Differentiated instruction

Shellonda S. Bolton
Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:45:10 PDT

Teaching is my passion. I have always enjoyed it and consider myself an educator at heart. Once I retired from the military, I decided to pursue a career in elementary education. I completed a teaching internship at Anderson Elementary School through the University of Alaska. While at Anderson, I worked in a second-grade classroom. In my observations, I noticed that some students were totally disengaged during daily lessons. I began to ponder why these students were not engaged. Over time, it appeared to me that students who were not actively participating were either bored or overwhelmed. My observations caused me to become intrigued with differentiated instruction. With this in mind, I decided to do research on the relationship between differentiated instruction and student performance. I wanted to understand how differentiated instruction and student performance were related. In today’s classrooms, there are a vast number of differences in students. Students come from many diverse backgrounds (Cox, 2008). They have different cultures and upbringings. They also have a variety of strengths and areas of needed additional support. Students learn in different ways (Cox, 2008). Students also express their learning in a variety of ways. Over the years, these differences have caused there to be a growing need for teachers to adjust their teaching styles in order to meet the many different needs of the students they teach. In this paper, adjusting one’s teaching style in order to meet the diverse needs of students will be referred to as differentiated instruction. To be more specific, differentiated instruction or differentiation will be defined as altering of content, product, process and the learning environment to fit the needs of3 students in the areas of their learning profile, readiness and interest (Bondie et al., 2019). This paper will examine the relationship between differentiated instruction and academic achievement in elementary schools. It will aim to answer whether or not differentiated instruction has an impact on academic achievement in elementary school students and the nature of that impact.