On the Impact of Addressing Student Diversity by using Computer-Assisted Differentiation Practices

Student diversity is omnipresent in education. Seated side by side in the classroom are students from diverse nationalities and socioeconomic backgrounds; students whose first language is not the language of instruction; special educational needs students; and students who vary in interests, personality, motivation, learning profile, and more. In view of these differences, policymakers have urged teachers to divert their focus from teaching "the average student" to addressing the individual needs of students. Differentiation is increasingly recognized as a powerful means to restructure today's classroom, mainly because of its solid theoretical base and broad array of practices. However, while the benefits of differentiation seem substantial enough for policymakers to invest in its implementation, a solid empirical base is missing. The gap between the theoretical and conceptual foundation and the limited access to empirical findings resulted in the main objective of this doctoral dissertation, i.e., providing causal evidence of the combined and isolated effects of specific differentiation practices. Using large-scale field experiments, this doctoral dissertation exploited the introduction of a novel compulsory curriculum on financial and entrepreneurship competences in Flemish secondary education to assign schools randomly to control and (multiple) experimental conditions. The study fields of financial and entrepreneurship education were attractive as little is known about what determines effective education in both study fields. To increase the internal validity and the scalability of the experiments, the differentiation practices were tested in computer-based learning environments. Therefore, this doctoral dissertation contributes to several strands of the literature by providing insights into (1) the effects of specific differentiation practices in secondary education, (2) the impacts of different teaching delivery methods in financial education and entrepreneurship education, and (3) the promise of educational technology.

Publication year:2021

Accessibility:Open