Design Implications for Teachers' Tools in Differentiated Instruction through Case Studies

The diversity of students is getting increased in the contemporary classroom. To deal with the diversity, differentiated instruction (DI) should be considered as a way of providing alternative approaches to content, process and product according to the students' readiness, interest, and learning needs. Teachers have problems and difficulties in supporting different student's needs. In fact, teachers need proven tools including framework, guidelines or computing systems to help to practice DI in real context. According to the activity theory, tools influence on how people act and think and even their social practice, playing a crucial role in mediating the activities with people. In DI practice, there are also some studies about physical and abstract tools, but they have been not widely utilized by teachers in real schools. It means that more innovative tool to promote DI might be required. Therefore, to design a better tool to mediate the DI activities with teacher, case studies were conducted. In order to elicit the design implications, two physical and two abstract tools for DI practice were analyzed as case studies. Through the analysis of the case studies, eight design implications better to facilitate DI practice were suggested. This study has implications in suggesting design guidelines for teachers' tools to facilitate their DI practice by analyzing case studies in DI practices for an innovative tool in the educational practice.