Abstract:

Recent advances in technology have enabled the scaling of personalized learning. Supported by philanthropic funding of the tech industry, the digitalization of personalized learning is gaining momentum. Educational institutions are adopting the new promising technology as a means to promote academic achievement by tailoring the instruction to the individual needs of the students. These are supposed to be met by providing the students with a curriculum that adjusts to their zone of proximal development (ZPD) along with ensuring that they can progress through it at their own pace. The learning platforms are also said to contribute to the improvement of social-emotional skills.

Meanwhile, despite the current focus on personalization of the learning experience of students in K-12 education, there is no agreed-upon definition of what constitutes personalized learning (PL). The broadness of the definition of personalized learning gives rise to a certain degree of ambiguity in defining what features are to be found in the personalized learning platform.

Similarly, there is a need for an external independent evaluation of whether the use of such tools does improve academic achievement and social-emotional skills as the developers of these tools claim. To date, little research has been done on the effectiveness of personalized learning platforms on the academic outcomes of students, and even to a lesser extent, its influence on social-emotional skills has been evaluated.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the distinctive features of personalized learning platforms that foster the development of students’ social-emotional skills as they are defined in key social-emotional skill frameworks. By capturing these characteristics we intend to stimulate further research on the assessment of the effectiveness of digital tools for personalized learning on the improvement of social-emotional skills.

Keywords:

Social-emotional skills, SEL framework, personalized learning, digital tools, personalized learning platforms, personalized tools.