Adaptive learning oriented higher educational classroom teaching strategies

Current situation of history classrooms in caus

At this stage, the college history curriculum occupies an essential position, especially in students’ humanities education. By equipping students with fundamental historical knowledge, the curriculum fosters historical thinking and enhances their ability to retrieve and critically evaluate historical information. Through this process, students develop essential concepts and methodologies such as historical materialism and inquiry-based learning. They strengthen their sense of mission and responsibility for China’s rejuvenation and cultural diffusion by learning and understanding history. Meanwhile, history education nurtures students’ well-rounded interests and character, broadens their perspectives, and cultivates a global outlook¹¹.

Next, a survey is conducted on students from the history classroom perspective in a university in Anyang, spanning lectures for three months. Then, through classroom observation and after-class communication with teachers and students, the current situation of college history classroom teaching is understood, and its features are summarized below:

(1) Students are roughly divided into four categories: on-class learning, selective learning, arduous learning, and independent learning students. On-class learning students are interested in history and have high-level classroom enthusiasm and concentration. However, they barely take notes, submit homework casually, and lack deep thinking. With poor after-class learning habits, they often score low on exams. By comparison, selective learning students only choose to learn what they are interested in the classroom and after class. They present an excellent cooperation ability as well. Nevertheless, they are indifferent to purely theoretical knowledge and lack concentration. Then, some students work hard both in and after class and are willing to ask for teachers’ help. However, they lack an effective learning method and often score just above average. Meanwhile, this group’s memorization and logical reasoning abilities are often inadequate. Lastly, independent learning students can listen and self-learn effectively and score the highest among the four groups. Nevertheless, their population is tiny.

(2) Similarly, teachers can be classified into three groups. First, some teachers do not have a correct understanding and mastery of teaching reform. The teaching reform stays on the surface, without real breakthroughs. Some teachers have made tentative reforms, carefully prepared teaching designs, and grasped students’ interests. However, the student-oriented adaptive learning method has not been fully implemented, mainly influenced by traditional concepts. Besides, students’ learning methods, practical abilities, and deep thinking have not improved. Such reform has made some progress, but it is still incomplete. Lastly, a small number of teachers have grasped the core of the reform, carried out the reform seriously, and achieved some results. However, as teaching and learning must be tested through time, the teaching reform needs perseverance and the support of educational resources and policies. Thus, this group is actually under more pressure than the other two groups.

(3) Humanitarian subjects like history are often less mentioned in contemporary CAUs, especially in science and engineering colleges. This results in students’ weak theoretical foundation of modern history, and the educational function of history disciplines is marginalized. Many students pay far less attention to history courses than subjects such as advanced mathematics. In turn, students’ weak basic knowledge of history brings great trouble to history teaching.

Given the above problems in the current situation of history classroom teaching in CAUs, new teaching strategies are designed from the perspective of Positive Psychology. New teaching plans are formulated through adaptive deep learning methods to reform the current teaching model of college history curriculums.

Positive psychology and adaptive learning

Positive psychology was formally introduced by Seligman and others in the 1990s. It emphasizes the study of human strengths such as well-being, achievement, resilience, and a sense of meaning. It focuses on stimulating individuals’ positive potential to promote holistic development. Compared to traditional psychology, which primarily examines psychological disorders and problematic behaviors, positive psychology is more concerned with how positive emotions and character traits enhance individuals’ learning motivation and social adaptability¹². In educational contexts, positive psychology highlights the importance of creating a supportive learning environment to enhance students’ sense of belonging, self-efficacy, and achievement motivation, which are key psychological variables for improving deep learning outcomes. For example, Dweck’s (2006) Growth Mindset theory suggests that when students believe intelligence can develop, they are more likely to embrace challenges, persist in their efforts, and learn from failures. This mindset provides a psychological foundation for students’ sustained engagement with complex historical problems, logical reasoning, and knowledge construction. Therefore, incorporating positive psychology principles, such as emphasizing individual potential, positive feedback, and a sense of belonging, into teaching strategies can help guide students toward active and enduring learning behaviors.

Adaptive learning, rooted in behaviorism and cognitive psychology, emphasizes dynamically adjusting instructional content, pacing, and methods based on students’ abilities, prior knowledge, interests, and learning styles to achieve personalized learning^13,14. In contemporary educational research, adaptive learning is widely applied in technology-supported learning systems. Its core lies in the continuous analysis of learning, data feedback, and content adjustments to achieve personalized optimization of learning pathways^15,16,17. Siemens’ (2005) connectivist theory further underscores that learning is a process of establishing connections between individuals and external knowledge networks. Students must develop the ability to identify, connect, and update information, which are core competencies that adaptive learning systems aim to cultivate.

This work integrates positive psychology and adaptive learning theories to propose a five-dimensional instructional strategy model. It emphasizes not only fostering students’ psychological well-being, learning motivation, and self-efficacy but also implementing personalized guidance based on learning data and individual differences. This integrated perspective not only enhances students’ historical comprehension and cognitive depth but also promotes metacognitive regulation and independent learning habits, ultimately achieving the goal of “deep and personalized” learning.

This theoretical framework provides dual support for the instructional strategy design here. On one hand, positive psychology helps establish a positive learning environment and internal motivation mechanisms. On the other hand, adaptive learning offers dynamic feedback and personalized learning pathways for instructional implementation. This framework provides a scientific rationale for subsequent teaching practices and establishes a theoretical reference for interpreting and analyzing experimental data.

Teaching strategies of history classrooms in caus

To address the issues of low student engagement and superficial learning outcomes in current university history classrooms, this work, based on the theories of adaptive learning and positive psychology, designs a teaching strategy system encompassing five dimensions: verbal information strategy, smart skills strategy, cognitive strategy, action skills strategy, and attitude strategy. This framework not only draws on Bloom’s revised taxonomy of cognitive objectives but also incorporates Kolb’s “experiential learning cycle.” It reflects the dual integration of cognitive levels and practical experience in teaching. The five-dimensional strategies form an interdependent, spiraling teaching process¹⁸. Among these, verbal information and smart skills focus on knowledge input and processing, cognitive strategies emphasize the enhancement of students’ metacognitive levels, and action skills and attitude strategies guide students in internalizing knowledge into capabilities and values. This approach aims to achieve a continuous learning path of “deep understanding—transferable application—self-regulation—value recognition.” Fig. 2 presents the details.

Refined teaching strategies in the history classroom.

The verbal information strategy corresponds to the “Remembering-Understanding” levels in Bloom’s Taxonomy. It helps students build an initial knowledge network through methods such as contextual teaching, historical language information encoding, and transfer training. This phase emphasizes the accurate acquisition of information, which forms the foundation of historical learning. The smart skills strategy aligns with the “Applying-Analyzing” levels and focuses on students’ abilities to recognize, classify, and reason about historical concepts. The strategy includes “discriminative learning,” “concept construction,” and “rule application,” aiming to cultivate students’ ability to convert historical knowledge into transferable skills. The cognitive strategy directly responds to the “Reflective Observation” and “Abstract Conceptualization” stages of Kolb’s experiential learning model. It emphasizes students’ planning, monitoring, and regulation of their learning process (such as metacognitive strategies and building self-efficacy), enabling autonomous learning and strategy transfer. The action skills strategy integrates the “Analyzing-Evaluating” levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. It focuses on training students’ abilities to analyze historical issues from multiple perspectives, search for materials, apply logical reasoning, and interpret history. This encourages students to make the transition from theory to practice. The attitude strategy runs throughout the entire learning process, aiming to establish students’ value recognition, sense of responsibility, and cultural confidence in history. It corresponds to the “Value-Organization-Characterization” levels in Bloom’s affective domain and strengthens the educational function of the course.

Additionally, this teaching strategy system emphasizes a “student-centered” approach, where teachers dynamically adjust teaching content and pace based on students’ learning styles and abilities, and implement the core principles of adaptive learning. Meanwhile, positive psychology’s focus on self-actualization, positive emotions, and a sense of belonging provides psychological mechanisms to support the implementation of these strategies. This strategy framework not only has a clear theoretical foundation but has also been validated through empirical research. It offers a practical pathway for transforming college history classrooms into environments that foster “deep, personalized, and active” learning.

According to Fig. 2, the main ways of implementing verbal information strategies include situational teaching, guiding students in effectively encoding historical language information, and teaching them how to transfer knowledge. The specific reasons and purposes of each teaching method are listed in Table 1:

Smart skills refer to students’ capacity to employ conceptual symbols to engage with their environment. History learning typically progresses from fundamental knowledge points to more intricate knowledge structures, adhering to a structured sequence. Consequently, effective teaching strategies should integrate historical knowledge with essential skills while fostering students’ ability to acquire knowledge and transform it into practical competencies. The teaching process encompasses discrimination, conceptual understanding, and rule-based learning. A detailed breakdown of these components is provided in Table 2.

Cognitive strategies encompass behaviors that enable students to regulate their learning, memory, and thinking processes. Cognition enhances students’ awareness, initiative, and autonomy, allowing them to assess their psychological state, abilities, and goals. Through cognitive strategies, students can plan, monitor, and adjust their cognitive activities effectively. A detailed overview of these strategies is provided in Table 3.

The action skills of the historical discipline are equivalent to the abilities and methods in the historical three-dimensional (3D) goal. During teaching, history teachers should first enable students to master multiple thinking skills, acquire skills to improve and expand their own abilities continuously, and master historical learning methods. They should guide students to retrieve historical information and summarize historical events’ causes, characteristics, and influences from different aspects. At the same time, students should be taught to see the essence of historical phenomena and grasp the laws of historical development. The specific content of the action skill strategies is demonstrated in Table 4.

Attitude is learning to acquire relatively stable internal dispositions and states that influence an individual’s actions toward things, people, and times. The specific content of the attitude strategies is shown in Table 5.

The proposed teaching strategies analyzed above are formulated according to the problems in the current teaching. Before the practical application of the established history classroom teaching strategies in CAUs, it is necessary to change the concepts of teachers and students. Their minds must be emancipated to adapt to the needs of social progress and the development of the times. The new teaching concepts include student orientation, learning-centeredness, comprehensive development, learning-based teaching, and teaching-learning services. Theoretically, the status of teachers and students is clearly defined. Teachers have changed from active imparters of knowledge and authorities of knowledge to participants, organizers, collaborators, and facilitators of student learning. Students have changed from passively accepting knowledge to active inquiry learning, from rote learning to self-motivated and collaborative exploration, and from accepting lectures and taking notes to interaction with teachers^19,20.

Design of experiment

This work uses a quasi-experimental design aimed at verifying the practical effects of the five-dimensional teaching strategy, based on positive psychology and adaptive learning theory, in college history classrooms. The subjects of the experiment are 60 freshmen from two parallel history classes at a university in Anyang, with 30 students in the experimental group (Class A) and 30 students in the control group (Class B). There are no significant differences between the two groups in their initial course grades and self-directed learning ability tests, ensuring comparability. To ensure the uniformity of the teaching intervention, both classes are taught by the same instructor, minimizing the potential impact of teacher differences on the results. The experimental period lasts for one semester, during which Class A fully implements the teaching strategy system designed here, while Class B continues with traditional teaching methods. The teaching strategies include five dimensions: verbal information, smart skills, cognitive strategies, action skills, and attitude strategies. The teacher embeds corresponding teaching activities based on the knowledge objectives of each lesson and student feedback. For example:

(1) During the study of the New Culture Movement, the verbal information strategy is adopted to guide students in constructing the historical context and understanding the background of cultural and ideological conflicts;

(2) When analyzing the reasons for the failure of the Xinhai Revolution, the smart skills strategy is used to guide students in event attribution and factor classification;

(3) Students are encouraged to write reflective reports after class, and use cognitive strategies to enhance their self-regulation abilities;

(4) Action skills are trained through material study and group debate;

(5) Students are guided to reflect on personal responsibility and social roles in history, reinforcing the attitude strategy dimension.

Although the experiment makes personalized adjustments to course objectives and teaching content, the evaluation standards (assessment structure and grading criteria) remain consistent for both classes to ensure fairness. Students’ course grades before and after the experiment serve as the primary quantitative indicators for analysis. The specific calculation reads^21,22,23:

In Eq. (1), \(\:X\) represents the improvement of scores in the pre-test and post-test. \(\:{a}_{2}\) is the post-test scores, and \(\:{a}_{1}\) is the pre-test scores. The comparison of the improvement of the average scores of the two classes shows the scientificity and effectiveness of this teaching strategy.

In the experiment process, teachers in Class A follow the following principles to cooperate with the proposed teaching strategy.

(1) The principle of teaching students as per their aptitude. Teachers should respect students’ individual differences, such as in personality, interests, abilities, and knowledge, and devise differentiated teaching methods. The purpose is to help students maximize their learning potential and avoid weaknesses^24,25.

(2) The principle of feedback control. Teachers should understand and analyze the students’ learning situation in time through teaching activities and constantly supervise, reflect, and evaluate the teaching. Then, according to the actual situation, the students should be guided on time. The teaching process should be controlled and adjusted. Meanwhile, it is necessary to guide students to learn self-feedback and monitor and cultivate students with the habit of monitoring teaching and learning activities²⁶.

(3) The principle of students’ leading role and teachers’ guiding role. In history teaching activities, teachers should respect the leading role of students and make students participate actively. Simultaneously, the leading role of students should be combined with the guiding role of teachers.

Basic information of participants

Students from freshmen Class A and Class B of a university in Anyang city are recruited as the experimental subjects. There are 30 students in both Class A and Class B. Class A (the experimental class) uses the proposed teaching strategy; Class B (the control class) uses the traditional teaching strategy. The investigation of the prior knowledge level of the two classes and the pre-test of autonomous learning ability shows that the two classes are similar in performance and autonomous learning abilities. Then, the two classes are taught by the same teacher, avoiding the influence of irrelevant factors on the experiment. In accordance with ethical guidelines, all participating students sign an informed consent form and receive approval from the Ethics Review Committee of the School of Marxism at Chengdu Normal University. The work strictly adheres to relevant ethical regulations to ensure the protection of students’ rights.