“In a typical classroom there may be several students who work at a higher grade level, and several who work at a lower one. Student don’t learn at the same pace, so their individual needs are often neglected because teachers can’t create personalized lesson plans for every student and work with them directly on what they’re struggling with, or challenge them. Even if the teacher did have time to create personalized lessons plans, the data available to them is usually only from a student’s latest test, or annual standardized tests. To combat this problem, several education startups are using big data to facilitate adaptive learning.

There are hundreds of thousands of data points for each student over the course of their academic career, data points which could be leveraged to deliver customized education. This type of learning, which adjusts based on student data, is called adaptive learning.”

Head on over to BetaKit to see how two new startups Knewton and Junyo aim to use all this data to get more insights into how people learn.