Process Differentiation for Academically Diverse High School Classrooms

Abstract

This study evaluated the effects of process differentiation on student literary analysis performance in a standard level 11th grade English class. Differentiation aims to help students of all ability levels succeed in diverse, inclusive classrooms. Process differentiation focuses on manipulating the “processing” part of a lesson, the part where students are learning new information, to help differentiate instruction for students. Literary analysis is a popular writing assessment for high school English students due to its use in standardized assessments, like PARCC. Literary analysis requires students to read multiple texts and compare their themes through a written prompt. The students in the experimental group of this study (n = 23) had differentiated process instruction based on ability level, whereas the students in the control group (n = 27) had non-differentiated process instruction when reading two texts. Results of pretesting indicated that the groups did not differ significantly in their ability to conduct literary analysis prior to the intervention. On a posttest literary analysis assessment based off of the two texts, the mean score of the experimental group (Mean = 6.04, SD = 0.88) was significantly higher than that of the control group (Mean = 5.07, SD = 1.00) [t(48) = 3.62, p = 001]. This provides evidence that process differentiation is an effective instructional strategy. Implications, threats to validity, and ideas for future research are discussed.