A new statistical tool could help researchers and practitioners determine when personalized treatments, educational programs, or recommendations are truly worth the extra cost and complexity, according to a new study. The findings offer a rigorous tool to identify when tailoring interventions is likely to outperform more conventional one-size-fits-all approaches. Personalized interventions are increasingly used in fields such as medicine, education, marketing, economics, and computer science because individuals often respond differently to the same treatment or support. However, personalized interventions are more expensive, often require more data, and can be more difficult to implement than universal interventions. There are very few tools to evaluate and identify scenarios when the added cost and complexity of personalization are justified by meaningful improvements in outcomes. To address this, Zhaoqi Li and Emma Brunskill developed a statistical hypothesis test – the K-fold Personalization Test (KPT) – that analyzes existing datasets to evaluate whether a personalized intervention policy is expected to outperform the best universal intervention. Unlike previous methods, the test accommodates multiple interventions, many individual characteristics, and flexible machine learning models while maintaining rigorous statistical guarantees, including control of false-positive (Type I) error. Across four datasets spanning job training, depression treatment, education, and marketing systems, the authors found that the KPT approach consistently demonstrated broad applicability and outperformed previous statistical methods for evaluating personalization. Li and Brunskill note, however, that the test evaluates personalization only within a user-specified class of decision policies and does not identify the optimal personalized policy itself. Yet even with these limitations, the KPT provides a rigorous and broadly applicable framework for helping researchers and practitioners determine when personalization is likely to deliver meaningful benefits.

In K-12 schools across the country, administrators are tasked with keeping everyone safe. New research shows they may be the most in need of protection.

In a study published this week in Psychology of Violence, researchers surveyed school personnel prior to the onset of COVID-19, during the height of COVID restrictions and after most restrictions had been lifted, and their findings surprised them: Administrators were more likely than teachers or school mental health professionals to experience verbal and threatening aggression from parents. After restrictions lifted, 77% of administrators reported such experiences, nearly 3.5 times the rate reported by teachers.

About The Study: In this cohort study of California public high schools, sustained availability of a dedicated health course was associated with modestly lower prevalence in several common forms of adolescent substance use. These findings suggest that sustained, dedicated health coursework may be a scalable component of school-based substance use prevention.

The University of Texas at Arlington’s Smart Hospital has been granted accreditation in teaching and education by the Society for Simulation in Healthcare, the leading global accrediting body for healthcare simulation programs.

(Boston)—Afzalbek Fayzullaev, a second-year student at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, has been awarded the prestigious ASTRO (American Society for Radiation Oncology) Medical Student Fellowship Award for his project, “Readability of Patient Education Materials for Radiation Oncology and Treatment Adherence at an Urban Safety Net Hospital.”

New research brief, “250 Years of Promise: Two Centuries of Youth-Driven Educational Change,” examined 16 youth-driven movements for educational change spanning nearly two centuries. Each movement was paired with an evidence-grounded, nonpartisan policy recommendation. The brief identified 10 strategic patterns, which offer a framework for understanding how young people have historically translated grassroots energy into institutional change.

Susan Culican, MD, PhD, senior associate dean of graduate medical education at the University of Minnesota Medical School, has been named a 2026-2027 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Health Policy Fellow by the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) — a prestigious honor that places her among the nation’s top health leaders. 

European regions where educational success is less tied to family background show a significant rise in patent applications. Researchers at the University of Zurich and the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW Mannheim) have for the first time demonstrated, on a large scale and over an extended period, that greater opportunities for advancement are an important driver of innovation and economic development.