Conclusions
As teachers, not only do we want our students to be engaged in our lessons, but we want them to retain the content material. As Herbert and Burt (2004) say, "…One of the major objectives for an education is to facilitate students' learning particularly in the creation of long-term knowledge (p. 77)." In this study, I strove to differentiate instruction in my classroom to observe what effects this had on the student retention of the content material.
Though I did not end up finding, as I had hoped, a magic formula for getting students to retain content material, I did end up finding several strategies to help students retain content material.
Differentiating instruction many times means trying out new methods of teaching, and I found early on that because students are not used to these activities, some students were not able to retain material as well from them (Artifacts 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9). Therefore, differentiation should be done in multiple ways so as to reach as many students as possible so that they all have a chance at retaining the content material.
When I tried differentiating instruction in multiple ways, I found that the difficulty of the material matters—even though the subject material is differentiated in many ways, the difficulty of the content material may affect how well students retain it (Artifact 4 and 8). Second, I found that when content was taught in multiple ways, students tended to choose the very last method of delivery as their favorite, which supports that students are in favor of repetition of the material to help them to remember it (Artifacts 4 and 8), and last, I found that including multiple kinds of differentiation for one activity works really well for review activities (Artifacts 2 and 5).
These findings have helped me to develop methods to help students to retain the content material: the different forms of differentiation should be introduced as early as possible in the school year to the students so that students can get used to them and learn maximally from them, as many possible forms of differentiation should be used to teach a topic, as this reaches the most students and it provides a certain degree of repetition that may help students retain the material better, and multiple forms of differentiation could be used within one lesson, which also seems to help students to retain the content material better.
This research has delved into some ways that could potentially help students to retain the material, but the remaining questions are how long is this material retained and how can we help students to transfer this material to their real lives? Mayer (2002) states that retention requires that students remember what they have learned, and transfer that students remember and make sense of and be able to use what they have learned. The whole point of retaining the content material is to help students remember it so that they can apply it to their real lives. So how does differentiating instruction affect how students transfer the material? for future research, I would bring this a step further so as to determine whether using these different forms of instruction helps students to not only retain the material, but also to transfer it to their own lives so that this learning would not just be limited to the classroom, but could be applied to the world as a whole.
Though I did not end up finding, as I had hoped, a magic formula for getting students to retain content material, I did end up finding several strategies to help students retain content material.
Differentiating instruction many times means trying out new methods of teaching, and I found early on that because students are not used to these activities, some students were not able to retain material as well from them (Artifacts 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9). Therefore, differentiation should be done in multiple ways so as to reach as many students as possible so that they all have a chance at retaining the content material.
When I tried differentiating instruction in multiple ways, I found that the difficulty of the material matters—even though the subject material is differentiated in many ways, the difficulty of the content material may affect how well students retain it (Artifact 4 and 8). Second, I found that when content was taught in multiple ways, students tended to choose the very last method of delivery as their favorite, which supports that students are in favor of repetition of the material to help them to remember it (Artifacts 4 and 8), and last, I found that including multiple kinds of differentiation for one activity works really well for review activities (Artifacts 2 and 5).
These findings have helped me to develop methods to help students to retain the content material: the different forms of differentiation should be introduced as early as possible in the school year to the students so that students can get used to them and learn maximally from them, as many possible forms of differentiation should be used to teach a topic, as this reaches the most students and it provides a certain degree of repetition that may help students retain the material better, and multiple forms of differentiation could be used within one lesson, which also seems to help students to retain the content material better.
This research has delved into some ways that could potentially help students to retain the material, but the remaining questions are how long is this material retained and how can we help students to transfer this material to their real lives? Mayer (2002) states that retention requires that students remember what they have learned, and transfer that students remember and make sense of and be able to use what they have learned. The whole point of retaining the content material is to help students remember it so that they can apply it to their real lives. So how does differentiating instruction affect how students transfer the material? for future research, I would bring this a step further so as to determine whether using these different forms of instruction helps students to not only retain the material, but also to transfer it to their own lives so that this learning would not just be limited to the classroom, but could be applied to the world as a whole.