Abstract:

Personalized learning is often justified through Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) theory, with schools expected to foster student’s agency and self-regulation even in early and middle adolescence. Yet most applied implementations either reduce personalization to content differentiation or implicitly assume that all 10–16-year-olds can be brought into adult-like SRL cycles by school-level intervention alone. This paper reports on a ten-year design-based research initiative in which a private Lithuanian school, Forvardas (grades 5–10), functioned as a laboratory for developing a three-layer personalized learning architecture and an intra-individual progression model (IPM) that makes weekly learning trajectories visible to students, teachers and parents. A recent master's thesis formally evaluated IPM v1 through an expert review (ten experts using Greller & Drachsler's learning analytics framework) and two illustrative student cases, identifying the absence of an explicit agency dimension as a key limitation.

Rather than treating this finding as a simple design gap to be filled by extending the model, the paper develops an interpretive counter-position: the expert recommendation surfaces a deeper governance question — who is responsible for agency development in compulsory education, and how is that responsibility currently distributed? Drawing on developmental neuroscience, ecological systems theory, and ten years of mentoring practice, we hypothesize the existence of a developmental threshold below which agency interventions predominantly generate imitative rather than genuine self-regulation and analyze the family–school alignment problem and the professionalization gap as constitutive features of the distribution question. We propose, as a hypothesis emerging from this single-school DBR, a distributed-responsibility framing in which families, the state and schools each carry distinct responsibilities for the conditions of agency development — to be tested in further work.

Keywords:

Personalized learning, self-regulated learning, design-based research, school responsibility boundaries, adolescent development, practitioner research.