Mapping a Personalized Learning Journey –
K-12 Students and Parents Connect the Dots with Digital Learning

Mapping a Personalized Learning Journey – K-12 Students and Parents Connects the Dots with Digital Learning is the first in a two part series to document the key national findings from Speak Up 2011. This report focuses on how today’s students are personalizing their own learning, and how their parents are supporting this effort. The ways that students are personalizing their learning centers around three student desires including how students seek out resources that are digitally-rich, untethered and socially-based. The key questions being addressed in this report include:

• How are students personalizing their learning?
• How are parents helping students to personalize their learning journey?
• What are the digitally-rich, untethered and socially based learning strategies that facilitate this process?
• How can education stakeholders support students as they seek to personalize their learning?
• What are the gaps between administrators’ views of personalized learning compared to parents’ and students’ views?

Key Findings from this year’s report include:

• Students are adopting technologies and then adapting them to support their own self-directed learning. For example, 1 in 10 high school students have Tweeted about an academic topic. 46% of students have used Facebook as a collaboration tool for schoolwork.
• Parents are supporting their children’s personalized learning journeys. 64% of parents report that they would purchase a mobile device for their child’s academic use at school.
• There is a gap in offerings between what schools offer and what students want to learn. As a result, students are looking outside of the classroom to meet their personalized learning goals. For example, 12% of high school students have taken an online class on their own, outside of the classroom, to learn about a topic that interested them.
• In math and science classrooms where students and teachers direct learning supported by technology, students’ interest in a STEM career is 27%, compared with 20% for students in traditional math and science classrooms.
• Parents’ definition of academic success for their children places a strong emphasis on learning the right skills to be successful (73%)- more than any other metric for success, including monetary success or getting into a good college.

Click here to download the PDF of the report.

Click here to view the report in HTML.

If you think this data is interesting and would like to gain a better understanding about your stakeholders’ perspectives about the use of technology for learning, participate in Speak Up 2012. The online surveys will be open from early October to mid December 2012 with survey results available to participating schools and districts in February 2013.

Download Infographic

Sign up for Speak Up News to receive updates about Speak Up 2012