Skip to main content

The Effect of Personalization on Student Learning


A group of ten separate studies illustrated that conversational cues can have a deep impact on student learning, particularly for deep learning that allows students to transfer their learning to new situations.[1]  Students presented with information in a less formal and more personal manner performed significantly better on problem-solving tests than students hearing identical information presented in a more formal manner.[2]

In her article, Legal Education in the Age of Cognitive Science and Advanced Classroom Technology, Deborah Merritt provides three reasons why personalization deepens learning:

“First, encouraging listeners to think of themselves as a reference point may enhance their interest in the subject, which produced more active cognitive processing. Second, personalizing information may help listeners relate new data to existing mental schema; extending mental frameworks in this manner encourages deeper learning. Finally, listeners may respond to the social cues of conversational tone; because another person is addressing them, they feel a ‘commitment to try to make sense out of what the speaker is saying.’ The implicit social obligation prompts more active cognitive processing as ‘the learner works harder to select organization, and integrate incoming information.’”[3]

There are a number of ways that you, as the instructor, can incorporate a more conversational manner into their teaching:
  • Utilize personal pronouns, such as “I” and “you,” rather than third-person structures;
  • Acknowledge your audience’s learning directly, showing that you understand the challenges of the learning process and giving recommendations for how to deal with those challenges;
  • Use positive gestures, such as smiling and nodding, when presenting to students; and
  • Place the student into the hypothetical, by suggesting they imagine if they were conducting research on behalf of their client.
  • Be judicious in how you use technology, as wordy PowerPoints and dimmed lights can cause students to fixate on the screen rather than their connection with you. [See Merritt's article for much more on this.]

Personalization may be particularly important in legal research classrooms, where students may have less interest in the subject matter due to the misconception that they already know how to research, to the fact that research sessions may be worth only part of a grade in their first year skills class or worth less credits than some of their doctrinal classes, and to the perception that research is boring. Personalization can help peak the interest of students, increasing their willingness to engage more actively with the material.

Personalizing the classroom experience and acknowledging the challenges student encounter may not only help students develop a growth mindset and promote the cultivation of trust in the classroom, but can actually improve students learning.  As such, it’s worth a try to start incorporating some of the methods listed above.


[1] Richard E. Mayer, Principles of Multimedia Learning Based on Social Cues: Personalization, Voice, and Image Principles, in The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning, at 201, 206 (Richard E. Mayer ed., 2005).

[2] Deborah Merritt, Legal Education in the Age of Cognitive Science and Advanced Classroom Technology, 14 B.U. J. Sci. & Tech. L. 39, 49 (2008).

[3] Id. at 50 (quoting Mayer, supra note 1, at 202).

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Helping With Student Focus & Motivation in the Remote Classroom, Part 3: Limiting New Technologies to Reduce Extrinsic Cognitive Load

A librarian colleague used to say to me, "Technology is great until it's not." This couldn't be more true in the classroom.  As many of us prepare for a fall entirely or partially online, there's a rush to familiarize ourselves with lots of new educational technology to teach our classes. There's this sense that if you're not using the best and newest ed tech in your class, you're doing something wrong. Fortunately, the science doesn't back this up.  Using too many different types of technology can be a contributing factor to cognitive overload in students . Cognitive load is a term cognitive psychologists use to describe the mental challenge that the limitations of working memory puts on a student's learning.[1] Basically, working memory is extremely limited in both time and duration. Humans can only hold on to between four and nine "chunks" of information at any given time,[2] and can only hold on to new information in their worki...
Read more

Why Experts Can Struggle to Teach Novices

This week in our Slack group on teaching , there was an interesting discussion about expertise and the amount of time needed to prep for instruction. I mentioned something that I recalled reading: that experts can be less effective in teaching novices because often the expert skips cognitive steps that the novice learner needs to understand.  I thought I'd dig into this a little more today on the blog. The fact is novices and experts learn very differently.  The major reason for this is that experts not only know a lot about their chosen discipline, but they understand how that discipline is organized. As such, what has a clear structure to the expert is a jumbled set of unorganized information to the novice.  The information presented to novices "are more or less random data points."[1]  In contrast, when the expert learns something new in her area of expertise, she just plugs it into the knowledge structure that already exists in her long-term memory. Because the...
Read more

The Power of Prediction in Legal Education

Are law students retaining what we teach? As educators, we should care that our students are taking their learning with them beyond our classes. To do so, we need to look to the science to discover ways that we can help our students to retain what they're learning. One evidence-based strategy for increasing retention is to use predictive activities in our classrooms. Predictive activities ask learners to give answers to questions or to anticipate outcomes about which they do not yet have sufficient information. They prepare our students' minds for learning by driving them to seek connections that help them to make accurate predictions. In doing so, students open up their minds to make connections between the new learning they're doing and the preexisting knowledge schema that exist in their long-term memories. By trying to answer questions without sufficient information to do so, it helps prepare the long-term memory to fit the new information into the preexisting knowledge...
Read more

Cognitive Disruptors in Legal Education

The pandemic has had a significant impact on all of our lives (biggest understatement ever).  However, with the return to in-person learning at many institutions, there has been this feeling that we should have returned to our "normal" teaching strategies in an effort to get back to the way things were. But of course, we know that things are not the same.  People traumatized by the pandemic--loved ones being gravely ill and dying, extreme isolation, financial stressors due to industries being impacted, and more--are experiencing lingering effects of the past two years.  Burnout has become the buzz word, as entire circles of friends and colleagues report feeling emotionally, physically, and mentally exhausted. This means that our classrooms should not go back to normal.  We must consider what might be impacting our students' ability to attend to and retain new information presented in our classrooms.  I've written before about cognitive (over)load and the limits...
Read more

Helping with Student Focus & Motivation in the Remote Classroom, Part 4: Building An Online Teaching Presence

I've written before about how important it is to show students you care about their learning and about them as humans , in part summarizing Kent Syverud's excellent piece , "Taking Students Seriously: A Guide for New Law Teachers. It is harder to show students that you care about them in a remote environment than when you see them in a physical classroom every day, where you can smile at them, easily ask them how they're doing as they enter the room or when you run into them in the classroom, or notice through their body language if they are having a hard time and reach out. But we know that showing we care matters; our students try harder and engage more when they feel like their learning matters to their instructor.  It takes more intention to show you care about students in the online classroom, but it's imperative that we find ways to show we do. So what are some ways that we can show students we care in the remote learning environment? The first is to ...
Read more