This article suggests strategies for creating differentiated educational experiences for gifted students in regular classrooms and for monitoring individualized work, while simultaneously addressing the many other diverse needs of a heterogeneous classroom. Ways of circumventing some pitfalls of individualizing are suggested. (Author/JDD)

Challenged by General Motors' creation of the Saturn automobile, St. Paul (Minnesota) educators created a new school by blending the best practices of existing schools with the most powerful and useful emerging technologies. In the Saturn School's learner-centered environment, each student develops a personal growth plan including academic,…

Undergraduate technology education students were divided into 4 groups: 47 took an in-class test, 61 a take-home test, and 63 no test. Both types of tests appeared to promote retention learning. Choice of test depends upon the learning situation and the specific objectives to be tested. (SK)

The pedagogical model views trainees as passive recipients; andragogy assumes learner self-direction. A contingency approach to adult learning recognizes a need for individualized approaches based on an assessment of trainee characteristics. (SK)

Study of an adult degree program used enrollment data 1986-96, course progression data 1990-95, and surveys of 140 enrolled and 250 not enrolled students. Three-fourths of those who graduated 1988-94 did so within three years; retention was most difficult in the self-directed and research phases; women's graduation rate was higher. (SK)

Advisement is a key component of personalized education. Usually, teacher advisors remain with a small group of advisees while they attend a particular school. The anonymity of large schools can be mitigated by creating school learning communities and/or schools-within-schools. Successful examples are profiled. (15 references) (MLH)

Discusses alternative-education programs and describes the SKILL (Student Knowledge in Living and Learning) Program that offers high school students small classes with individualized instruction. Describes public-education alternative schools as well as private, religious, and other types of alternative schools, and five sidebars offer other…

Discusses how to expand the spelling vocabularies of students with learning disabilities, improve dictionary skills, instill a desire to spell words correctly, and perfect the abilities of students to detect and correct spelling errors. The methods used for junior high students with learning disabilities are described. (CR)

Individualized instruction is a preferred method for at-risk youth in juvenile corrections. Three years of test results from North Carolina demonstrate higher achievement of students taught by individualized rather than traditional methods. (SK)

Reviews intelligent tutoring systems and introduces social theory as an alternative to individual learning theory that has served as a basis for intelligent tutoring system development. Discusses social processes and learning, collaborative learning and intelligent tutoring systems, and the need for a revised architecture for intelligent tutoring…

With the passage of No Child Left Behind and the start of the high-stakes accountability movement, it has become increasingly important that teachers are able to appropriately assess all students, including those who qualify for alternate assessments. If suitable assessment is occurring, teachers can use these data to help improve student…

While the concept of "differentiated instruction" can be defined in many ways, as good a definition as any is ensuring that what a student learns, how he/she learns it, and how the student demonstrates what he/she has learned is a match for that student's readiness level, interests, and preferred mode of learning. A readiness match maximizes the…

In this study, the author analyzed the effects of using the Self-Advocacy Strategy to increase student participation in Individualized Education Program conferences. An experimental design was used to collect data throughout the students' IPLAN program. Student participation and ability to self-advocate increased when the Self-Advocacy Strategy…

This article shows how children's literature can be used to provide meaningful mathematics instruction for children functioning at a variety of instructional levels in a single classroom.

A personalized e-learning framework based on a user-interactive question-answering (QA) system is proposed, in which a user-modeling approach is used to capture personal information of students and a personalized answer extraction algorithm is proposed for personalized automatic answering. In our approach, a topic ontology (or concept hierarchy)…