Skip to main content

The Effect of Personalization on Student Learning


A group of ten separate studies illustrated that conversational cues can have a deep impact on student learning, particularly for deep learning that allows students to transfer their learning to new situations.[1]  Students presented with information in a less formal and more personal manner performed significantly better on problem-solving tests than students hearing identical information presented in a more formal manner.[2]

In her article, Legal Education in the Age of Cognitive Science and Advanced Classroom Technology, Deborah Merritt provides three reasons why personalization deepens learning:

“First, encouraging listeners to think of themselves as a reference point may enhance their interest in the subject, which produced more active cognitive processing. Second, personalizing information may help listeners relate new data to existing mental schema; extending mental frameworks in this manner encourages deeper learning. Finally, listeners may respond to the social cues of conversational tone; because another person is addressing them, they feel a ‘commitment to try to make sense out of what the speaker is saying.’ The implicit social obligation prompts more active cognitive processing as ‘the learner works harder to select organization, and integrate incoming information.’”[3]

There are a number of ways that you, as the instructor, can incorporate a more conversational manner into their teaching:
  • Utilize personal pronouns, such as “I” and “you,” rather than third-person structures;
  • Acknowledge your audience’s learning directly, showing that you understand the challenges of the learning process and giving recommendations for how to deal with those challenges;
  • Use positive gestures, such as smiling and nodding, when presenting to students; and
  • Place the student into the hypothetical, by suggesting they imagine if they were conducting research on behalf of their client.
  • Be judicious in how you use technology, as wordy PowerPoints and dimmed lights can cause students to fixate on the screen rather than their connection with you. [See Merritt's article for much more on this.]

Personalization may be particularly important in legal research classrooms, where students may have less interest in the subject matter due to the misconception that they already know how to research, to the fact that research sessions may be worth only part of a grade in their first year skills class or worth less credits than some of their doctrinal classes, and to the perception that research is boring. Personalization can help peak the interest of students, increasing their willingness to engage more actively with the material.

Personalizing the classroom experience and acknowledging the challenges student encounter may not only help students develop a growth mindset and promote the cultivation of trust in the classroom, but can actually improve students learning.  As such, it’s worth a try to start incorporating some of the methods listed above.


[1] Richard E. Mayer, Principles of Multimedia Learning Based on Social Cues: Personalization, Voice, and Image Principles, in The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning, at 201, 206 (Richard E. Mayer ed., 2005).

[2] Deborah Merritt, Legal Education in the Age of Cognitive Science and Advanced Classroom Technology, 14 B.U. J. Sci. & Tech. L. 39, 49 (2008).

[3] Id. at 50 (quoting Mayer, supra note 1, at 202).

Popular posts from this blog

Why Experts Can Struggle to Teach Novices

This week in our Slack group on teaching , there was an interesting discussion about expertise and the amount of time needed to prep for instruction. I mentioned something that I recalled reading: that experts can be less effective in teaching novices because often the expert skips cognitive steps that the novice learner needs to understand.  I thought I'd dig into this a little more today on the blog. The fact is novices and experts learn very differently.  The major reason for this is that experts not only know a lot about their chosen discipline, but they understand how that discipline is organized. As such, what has a clear structure to the expert is a jumbled set of unorganized information to the novice.  The information presented to novices "are more or less random data points."[1]  In contrast, when the expert learns something new in her area of expertise, she just plugs it into the knowledge structure that already exists in her long-term memory. Because the new

Motivation in the Legal Research Classroom

Motivating students in the legal research classroom can be a challenge. As we know, there are many false narratives surrounding students' conceptions of legal research's importance, interest level, and ease, all of which can result in a decrease in students' motivation to engage in this subject matter. There are two types of motivation--intrinsic and extrinsic.  Extrinsic motivation occurs when students are motivated by an outside reward or punishment;[1] in instruction, this is often the grades students will get on research assignments or the participation points they might receive for actively engaging with in-class exercises.  Intrinsic motivation , on the other hand, occurs when students are interested in the topic for its own sake.[2] Due to legal research's false narratives, students entering our classrooms tend to be drive primarily by extrinsic motivation.  The problem is, as Julie Dirksen aptly notes in her excellent book Design for How People Learn , &qu

Helping With Student Focus & Motivation in the Remote Classroom, Part 3: Limiting New Technologies to Reduce Extrinsic Cognitive Load

A librarian colleague used to say to me, "Technology is great until it's not." This couldn't be more true in the classroom.  As many of us prepare for a fall entirely or partially online, there's a rush to familiarize ourselves with lots of new educational technology to teach our classes. There's this sense that if you're not using the best and newest ed tech in your class, you're doing something wrong. Fortunately, the science doesn't back this up.  Using too many different types of technology can be a contributing factor to cognitive overload in students . Cognitive load is a term cognitive psychologists use to describe the mental challenge that the limitations of working memory puts on a student's learning.[1] Basically, working memory is extremely limited in both time and duration. Humans can only hold on to between four and nine "chunks" of information at any given time,[2] and can only hold on to new information in their worki

Rethinking Formative Assessment

We've seen an increased significance placed on formative assessment in the legal academy. Standard 314 of the ABA Standards requires that law schools use both formative and summative assessment methods in their curriculum. Its rational for doing so is "to measure and improve student learning and provide meaningful feedback to students." The ABA defines formative assessment methods as "measurements at different points during a particular course or at different points over the span of a student's education that provide meaningful feedback to improve student learning." Those of us in the legal research instruction business are no strangers to formative assessment. We are leaders in this in the law school curriculum, with rarely a class going by in which students do not practice their skills. Lately, though, I've been wondering whether I'm going about formative assessment in the way that will best provide meaningful feedback to students. In the mandato

Reflection in the Legal Research Classroom

Reflection is a critical component of experiential learning.  We see in ABA Standard 303 that experiential courses must include multiple opportunities for self-evaluation.  Self-evaluation is critically important to legal research.  Students must reflect on and assess their research methodology each time they research to continue becoming more efficient legal researchers and to determine what research strategies work best in which situations. [1] Reflection relates to several ideas found in cognitive theory that have been shown to result in stronger learning and retention: Retrieval : recalling recently-learned information;  Elaboration : finding a nexis between what you know and what you are learning; and  Generation : putting concepts into your own words and/or contemplating what you might do differently next time. I've been contemplating how to better incorporate reflection into legal research classes. At the beginning of this semester, at the recommendation of a works