Personalized learning: From neurogenetics of behaviors to designing optimal language training. (April 2017) - Wong, Patrick C.M.
Abstract: Variability in drug responsivity has prompted the development of Personalized Medicine, which has shown great promise in utilizing genotypic information to develop safer and more effective drug regimens for patients. Similarly, individual variability in learning outcomes has puzzled researchers who seek to create optimal learning environments for students. "Personalized Learning" seeks to identify genetic, neural and behavioral predictors of individual differences in learning and aims to use predictors to help create optimal teaching paradigms. Evidence for Personalized Learning can be observed by connecting research in pharmacogenomics, cognitive genetics and behavioral experiments across domains of learning, which provides a framework for conducting empirical studies from the laboratory to the classroom and holds promise for addressing learning effectiveness in the individual learners. Evidence can also be seen in the subdomain of speech learning, thus providing initial support for the applicability of Personalized Learning to language. Highlights: Individual differences exist across diverse areas including language learning. A new framework, Personalized Learning, is proposed for addressing such differences. Evidence connecting cognitive genetics, neural and behavioral research is reviewed. Implications for language learning are discussed.