Reaching all, teaching differently : exploring teachers' approaches to differentiated instruction in primary education

Abstract

In increasingly diverse educational settings, the call for teachers to provide instruction that responds to different learning needs has become more prominent than ever. Differentiated instruction (DI) has emerged as a key pedagogical approach for addressing this challenge. Building on a small but emerging body of person-oriented research that recognizes meaningful variation between teachers, the overarching aim of this dissertation is threefold: (1) to provide a comprehensive conceptualization and measurement of DI based on existing validated instruments, (2) to disentangle teachers’ approaches to DI, and (3) to deepen understanding of the contextual embeddedness of these approaches. The dissertation comprises four interrelated studies. Study 1 develops and validates the Comprehensive Differentiated Instruction Questionnaire (CDIQ), a multidimensional instrument that captures teachers’ conceptions and practices of DI alongside school-level organisational conditions that support its implementation. Study 2 adopts a person-oriented perspective to identify distinct profiles of teachers’ conceptions and practices of DI in primary mathematics education. The findings reveal substantial heterogeneity among teachers, demonstrating that DI is enacted through different constellations of beliefs, perceived constraints, and instructional practices, resulting in five distinct conception profiles and five distinct practice profiles. The findings further suggest that teachers’ conceptions are closely linked to how they enact DI in practice, while teacher characteristics, including teaching experience and gender, are also associated with profile membership. Study 3 examines how variation in classroom composition relates to teachers’ practice profiles. The results indicate that greater linguistic diversity among students and larger class sizes are associated with a more constrained DI approach, characterized by a narrower range of practices and lower levels of engagement. Study 4 investigates how school-level organisational conditions relate to teachers’ approaches to DI practices. The findings show that a shared school vision and strong school-internal cooperation for meeting students’ learning needs are associated with teacher profiles characterized by more extensive engagement in DI. Together, these findings demonstrate that DI is best understood not as a single pedagogical approach, but as a phenomenon characterized by meaningful variation in both teachers’ conceptions and practices. Moreover, these conceptions and practices are neither solely the result of individual pedagogical choices nor purely context-driven. Rather, they emerge from the dynamic interplay between teacher-, classroom-, and school-level factors. By integrating measurement development, person-oriented research, and contextual analysis, this dissertation provides a comprehensive and context-sensitive understanding of DI and offers new directions for supporting its implementation in primary education.