Recently I described an unpublished study by Dragan Gasevic and team on the use of Knowillage / LeaP adaptive platform. ((When the study started Knowillage was an independent company; mid-way through study D2L bought Knowillage and renamed product as LeaP.)) The context of article was on D2L’s misuse of the results, but the study itself is interesting in terms of its findings that adaptive learning usage (specifically LeaP in addition to Moodle within an Intro to Chemistry course) can improve academic performance. I will share more when and if the results become public.
If we look to published research reports there are other studies that back up the potential of adaptive approaches, but the most promising results appear to be for a subset of adaptive systems that provide not just content selection but also tutoring. Last year a research team from Simon Fraser University and Washington State University published a meta-analysis on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) which they described as having origins from 1970 and the development of SCHOLAR. ((I would link to G+ post by George Station here if it were not for the ironic impossibility of searching within that platform.)) The study looked at 107 studies involving 14,321 participants and found:
The use of ITS was associated with greater achievement in comparison with teacher-led, large-group instruction (g .42), non-ITS computer-based instruction (g .57), and textbooks or workbooks (g .35). There was no significant difference between learning from ITS and learning from individualized human tutoring (g –.11) or small-group instruction (g .05). Significant, positive mean effect sizes were found regardless of whether the ITS was used as the principal means of instruction, a supplement to teacher-led instruction, an integral component of teacher-led instruction, or an aid to homework. Significant, positive effect sizes were found at all levels of education, in almost all subject domains evaluated, and whether or not the ITS provided feedback or modeled student misconceptions. The claim that ITS are relatively effective tools for learning is consistent with our analysis of potential publication bias.