Differentiated instruction involves teaching in a way that meets the different needs and interests of students using varied course content, activities, and assessments.
Differentiated Instruction (DI) is fundamentally the attempt to teach differently to different students, rather than maintain a one-size-fits-all approach to instruction. Other frameworks, such as Universal Design for Learning , enjoin instructors to give students broad choice and agency to meet their diverse needs and interests. DI distinctively emphasizes instructional methods to promote learning for students entering a course with different readiness for, interest in, and ways of engaging with course learning based on their prior learning experiences ( Dosch and Zidon 2014).
Successful implementation of DI requires ongoing training, assessment, and monitoring (van Geel et al. 2019) and has been shown to be effective in meeting students’ different needs, readiness levels, and interests (Turner et al. 2017). Below, you can find six categories of DI instructional practices that span course design and live teaching.
While some of the strategies are best used together, not all of them are meant to be used at once, as the flexibility inherent to these approaches means that some of them are diverging when used in combination (e.g., constructing homogenous student groups necessitates giving different types of activities and assessments; constructing heterogeneous student groups may pair well with peer tutoring) (Pozas et al. 2020). The learning environment the instructor creates with students has also been shown to be an important part of successful DI implementation (Shareefa et al. 2019).
Differentiated assessment is an aspect of Differentiated Instruction that focuses on tailoring the ways in which students can demonstrate their progress to their varied strengths and ways of learning. Instead of testing recall of low-level information, instructors should focus on the use of knowledge and complex reasoning. Differentiation should inform not only the design of instructors’ assessments, but also how they interpret the results and use them to inform their DI practices.
There are generally considered to be six categories of useful differentiated instruction and assessment practices (Pozas & Schneider 2019):
Hall, M (2018). “What is Specifications Grading and Why Should You Consider Using It?” The Innovator Instructor blog, John Hopkins University Center for Teaching Excellence and Innovation.
Shareefa, M. et al. (2019). “Differentiated Instruction: Definition and Challenging Factors Perceived by Teachers.” Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Special Education (ICSE 2019).
Turner, W.D., Solis, O.J., and Kincade, D.H. (2017). “Differentiating Instruction for Large Classes in Higher Education”, International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 29(3), 490-500.
van Geel, M., Keuning, T., Frèrejean, J., Dolmans, D., van Merriënboer, J., & Visscher A.J. (2019). “Capturing the complexity of differentiated instruction”, School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 30:1, 51-67, DOI: 10.1080/09243453.2018.1539013