6 Principles of Effective Personalized Learning

Thursday Sep. 9th, 2021

Effective learning cannot be achieved without knowing the best practices for learning. In this article, we collected the most important learning principles aimed to make learning more effective.

Principle 1: Understanding Rather Than Memorization
Learning is more effective when it focuses on understanding general principles and concepts rather than memorizing individual facts and algorithms. Understanding itself is the key to the practical application of knowledge in life situations. This is important because even the tasks of the world-famous PISA test do not test how well children know the school program but how effectively they can use school knowledge in everyday life. And to really understand the material, you need to discuss it and give enough time to think.

Principle 2: Applying Knowledge to Different Situations
Learning becomes more effective and meaningful when students learn to apply knowledge in real-life situations. This is logical because why know Newton's laws if they exist only in tests and in the pages of the textbook? Furthermore, the child will be more willing to learn new knowledge if he knows that he can apply it outside of school. For example, any regular professional essay writer will constantly be reapplying and recontextualizing their academic knowledge, so this principle is extremely important.

Principle 3: Time for Practice
It takes time to absorb information. To apply it in practice - too. For example, students' reading and writing skills depend on how much time they actually read and write.

Spend more time on active learning (remember the principle of active participation of children in the classroom). Passive acquisition of new information is much less effective than tasks that involve students: it can be planning experiments, measuring, discussing, preparing projects.

Dedicate time to conscious practice, in which students independently assess their own progress and regulate the learning process accordingly: we talked more about this in paragraph 6 of the previous material. It is also important to take breaks between practices to prevent burnout.

Principle 4: Developmental and Individual Differences
Individual differences play a major role in the learning process. Usually, the school pays attention to abilities in either the humanities or the exact sciences, but they cannot be classified into only two categories.

Someone may have outstanding spatial thinking or fine musical hearing, so it is worth organizing training to identify and nurture the individual differences of each student. It's all about recognizing the unique nature of every person. In terms of learning, this aspect can show itself through even something as simple as some students needing essaywriter.org while others do not.

Principle 5: Motivation (Creating Motivated Learners)
A motivated student is easy to recognize - he strives to achieve the goal and devotes enough time and effort to it. All teachers want to work with children who are motivated to learn, but as motivation directly affects learning, so does the teacher affect motivation. So how to do it right?

Recognize student achievement. Praise them for their success, but focus on internal rather than external factors. Help students believe in themselves. Do not underestimate their abilities, do not compare with each other because they are all unique and develop at their own pace. Have the children hear words of support from you and receive assignments that meet their level, goals, and needs.

Help students set goals and adjust them so that they are realistic. After setting goals, tell students how to choose the best learning strategy.

Group children according to their abilities and encourage cooperation instead of competition: for example, they can jointly implement educational projects. A VARK survey will help determine the best learning strategy for each student.


Suggest interesting tasks: not too easy, but not too difficult. The child should feel that he can potentially solve them - this will encourage him to make more effort. Additionally, gamified learning experiences can easily encourage, engage, and motivate students to achieve more.

How Personalized Learning Is Implemented in Modern Education
Every year Microsoft Education adds to the list of the most innovative schools in the world - Microsoft Showcase Schools. The list includes institutions that use personalized learning approaches and develop 21st-century skills among schoolchildren.

Personalized learning is becoming more popular and effective due to the rapid development of technology. Adaptive learning technologies are adapted to the student in real-time and provide him and the teacher with analytics of the educational process.

Such technologies are increasingly attracting the attention of reputable educational institutions. In particular, the online learning platform CogBooks and the University of Arizona tried to introduce an inverted course (new material is developed at home, and in-class it is discussed and completed) in biology and two history courses.

To do this, the university and CogBooks have developed an adaptive online environment, and after the first semester, the number of students who did not complete the course fell 10 times - from 15% to 1.5%. The adaptive environment included video and interactive tasks: in addition, the teacher saw student performance statistics and could identify topics that need to be worked out in more detail in class. At the same time, the Technical University of Colorado uses the personalized Intellipath learning system as one of the main components of the programming course.