Abstract: Teaching in a smart education environment pays more attention to the individual demands of learners, and adaptive learning can provide technical and methodological support for achieving personalized education. A review of the domestic and foreign research on personalized adaptive learning research is conducted to interpret its system framework and related components. Its implementation mechanism is given at three aspects, i.e., the domain knowledge model, the learner characteristic model, and the teaching model. After a comprehensive analysis, the problems and deficiencies of current research are pointed out. On that basis, the research on related component technologies in recent years that can promote interpretability is introduced to provide references for the next step of personalized adaptive learning research.