Analysis of Differentiated Instruction's Effects on Increasing Student's Engagement in Online Education

About the Study

Student engagement in online education has been an issue for global educators. This briefly touched upon the definition of Differentiated Instruction (DI) in both the west and china, shedding light on learning styles and how chinese students’ learning styles are categorized. Lastly, it is concluded that the idea to incorporate numerous learning apps during online education is a good way of DI to increase student engagement in the west and china.

Due to technological advancement and the on-going COVID-19 safety concerns, online education has gained widespread public attention and become an alternative to traditional face-to-face learning at various levels of education. Countries all over the world have made attempts to provide online education to accommodate the global pandemic, including China. Chinese schools have been urged to employ online learning platforms and promote virtual learning in place of face-to-face instruction during the sporadic school closures as part of the "School's out, but class's on" lockdowns for COVID-19. However, given the massive population of the students in China, many cast doubt on the effectiveness of Chinese online education. Specifically, one direct result of such an enormous student population is the large class size. According to the chinese government’s educational report, there are two types of large class sizes in primary and secondary schools. Super courses, or classrooms having more than 66 students, are one example. These classes account for 86,000 students or 2.4% of all classes. Second, 10.1% of all classes have 368,000 large classrooms with more than 56 students. Therefore, it can be difficult to maintain discipline and ensure student engagement in such a large class.

Differentiated Instruction (DI) is a new teaching pedagogy that has been proven effective in improving learner engagement, and enhancing learning outcomes. Yet, fewer studies have been conducted on the effectiveness of DI on student engagement in online courses. As a result, the use of DI in online education to improve student engagement during online sessions remains an under-researched subject. This shows shed light on the key concepts of DI and learner engagement from a West and Chinese perspective, presenting a balanced view on the feasibility of DI in improving learner engagement during Chinese online education.

Tomlinson describes DI as an education philosophy according to the belief that children optimize their learning when teacher children’s readiness levels, interests, and learning profiles into consideration. In other words, DI aims to maximize student learning. Differentiating can be done in many ways, including content, product, and process differentiation. Content differentiation refers to “the input of the unit: ideas, concepts, information and facts” product differentiation, on the other hand, demands that students should be able to use a variety of ways to show what they understand and what they learn from the classroom lastly, process differentiation is the process where students can “make their own sense of the content or input”.

To differentiate, various students’ profiles need to be taken into consideration before teaching, including socioeconomic backgrounds, academic readiness, languages, and interest’s teachers should also collaborate with each other to provide an ideal learning environment for children via differentiated teaching. In addition, teachers should give equal respect for students’ talents and offer them diversified assessment options so they can be assessed based on what students are good at. Overall, DI offers a meaningful approach for teachers to address learner variance, reform the one-size-fits-all curriculum, and meet various learning styles of various learners.