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  3. What If You Could Learn Everything? [A] Imagine every student has a tireless personal tutor, an artificially intelligent and ine

What If You Could Learn Everything? [A] Imagine every student has a tireless personal tutor, an artificially intelligent and ine

admin2017-01-16  24
问题                     What If You Could Learn Everything?
[A] Imagine every student has a tireless personal tutor, an artificially intelligent and inexhaustible companion that magically knows everything, knows the student, and helps her learn what she needs to know. ’"You guys sound like you’re from the future,’" Jose Ferreira, the CEO of the education technology startup Knewton, says. "That’s the most common reaction we get from others in the industry."
[B] Four years ago, this kind of talk sounded like typical Silicon Valley boast from another childish founder of a technology startup. Today, Knewton says they can deliver the kinds of breakthroughs: several million data points generated daily by each of 1 million students from elementary school through college, using Knewton’s "adaptive learning" technology to study math, reading, and other fundamentals. Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder, Facebook investor, and an early investor in Knewton, told Knewton’s staff recently that the company has two key characteristics he looks for in a deal. "Before they happen, everybody thought it was impossible. Afterwards it’s too late for anyone else, because they’ve already done it."
[C] Adaptive learning is an increasingly popular saying indicating educational software that customizes its presentation of material from moment to moment based on the user’s input. It’s being hailed as a "revolution" by both venture capitalists and big, established education companies. Starting this fall, Knewton’s technology will be available to the vast majority of the nation’s colleges and universities and K-12 school districts through new partnerships with three major textbook publishers: Pearson, MacMillan, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. And Ferreira’s done all this even though he says neither his investors nor his competition, to say nothing of the public or the press, really understand what Knewton can do.
[D] But here’s the vision. Within 5 or 10 years, the paper textbook and mimeographed (油印的) worksheet will be dead. Classroom exercises and homework—text, audio, video, games—will have shifted entirely to the iPad or equivalent. And adaptive learning will help each user find the exact right piece of content needed, in the exact right format, at the exact right time, based on previous patterns of use.
[E] In an age of swelling class sizes, teacher layoffs, and students with a vast grouping of special needs and learning styles, some reformers greet these adaptive learning software systems as a savior that could make learning more customized and effective and teaching more efficient. While battle lines are sharp in K-12 school reform over issues from charters to the Common Core national curriculum standards, digital innovations have fans across the political scope for their power to engage students and bring the classroom into the 21st century.
[F] Knewton, at base, is a recommendation engine but for learning. The recommendation engine is a core technology of the Internet, and probably one you encounter every day. Google uses recommendations: other people who entered these search terms clicked on this page, so we’ll show it to you first. The more you use one of these websites, the more it knows about you—not just about your current behavior, but about all the other searches and clicks you’ve done. In theory, as you spend more time with a site its recommendations will become more personalized.
[G] Rather than the set of all Web pages or all movies, the learning data set is, more or less, the universe of all facts. Ferreira calls these facts "atomic concepts," meaning that they’re indivisible into smaller concepts. When a textbook publisher like Pearson loads its curriculum into Knewton’s platform, each piece of content—it could be a video, a test question, or a paragraph of text—is tagged with the appropriate concept or concepts.
[H] The platform forms a personalized study plan based on that information and decides what the student should work on next, feeding the student the appropriate new pieces of content and continuously checking the progress. A dashboard (仪表盘) shows the student how many "mastery points" have been achieved and what to do next. Teachers, likewise, can see exactly which concepts the student is struggling with, and not only whether the homework problems have been done but also how many times each problem was attempted or how many hints were needed. The more people use the system, the better it gets: and the more you use it, the better it gets for you.
[I] In a traditional class, a teacher moves a group of students through a predetermined sequence of material at a single pace. Reactions are delayed—you don’t get homework or pop quizzes back for a day or two. Some students are bored: some are confused. You can miss a key idea, fall behind, and never catch up. Software-enabled adaptive learning flips all of this on its head. Students can move at their own speed. They can get hints and instant feedback. Teachers, meanwhile, can spend class time targeting their help to individuals or small groups based on need.
[J] The Knewton system uses its analytics to keep students motivated. If it notices that you seem to have a confidence problem, because you too often blow questions that should be easy based on previous results, it will start you off with a few questions you’re likely to get right. If you’re stuck, choosing the wrong answer again and again, it will throw out broader and broader hints before just showing you the right answer. It knows when to drill you on multiplication and when to give you a fun animated video to watch.
[K] These are early days, and the questions are mounting. Research indicates that emotional qualities like courage, persistence, and motivation may be even more important to students’ success than the knowledge or skills they acquire, and they all depend heavily on human relationships. Knowledge acquisition is the only aspect of education that today’s digital technology seems especially well adapted to. So far, most software applications, platforms, apps, and games, including Knewton’s, have been optimized for transferring quantitative, bounded bodies of facts in fields like math, science, or engineering, as well as basic literacy and grammar. An adaptive-learning platform like Knewton’s is helpless to analyze a student’s insight in class discussions, the special brilliance of an essay, or creativity in a group presentation. In a rare moment of modesty, Ferreira agrees. "In the end," he says, "maybe Knewton is just a tool."
With cooperation with major textbook publishers, Knewton’s technology will be accessible to many universities beginning from this autumn.
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答案C
解析 通过textbook publishers锁定C段。C段第3句说，从这个秋季开始。美国的大多数大专院校以及幼儿园到高中范围的学校都可以使用Knewton的技术，这得益于Knewton与三大教材出版商的新近合作。题目中的cooperation对应原文的partnerships；accessible to对应available to；autumn对应fall，所以本题信息来自C段。
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