From Data to Knowledge to Action: Enabling Personalized Education

As a nation built largely on knowledge – and facing unparalleled twenty-first century challenges – we require our citizens to constantly acquire new skills quickly, to engage in new learning approaches enthusiastically, and to form new learning communities that work well together. Yet most of our classrooms still look like nineteenth and early twentieth century schoolhouses: learning materials (e.g., textbooks and blackboards) have changed little, and teachers use many of the same instructional methods, such as lecturing to passive students or assigning tasks to be solved by individuals. We simply are not cultivating within the next-generation workforce the kinds of understanding and capabilities that we so desperately need in order to be able to tackle the real-world issues of the future. As a result, our students are suffering: national reading tests indicate that almost 90 percent of inner-city fourth graders do not have a basic level of reading proficiency; in international math tests, high school students in Cyprus and South Africa routinely surpass American high school seniors in their results; and nearly half of all minority students drop out of high school.