Making Evidence Actionable in Adaptive Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a teacher-guided feedback system for adaptive learning that optimizes micro-interventions using formalized algorithms, ensuring effective, equitable, and scalable personalized education.

Contribution

It presents a novel, formalized approach to converting assessment evidence into targeted interventions with safeguards, and demonstrates its effectiveness in real classroom deployment.

Findings

Full skill coverage achieved for nearly all students within time bounds.

Gradient-based method reduced redundant interventions by ~12%.

Greedy method offered lower computational cost in resource-scarce settings.

Abstract

Adaptive learning often diagnoses precisely yet intervenes weakly, yielding help that is mistimed or misaligned. This study presents evidence supporting an instructor-governed feedback loop that converts concept-level assessment evidence into vetted micro-interventions. The adaptive learning algorithm contains three safeguards: adequacy as a hard guarantee of gap closure, attention as a budgeted constraint for time and redundancy, and diversity as protection against overfitting to a single resource. We formalize intervention assignment as a binary integer program with constraints for coverage, time, difficulty windows informed by ability estimates, prerequisites encoded by a concept matrix, and anti-redundancy enforced through diversity. Greedy selection serves low-richness and tight-latency regimes, gradient-based relaxation serves rich repositories, and a hybrid method transitions along a richness-latency frontier. In simulation and in an introductory physics deployment with one thousand two hundred four students, both solvers achieved full skill coverage for essentially all learners within bounded watch time. The gradient-based method reduced redundant coverage by approximately twelve percentage points relative to greedy and harmonized difficulty across slates, while greedy delivered comparable adequacy with lower computational cost in scarce settings. Slack variables localized missing content and supported targeted curation, sustaining sufficiency across subgroups. The result is a tractable and auditable controller that closes the diagnostic-pedagogical loop and delivers equitable, load-aware personalization at classroom scale.