SCORE! Educational Centers - Personalization in Educational Software

Personalization in Educational Software

By developing a retail business model to deliver educational software for a monthly fee, SCORE! made available to individual consumers access to a large personalization software system that was originated by Stanford professors, Patrick Suppes and Richard C. Atkinson, and was previously only available to select schools and the Education Program for Gifted Youth. In 1963, IBM had established a partnership with Stanford University's Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences (IMSSS), directed by Suppes, to develop the first comprehensive CAI elementary school curriculum which was implemented on a large scale in schools in both California and Mississippi. In 1967 Computer Curriculum Corporation (CCC, now Pearson Education Technologies) was formed to market to schools the materials developed through the IBM partnership. As a student worked on the CCC software, the system learned the user’s strengths and weaknesses and created customized lessons based on criterion-referenced testing that produced on a personalized profile for each student. The instructional design, based on automated personalization, was considered innovative in the early 1990s, compared to the traditional classroom model of instruction where students would cover educational material together at the same pace. Based on computer-generated progress reports that CCC measured against national curriculum standards, typical students at SCORE! who worked for six months, or forty computer-hours, increased the equivalent of approximately two years in a classroom in math or reading.