But when teachers track student performance, they can spot trends, tailor instruction to the needs of students and take corrective action.
Teachers who for decades were shielded from the bureaucratic particulars of the public education system now find themselves overwhelmed with mandates to track grades electronically, administer frequent tests and analyze data to tailor instruction.
The Achievement Reporting and Innovation System, known as ARIS, is billed as a tool that allows educators to share ideas via blogs, pinpoint deficiencies in learning and tailor instruction to each student.
"Continuity and stability help teachers and schools tailor instruction for the needs of each child over the long term," Devon Puglia, a spokesman for the Education Department, wrote in an e-mail.
School districts across the country are increasingly adopting digital technologies that collect details about students' achievements, activities, absences, disabilities and learning styles in an effort to tailor instruction to the individual child.
Second, presenting content in short, bite-size chunks, rather than monolithic hourlong lectures, is better suited to students' attention spans, and provides the flexibility to tailor instruction to individual students.
As the company develops and works with more data and content — major universities like University of Nevada, Las Vegas, are adopting its technology, as is the publishing giant Pearson — it will tailor instruction more finely.
This approach could mimic the characteristics that make human tutoring so effective, including the ability to immediately ascertain what a student needs to learn, to tailor instruction to those needs, and to provide immediate feedback regarding student progress.
Perhaps nowhere is the emphasis and the attendant scrutiny so intense as in New York City, where schools are judged not just on how their students perform on the tests, but also on how effectively their teachers tailor instruction based on the results of the annual exams and eight interim tests each student must take every year.
First, teachers who receive information about the children before school starts can use this information to tailor instruction and guide their own behaviors and interactions with the specific child.
