Adaptive Goals

Tailored Targets

Overview

What?

Goals need to be adaptive based on students' ages and stages https://egia.slab.com/posts/developmental-levels-8f862458, individual progress, as well as the environments. How the content is presented to the students should be dictated by the individual characteristics of that class. 

Why?

Learners' ages and stages, as well as their different prior experience and growth environments would affect how they learn.

How to use to support learning

The environments may include peer pressures, physical learning environment and different situations changed with time. These are factors that need to be considered when designing goals.

When communicating goals, teacher should take in consideration of students’ different social norms to make the goal explicit to everyone. (in-class 09/25, see https://egia.slab.com/posts/cultural-context-5e757047 https://egia.slab.com/posts/norms-39777431)

Pitfalls to avoid

Avoid over-adaptive: goals should still be aligned with the core big idea.

Consider more than students' self assessment of their own needs. Students might not being motivated enough to jump out of their comfort zone and challenge themselves. For example, a self-claimed bottom-up learner who wants to dive into the details before viewing the big picture might learn better by starting with a deductive overview, but never gives it a try due to a tutor's adaptiveness in choosing learning styles for different individuals. So explore different ways more rather than merely exploiting from the initial information of learners.

Implications

Learner Context

• Learner context includes students' ages, stages and the environments.
• Use the learner context to inform your instructional goals so they are:
  • Achievable (https://egia.slab.com/posts/achievability-51403cac)
  • Engaging (https://egia.slab.com/posts/excitement-0bbf507e, https://egia.slab.com/posts/motivation-6045c575)
  • Useful to students (https://egia.slab.com/posts/authenticity-1959e7ba)

Goals

• Goals need to be adaptive based on students' ages and stages.
• Goals need to be adaptive based on the environments.
• Goals should be achievable, engaging, and useful (https://egia.slab.com/posts/achievability-51403cac, https://egia.slab.com/posts/excitement-0bbf507e, https://egia.slab.com/posts/motivation-6045c575, https://egia.slab.com/posts/authenticity-1959e7ba)
• Have more than one single goal and give different options for learning and performing tasks. Give students the freedom to select the topic / content they're learning
• Learning goals should adapt to learners context and culture.
  • e.g. Goals where students are expected to speak publicity may be ineffective in culture where children are expected to remain quiet.
• Consider access to hardware/ platform when designing goals
  • e.g. avoid using Internet when the Internet connection is poor

Assessment

• Assessments should be flexible since they are aligned with the goals. https://egia.slab.com/posts/alignment-4409be22
• Use asynchronous online assessments to evaluate student performance and adapt goals accordingly. Teachers could also provide faded scaffolding based on different goals
• Customize course contents for different students
  • e.g. Use pre-test to evaluate students' knowledge level and customize course contents accordingly.

Instruction

• Although the teachers we studied said it differently, they seemed to have grasped the essence of Steele’s message: every student requires something special. No single approach can work for everyone. Paul Baker put it this way: “My strongest feeling about teaching is that you must begin with the student. As a teacher you do not begin to teach, thinking of your own ego and what you know . . . The moments of the class must belong to the student—not the students, but to the very undivided student. You don’t teach a class. You teach a student.” (Bain, pg.97)
• Provide instructions with different levels of difficulty to learners.

Research and Evaluation

• When evaluating the effect of teaching, we should take students' ages, stages and environments into consideration.
• Survey for what motivates students to change how goals match students' expectations; Survey for what students want to get out of a class

Examples

• For example, in many cases, the priority of goals in children’s school may not to teach them to remember something, but should be to teach the kids learn how to learn.