THE IMPACT OF DIFFERENTIATED INSTRUCTION ON PUPILS’ ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE

Background to the Study
One of the primary goals of effective teaching is to foster success for all pupils and to help them become self-directed, productive problem-solvers, and creative thinkers. These attributes are necessary to be successful in life, not just at school. As such, schools are expected to provide these opportunities within the curriculum to help students practice and develop these skills (Maduakolam and Ogo, 2010).
However, the balancing act is dealing with standards and classrooms containing diverse, heterogeneous groups of learners who have different socioeconomic backgrounds, different life experiences, interests, learning styles, and multiple intelligences. Learners do not all learn the “same thing in the same way on the same day.” Consequently, teachers must consider each learner within the learning community based on needs, readiness, preferences, and interests. In order to effectively do this, teachers need to adopt a philosophy that enables them to plan strategically as well as provide a variety of options to successfully reach targeted standards, goals, and objectives. Differentiated Instruction (DI) allows teachers to do so; meets learners where they are; and offers challenging, appropriate options for them in order to achieve success.

A close look at educational institutions may reveal that many instructors teach and assess all pupils in the same way using the same material without paying attention to learners variance. then a case can be made for these institutions to transform their programmes to reflect the realities of 21st century schools (Chesley & Jordan, 2012). One way to accomplish this is to emphasize differentiated instruction not merely as an instructional strategy, but rather as a critical teaching and learning philosophy that all prospective teachers should be exposed to in teacher education programmes (Ireh & Ibeneme, 2010). This philosophy, according to Tomlinson and Imbeau (2010), is based on the following set of beliefs: (a) that pupils who are the same age differ in their readiness to learn, their interests, their styles of learning, their experiences, and their life circumstances; (b) the differences in pupils are significant enough to make a major impact on what pupils need to learn; (c) pupils will learn best when they can make connections between the curriculum and their interests and life experiences; (d) the central job of schools is to maximize the capacity of each child. Contemporary classroom teachers, therefore, will need to develop classroom routines that attend to, rather than ignore learners’ variance in readiness, interest and learning profile. To achieve this ideal, educational institutions must put in place systems that support effective teaching and modelling of differentiated instruction. Tomlinson and Imbeau (2010) describe differentiation as “classroom practice with a balanced emphasis on individual pupils and course content.” They posit that at the core of the classroom practice, differentiation is the modification of curriculum-related elements such as content, process and product, based on pupil readiness, interest, and learning profile.

Differentiation is not at all a new concept. The one-room schoolhouse is a prime example of teachers differentiating to meet the needs of all pupils. Differentiated Instruction is a teaching theory based on the premise that instructional approaches should vary and be adapted in relation to individual, diverse needs and differing abilities of pupils in a classroom (Gregory, 2003; Tomlison, 1999). By its nature, differentiation implies that the purpose of schools should be to maximize the capabilities of all pupils. Differentiated Instruction integrates what we know about constructivist learning theory, learning styles, and brain development with empirical research on influencing factors of learner readiness, interest, and intelligence preferences toward pupils’ motivation, engagement, and academic growth within schools (Tomlinson & Allan, 2000). The intent of differentiated instruction is to maximize each pupils’ growth and individual success by meeting each pupil where he or she is, and assisting in the learning process. To differentiate instruction is to recognize students’ varying background knowledge, readiness, language, preferences in learning, interests, and to react responsively.

The teacher, who entails the key to a successful differentiated instruction, is challenged to facilitate learning for pupils of different readiness level, interests, learning profile (Tomlinson, 2003), socio-economic and cultural capital and psycho-emotional characteristics, all features that can affect the construction procedure of new knowledge. Differentiated instruction that was first proposed as a teaching practice by Tomlinson, (2009) is seen as the change of the teaching process based on teaching routines that correspond to the large span of pupils’ differences in mixed ability classrooms.

Furthermore, differentiation can be defined as the instructive approach by which teachers modify the curriculum, their teaching methods, the educational resources used, the learning activities and the evaluation methods according to and in correspondence with pupils’ differentiated needs, in order to maximize the learning opportunities for every student (Bearne,2008). Differentiation constitutes an innovating, constant reflective procedure of effective teaching and learning that cannot be met by readymade lesson plans. The planning and the instructional choices of a lesson plan based on differentiation can only be used effectively when chosen by the teacher, according to pupils’ needs and other personal characteristics (Valiande & Koutselini, 2008, 2009; Valiande, 2010). Pupils’ learning style, their interests, their talents, their skills, their competences and their cultural background will guide the teachers through his final decision concerning the kind of differentiated teaching to be chosen (Hall, 2002).
Although Tomlinson’s proposal for differentiated instruction corrects deficiencies of the positivist instruction paradigm by imposing a more pupils- centre instruction model, it fails, at the same time, to identify and take into consideration several pupils’ personal factors that affect and determine learning, such as the socioeconomic status of the family, pupils’ level of self-perception and other specific characteristics arising from pupils’ life outside school. While differentiation theory calls on equity by responding to pupils’ needs, simultaneously education is formed responding to society’s call for the rise of standards, through strictly countable tests and their results, becoming a means for the reproduction and the creation of social and academic inequalities (Apple, 2006).