Designing an Adaptive Instructional System for Financial Literacy Training

Abstract

Adaptive instructional systems (AIS) provide instruction tailored to an individual’s abilities and/or needs to meet their educational goal. AISs have been shown to improve learning and performance outcomes and reduce time in training relative to traditional approaches. Typical AISs that are documented in training and education research involve use cases in which the educational objective is to maximize a learner’s understanding of a topic or performance on a task and employ different instructional techniques based on the learner’s performance during training. This paper aims to explore another method of adaptation to promote adult learning or workplace training where it may be more relevant to focus interventions that personalize content for learners. Personalization can help learners find information they need quickly and is theorized to increase motivation to learn by having content more directly related to a learner’s personal experience. Using financial literacy as a use case, we discuss how we used this personalization approach to design a mobile-based AIS to train U.S. service members about personal finance topics.