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Stream/Area:
-
Subject:
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Paper ID:
IJSREM62673
Volume:
10 |
5 |
May 2026
Pages:
1-7
Publication Frequency:
Monthly (12 issues per year)
License:International Journal of Scientific Research in Engineering and Management follows the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) License, allowing free use and distribution with proper attribution.

Information Technology
Noida Institute of Engineering & Technology
Information Technology
Noida Institute of Engineering & Technology
The proliferation of online learning has exposed a persistent tension between scale and personalization. While massive open online courses democratize access, completion rates rarely exceed fifteen percent, largely because learners receive identical content irrespective of prior knowledge, cognitive capacity, or affective state. Existing AI-based personalized learning platforms typically address only one dimension of personalization—either content recommendation or difficulty adjustment—without modeling the learner's cognitive state in real time. This paper proposes ADAPT-CL (Adaptive Personalization via Cognitive Load), a unified framework that integrates Bayesian Knowledge Tracing for mastery estimation, a contextual multi-armed bandit for content modality selection, and a Large Language Model for on-demand explanation generation, all governed by an inferred cognitive load score derived from passive behavioral signals such as response latency, edit distance, retry frequency, and scroll velocity. We formalize a Personalization Efficacy Index (PEI) that captures the joint optimization of mastery gain and cognitive load minimization, providing a single tractable metric for evaluating adaptive systems. A pilot study with forty-seven undergraduate students learning introductory data structures demonstrated a 23.4% improvement in post-test scores and a 31.2% reduction in self-reported frustration relative to a non-adaptive control, with statistically significant differences in retention measured two weeks after instruction. We discuss implications for scalable personalization in low-resource educational contexts, propose a federated learning extension to preserve learner privacy, and outline a research agenda for longitudinal validation across heterogeneous learner populations.
KEYWORDS
AI-based personalized learning has long suffered from a tension between the engineering elegance of its components and the pedagogical effectiveness of their integration. Knowledge tracing, content recommendation, and generative tutoring have each produced strong individual results yet have rarely been combined in ways that explicitly model the cognitive state of the learner moment to moment. ADAPT-CL proposes one such integration, anchored on the observation that interaction telemetry alone, suitably engineered, supplies a workable signal of cognitive load without specialized hardware. A pilot study supports the framework's viability and suggests effect sizes large enough to motivate substantial replication. We do not claim that ADAPT-CL is the final word on personalized learning—our limitations are numerous and our population narrow—but we believe the design principles it articulates, namely that personalization is a joint optimization problem over mastery, cognitive load, and generative content, will outlast the particular implementation choices reported here. The two-sigma problem has resisted technological solution for forty years; it will not be solved by any single component, however impressive. It will be solved, if at all, by the careful orchestration of many.
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Publication Date
5/6/2026
Peer Review Type
Double-Blind Peer Review
Review Rounds: 2
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