Students who engage in personalized learning do better in math than their peers, and charter schools are more conducive to implementing and scaling personalized learning programs than traditional schools, because of their inherent flexibility.

These are among the findings of a new RAND Corp. study of 40 schools nationwide — 31 charters and nine traditional schools — that are part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Next Generation Learning Challenges’ Breakthrough School Models program. The research, released today, was conducted for the foundation and follows up on a 2015 report, delving into what the implementation of personalized learning looks like in schools and how the practice may play out as it is adopted more broadly.

Researcher John Pane tells The 74 that models of personalized learning — defined by RAND simply as “instruction that is focused on meeting students’ individual learning needs while incorporating their interests and preferences” — varied greatly among the 40 schools, giving him and his colleagues a richer picture of how implementation differs around the country.

Early in the exploration of a new idea, I think it makes a lot of sense to try a variety and see what seems to work,” says Pane.

“Without evidence that one particular way is the best way, it makes sense to try different things and adapt and learn from the experience, but it does make it harder to say what [personalized learning] is exactly. At some point, as people want to scale it up, it will be more important to find a more precise model so people know what to do, expect, and implement.”

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