Modeling and Simulation of Individualized Instruction

In recent years there has been a significant expansion in the individualization of instruction from the elementary school to the University, as well as in technical and industrial training. Attempts to introduce individualized instruction often have been thwarted by the sudden emergence of a complex and time-constrained allocation of resources problem in an area where little or no management expertise was previously required. In this paper, an attempt has been made to develop a mathematical model of individualized instruction. Representation of the process both as a flow graph and as a state space has been considered. Serious questions of stationarity arose when an attempt was made to handle statistically the "free" choice of individual human beings. An attempt is now being made to run an interactive management information system concurrent with an ipdividualized course, thus providing a means of directly modifying the operation of the simulation by the actions and decisions of the human participants. It is expected that after such a "participative simulation" is run concurrent with several courses, it will result in a useful and pre-validated mathematical model and computer simulation for the planning and management of individualized instruction.