while others may still be struggling with foundational knowledge or are finding the advanced activities challenging. Our best efforts in the classroom do not get students to reach the exact same point of understanding in the exact same amount of time.

Understanding Learning Gaps: The Role of Prior Knowledge and Attention

Research consistently demonstrates that a significant factor driving these disparities is students’ prior knowledge (e.g. Simonsmeier, et al. 2021). Studies suggest that varying levels of student attention during lessons can exacerbate these initial differences, leading to greater disparity in learning outcomes (e.g. Stevens & Bavelier, 2012).
Graham Nutall’s extensive classroom research supports these findings regarding individual learning variations and is brilliantly detailed in his book ‘The Hidden Lives of Learners’ for those interested in diving deeper into this area.

I’m sure we can all recall many instances of both these factors – prior knowledge and attention – impacting a student’s performance in the classroom. The student who was ill the previous lesson and is struggling to keep up in this one. The two students whispering away as you explain how to solve a specific problem, and lo-and-behold then struggle to answer those questions later on in the lesson.

Of course, aspects like motivation (Howard, et al 2021), interest (Lei, et al 2018) and confidence (Multon, et al 1991) also play an important role in what a student learns.

The Challenge for Teachers: Personalising Learning to Bridge Attainment Gaps

Given that all students can both start and finish a lesson with very different levels of understanding, the right approach to preparing them for a lesson or embedding their knowledge afterwards will also have significant differences. What does this mean for our classrooms, and for learning more generally? As teachers strive for deep understanding and long-term retention with students, we have to embrace more thoroughly differentiated instruction strategies:

If you’re including more advanced activities in your lesson, what is the most effective preparation work to ensure the greatest number of students can access them?

When some students are excelling with extension activities while others are still grappling with fundamental concepts, what should differentiated homework actually look like?

Most importantly, how can you truly personalise independent work for students without accumulating hours of extra, unmanageable workload each week?

CENTURY Smart Assignments: The Future of Adaptive Homework

We have developed Smart Assignments with exactly these questions in mind. So how have we integrated the research into our development?

• Smart Assignments have been designed with the zone of desirable difficulty in mind. Research shows that working to the optimal level of difficulty — where a task is achievable yet challenging — really supports the embedding of information in long-term memory, which is the ultimate goal of effective learning and retention.
• Effective management of cognitive load during learning is paramount. Students require activities that are neither overwhelming due to excessive difficulty nor disengaging because they are too easy, particularly during independent study. Personalised learning assignments offer an excellent solution to ensure cognitive load is optimised for every student in your classroom, promoting deeper understanding.
• Generic independent learning often leads to disengagement, as students may encounter tasks that are either too easy (‘I already know this!’) or too overwhelming (‘This is too hard!’). Such frustrations inevitably diminish motivation. Research consistently demonstrates that providing relevant, achievable, and appropriately challenging work increases student engagement and greater perseverance through academic challenges (look generally at Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow Theory and Bandura’s Self-Efficacy theory for a wealth of different studies demonstrating the positive relationship between optimal difficulty and improved outcomes). In turn, this increases the quality of learning that is happening. Smart Assignments offers this type of genuine and true differentiation, to keep students engaged and motivated while learning independently.
• As with all nuggets on CENTURY, Smart Assignments provides immediate and actionable feedback. From a neuroscientific perspective, timely feedback is absolutely critical because it can help correct misconceptions before they become really embedded. It also strengthens memory retention by reinforcing those correct responses immediately and encourages students to reflect on their learning, which in turn contributes to increased motivation.
• Finally, we know that there aren’t enough hours in the day for teachers to provide this level of differentiated instruction. Smart Assignments does the differentiation for you but crucially gives you all the information on how your students are getting on, in real time.

Whether homework is being used to prepare students for an upcoming lesson, or to embed the knowledge already learned, CENTURY’s Smart Assignments meets each student exactly where they are and supports them to make genuine progress.

To learn more about CENTURY and the new Smart Assignments feature, book a demo here.

Citations

Simonsmeier B. A., Flaig M., Deiglmayr A., Schalk L., & Schneider M. (2021). Domain-specific prior knowledge and learning: A meta-analysis. Educational Psychologist, 57(1), 31–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2021.1939700

Stevens C., Bavelier D. (2012) The role of selective attention on academic foundations: a cognitive neuroscience perspective. Developmental cognitive neuroscience, 2 Suppl 1(Suppl 1), S30–S48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2011.11.001

Howard, J. L., Bureau, J., Guay, F., Chong, J. X. Y., & Ryan, R. M. (2021). Student Motivation and Associated Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis From Self-Determination Theory. Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 16(6), 1300–1323. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620966789

Lei, H., Cui, Y., & Zhou, W. (2018). Relationships between student engagement and academic achievement: A meta-analysis. Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal, 46(3), 517-528. https://doi.org/10.2224/sbp.7054

Multon, K. D., Brown, S. D., & Lent, R. W. (1991). Relation of self-efficacy beliefs to academic outcomes: A meta-analytic investigation. Journal of counseling psychology, 38(1), 30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.38.1.30

Beard, K. S. (2015). Theoretically speaking: An interview with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on flow theory development and its usefulness in addressing contemporary challenges in education. Educational Psychology Review, 27(2), 353-364.