Technology ensures freedom to be more flexible and creative while working with all kinds of students. This will improve equality in education.

Flexible learning paths

First of all, technology makes it possible to track progress. Cito, the leading testing company in the Netherlands has build a tool for this. Based on data about student's progress, teachers can create differentiated learning paths targeting different levels of motivation, learning preferences and mastery of skills and knowledge.

Even better, large databanks can be created containing results of student groups differing in age, gender, background, culture and country. Teachers can use this collaborative intelligence to continuously improve their learning paths to suit most student needs. This does not mean every student should be provided with their own individual learning path. Richard Cash (2010) calls this one of the myths of differentiated learning. Just by having more than one learning path available, students can pick (parts of) the learning path that fits them best, change whenever necessary and reach the goal at their own pace. 

At my company we are at this moment, for the purpuse of providing differentiated content, building a micro-learning course using  different ways to present the same information (video, animation, audio, text). The only disadvantage is that is very hard to keep this content updated. So we picked a topic that isn’t likely to change a lot (math in healthcare). I will put a screenshot down, dutch, sorry, but maybe you see what I mean.

Individual attention

Progress data is not only useful to create different learning path’s. By having data of student’s progress readily available, and have digital devices take over some teaching, the teacher is able to be more attentive to individual needs and guide students towards suitable learning paths. A supportive framework for this is the MultiTiered System of Supports (MTSS). This is a framework that helps educators provide academic and behavioural strategies for students with various needs. It uses collected data to assess student needs and provide them with interventions in appropriate tiers.

But these kind of frameworks aren’t essential to support differentiated learning. Teachers can do small and meaningful things to help student along. By adapting the way a learning artifact needs to be presented for a group of students having a different learning style. By putting same-abled students in an online whatsapp study-group having the same progress to help each other out. And other times by putting students with different backgrounds, ages or abilities together to work together on an online project.

Assessment

Although differentiated learning is great, to me it seems inevitable at some point all students need to be assessed on their mastery of skills or knowledge in a standardized way. Students need to know about what they are capable of and compare themselves with others. Also, people around them need to know about their level of knowlegde and skills, like employers, teachers and perhaps their own students. So, standardized summative assessment is necessary at one point and students need to be prepared for this. 

But, this should just be one of the learning tools available. We shouldn’t create a standardized bell curve to differentiate students during there learning progress.

Instead, we need to be very sure about what we want students to know and how they should able to present their knowledge and skills at the final checkpoint. During the process of getting there, adaptive, formative assessment used as checkpoints for individual progress is much more effective and motivational. An example of this is the memo-trainer developed by another Dutch company A New Spring. This assessment tool is adaptive, and is used to practice a few questions every single day. This would be very time consuming for a teacher, so this is a great example of how modern tools serve to make differentiated learning possible. They can provide automated, adaptive feedback and make it easier to have qualitative and continuous peer reviews. This will provide students with control and responsibility for their own and their fellow students progress.

References

A New Spring. Memotrainer. Retrieved from: https://www.anewspring.com/memotrainer/

Cash, R.M. (2010). Advancing Differentiation: Thinking and Learning for the 21st Century. ISBN-13: 978-1575423579.

Cito. Student Tracking Systems. Retrieved from: https://www.cito.com/student-tracking-systems.

What is MTSS?. Retrieved from: https://www.pbisrewards.com/blog/what-is-mtss/