‘I think they need to rethink their concept!’: examining teachers’ sense of preparedness to deal with student heterogeneity

ABSTRACT

Following a mixed-method approach research design, this paper reports on two studies that seek to investigate teachers’ sense of preparedness to deal with student heterogeneity and its effect on their differentiated instructional practice. The first study uses nationally representative data from the National Educational Panel Study in Germany (N = 677), while the second study analyses, on a micro-level, interview responses of 18 secondary school teachers. Findings from both studies reveal the overall significance of teachers’ preparedness and collaboration as a means to deal with student heterogeneity and effectively implement DI. Moreover, results provide important information into teachers’ training needs. Implications of the results and further research are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Student heterogeneity
• differentiated instruction
• teachers’ sense of preparedness
• mixed-methods approach

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

This paper uses data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS): Starting Cohort Grade 5, doi:10.5157/NEPS:SC3:8.0.0. From 2008 to 2013, NEPS data were collected as part of the Framework Programme for the Promotion of Empirical Educational Research funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). As of 2014, NEPS is carried out by the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) at the University of Bamberg in cooperation with a nationwide network. https://www.neps-data.de/en-us/datacenter/dataanddocumentation/startingcohortgrade5/dataandcitation.aspx.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marcela Pozas

Marcela Pozas is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Trier. Her main research interests are differentiated instruction, motivation and interest, as well as metacognition, context-based problem-solving tasks, and digital learning.

Verena Letzel

Verena Letzel is a doctoral student at the University of Trier. Her main research interests are heterogeneous learning groups, differentiated instruction, teacher beliefs and attitudes, as well as digital learning.