An Instrument to Measure Teacher Practices to Support Personalized Learning in the Middle Grades

Abstract

Reforms to support and expand personalized learning increasingly are being introduced in middle schools across the United States. Personalization, as enacted in response to these reforms, encourages teachers to implement many practices that long have been recommended by advocates of middle grades philosophy. To better understand the practices of middle grades teachers working in schools attempting to implement personalized learning, this article presents a survey instrument to measure teacher practices for personalization in the middle grades. The article describes the formulation and initial administrations of the survey to 232 teachers in 2016 and 165 teachers in 2017. Exploratory factor analysis provided evidence for the presence of factors describing practices for personalized assessment, out-of-school learning, whole group learning in a personalized setting, and technology implementation. Confirmatory factor analysis with the follow-up sample provided additional support for this structure. Data from these two separate survey administrations demonstrated high internal consistency and moderate correlation across the groups of practices. Suggestions for future research using the tool are offered. The survey instrument is included as an appendix.