Adaptive Courseware in Biology

Adaptive courseware is a digital instruction tool that provides a personalized learning experience for each student. It includes instructional content and assessment that is scoped and sequenced to support an entire course. Adaptive courseware analyzes student data and can adapt elements of the instructional content, activities, and assessments based on the student’s performance. As a result, each student takes a customized path through the course material based on how he or she is interacting with the software (e.g., answers/inputs, time spent on tasks, assessment results). The individual student data allows faculty to also customize pedagogy and interventions used during remaining course time (Vignare et al., 2018). In this brief, we provide an overview of the current research on the effectiveness of adaptive courseware broadly and in the discipline of Biology. We also provide a list of suggested resources where you can learn ore about adaptive courseware, its efficacy, and best practices.