I've been writing quite a bit recently about the power of the
word "personalize" in education reform conversations and its
many different meanings. To some, it means allowing students to
proceed through content at their own pace. To others, it means
allowing students to pursue their own interests. Those, I would
say, are the two major ways "personalize" is used in our current
discourse, but I stumbled across another definition worth
discussing: personalization as situations where content is
modified to align with a student's interests. Last week,
Education Week ran an article about a recent study from Southern
Methodist University showing that students performed better on
algebra word problems when the problems tapped into their
interests. (The link to the full paper is here. Many thanks to
lead author Candace Walkington for putting her paper in a
publicly-accessible form online). The researchers surveyed a
group of students, identified some general categories of
students' interests (sports, music, art, video