Growth & Development
Maximizing Your Kid's Potential With Personalized Learning
Maximizing your kid’s potential
We all want our kids to develop into the best versions of themselves. To maximize their potential. We also know that every child is different and should embrace these differences. However, in today's traditional K-12 system, there is a one size fits all approach. Worse yet, our kids are still suffering from the fallout of the pandemic in the form of persistent learning gaps. Put simply, the big dilemma is that teachers don't have enough hours in the day to personalize instruction for every single student. They do their best to tailor the curriculum to the overall needs of the class. However, we are still left with kids that fall behind grade level, some that are on grade level, and others that are bored in class because they are ahead.
Studies have shown that personalized instruction, or one-to-one learning, is the gold standard for your child’s success. Until Beehive, there has been no affordable and scalable way for ALL parents to get this for their kids in one easy-to-use app.
Advances in technology and perceptions of how we learn provide new opportunities for parents to ensure their children develop into the best version of themselves. Beehive is at the forefront of delivering a scalable platform for a personalized, data-driven learning journey for each of your kids. In this article, we will walk through the research behind the implications of personalized learning and how Beehive can help for the benefit of parents across the country.
The research behind personalized learning
Dr. Benjamin Bloom was an educational psychologist. As a result of his landmark research, he can be considered the father of Mastery Learning. In the 1980s, Dr. Benjamin Bloom, along with two University of Chicago doctoral students in education, completed research studies comparing student learning under three conditions of instruction:
Conventional
How instruction is typically administered in a classroom with periodic tests.
Mastery Learning
Conventional instruction combined with corrective procedures based on testing outcomes and parallel formative tests (i.e., a practice that occurs during the learning process) to determine the extent to which students have mastered the subject matter.
Tutoring
Students learn the subject matter with a good tutor (in one-to-one or up to three students per tutor) along with periodic testing, corrective procedures, and parallel formative tests as in mastery learning.
The Bloom Experiment
Students were randomly assigned to the three learning conditions. Their initial aptitude test scores, previous achievement in the subject, and initial attitudes & interests in the subject were all similar.
The results showed that students' achievement changed under these learning conditions. It was found that the average student under mastery learning was above 84% of the students under conventional learning methods and that the average student under tutoring was above 98% of their conventional learning peers. Notably, the tutoring process demonstrated that most of the students do have the potential to reach this high level of learning. An interesting corollary showed that students' attitudes and interests were also impacted, with the least positive under conventional instruction and the most positive under tutoring. This striking performance by the tutoring group (although we believe the improvement under mastery learning is also significant) equates to a two-standard deviation improvement. Not to get too scientific here 🤓, but two standard deviations can also be referenced as 2-sigma. That is why Benjamin Bloom posed this problem to the world as "The 2-Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring."
Keep in mind this study was done in the 1980s. Yet forty years later, the research is still valid. And despite all of the technological breakthroughs we have witnessed over this period, the problem remains. The issue has been how to best implement these ideas of personalized instruction in a scalable way that is affordable and accessible to the 50+ million K-12 children nationwide.
Why Beehive can help solve Bloom’s 2 sigma problem
In an ideal world, every child would have their own educational roadmap. This would require processing massive amounts of data on each child to determine their needs and interests while being able to track their evolving capabilities in real time. This just hasn't been feasible to implement. However, the advances in technology and computing power are now providing a realistic path to implementing 2-sigma improvements based on a personalized learning journey for each child. Unlocking the code to personalized learning also represents the key to the future development of learning apps for kids.
Beehive's mission is to bring this to reality by optimizing the learning journey at every phase of your child's development. Our differentiator is creating a unified learning experience that can adapt to your child's personalized needs and interests inside and outside the classroom.
Beehive's Growth Plans feature gives parents a scalable alternative to tutoring. These personalized learning lessons taught by our expert learning coaches are more affordable and will help parents progress toward achieving those 2-sigma improvements while helping to close those pandemic-driven learning gaps from the convenience of one secure app. Our data analytics will provide a real-time, holistic picture of your child's learning development and provide actionable insights so you can feel at ease that you're on top of it as parents. These insights will help Beehive create personalized Growth Plans that address your child's needs and are tailored to their interests. Want to know the best part? Beehive does all of the work for you! We structure the plan, create the content, and track your little learner's progress every step of the way. You can also set lesson reminders in the app to help you stay more organized across each of your children!
We hope to see you in the Hive soon!