Post written by Douglas B. Reeves, founder of the Leadership and Learning Center in Salem, Mass., and author of ASCD books on educational leadership. Connect with Reeves by e-mail atDReeves@LeadAndLearn.com. This post was originally featured in ASCD Express.
For all the ink that has been spilled regarding the issue of differentiated instruction, little has been said about differentiated assessment. There is no doubt that students come to school with a variety of backgrounds and learning needs, and Carol Ann Tomlinson (Tomlinson & McTighe, 2006) and others (e.g., Stefanakis & Meier, 2010; Fogarty & Pete, 2010) have documented the importance of the issue and the potential success of the results.
The devil, as always, is in the details, and as Schmoker (2010) recently noted, some teachers find the demands of creating different lessons for the learning needs of each student overwhelming. Here are some practical ideas for busy teachers who want to meet the different needs of students while managing the demands on their already busy schedules.
Keys to Motivation and Engagement
If we were to synthesize evidence on student motivation and engagement, there are three overlapping concepts that are essential: choice, power, and competence. Any one of these is insufficient to maintain engagement.
Empowered students who exercise choice, doing what they want to do, may be temporarily engaged. But if they never become competent, they will become frustrated and distracted. Conversely, competent students who master a skill but never have the opportunity to enjoy a degree of choice or exercise power over the content and nature of their assessments, will dully go through the motions but never achieve a high level of engagement.
However, when students combine these three powerful elements of engagement, then we have the opportunity to achieve what Jeff Howard (Raney, 1997) has called the “Nintendo Effect”: the trance-like level of engagement that students achieve for sustained periods of time when they play video games. Students would not be engaged by merely watching videos; rather it’s the improvement in competence and the exercise of power, making choices every minute, that keeps them engaged. These are principles that can be applied in every classroom.
Homework Menus
Differentiated instruction means nothing when every student is told to finish the same 15 problems with instructions such as, “Complete the odd-numbered problems, numbers 1 through 30.” A better approach is the homework menu.
Consider a 7th grade math class in which some students continue to struggle with number operations while others are bored by what they consider the low-level demands of the class. The lesson: one-variable equations, such as “In the equation 3x = 10, what is the value of x?”
An assignment menu would have three columns, each with 15 problems:
- The first column contains problems that allow students to practice the basic number operations required for this lesson, including multiplication, division, and decimals.
- The second column contains opportunities to practice and master the central challenge of a one-variable equation.
- The third column includes two-variable equations and more advanced story problems that include opportunities to create one- and two-variable equations based on a real-world challenge.
Students can choose to complete any 15 problems of their choice.
Some will start in the first column and remain there; they need to practice number operations. Other students will start in the first column, quickly find those problems too easy, and proceed to the second column to finish their 15 problems. Other students may start in the second column and think, “OK, I did this 5 times. Why do I have to do it 15 times?”
These are the very students, by the way, who are going to fail a class despite having passed the final exam. They know the material but did not finish their homework assignments. Rather than engage in a power struggle with the teacher, these students need a next step, and that’s where column three comes in. Some of them will proceed to column three and relish the challenge, while others will find column three too difficult and finish their 15 problems in other columns. A few students will do only ...
