Catering for Learner Diversity

Learner diversity exists in every classroom and should be taken into account when planning learning and teaching strategies. It is unrealistic to expect every student to achieve the same level of attainment. Diverse learning and teaching strategies should be adopted to give students opportunities to learn in different ways to realise their potential. In this regard, teachers are encouraged to find out more about their students’ interests, abilities, strengths and needs through investigating their general background, personal contacts with other students, and progress in learning. This will enable teachers to make informed decisions on the most appropriate strategies.

4.5.1 Strategies to Cater for Learner Diversity

Suggestions on curriculum planning to cater for learner diversity are outlined in Section 3.3.3 of Chapter 3. Teachers may consider the following suggestions in designing their learning and teaching strategies.

(1) Employing a variety of learning and teaching activities to address students’

different learning styles

Some students are visual learners; some are auditory learners; and some are kinaesthetic learners. Teachers have to adopt a range of presentation modes and vary their pedagogical strategies to address such differences. A variety of resources including textual, visual and audio materials may be used; and a variety of individual and group work should also be arranged to allow students to study and learn in their preferred style.

(2) Adjusting the learning tasks for students with different abilities

The basic idea is to vary the scale, nature and demand of learning tasks for students of differing abilities. For capable students, teachers have to design tasks which are challenging enough to maintain their motivation. With students who are less able, small and less demanding tasks help them to build up their confidence gradually and to learn effectively. For example, for less able students, the teacher may break down a complicated investigation into a series of simple ones. However, for capable students, scientific investigations can be made more demanding by encouraging a higher level of thinking, including more variables, requiring the collection of more data, or imposing the use of more sophisticated instrumentation and skills.

(3) Identifying and providing manageable “building blocks” for different ability groups of students

Teachers must identify the “building blocks” of learning and systematically make them available to students in manageable chunks that do not exceed their capacity, as this will enable them to learn more efficiently and enhance their overall capacity for self-directed learning.

(4) Varying the degree and nature of teacher intervention

Students vary in the amount and type of support, guidance and challenge needed for them to achieve the learning targets of the curriculum. Teachers should be sensitive enough to offer support to slow starters, to provide extra guidance to less able students, and to add further challenges for more able students. They should also consider whether extra support and scaffolding have to be provided for some students for the more demanding topics. As the performance of such slow starters improves, teachers should gradually reduce the extent to which they intervene in the learning process, to allow them to learn more independently.

(5) Flexible grouping

Student diversity can be viewed as an opportunity to get students to provide mutual support, particularly when they work collaboratively to complete learning tasks. Students of differing abilities can be grouped together so that the more able ones can share their knowledge with the less able ones. Alternatively, teachers can group together students of similar ability to work on tasks with an appropriate degree of challenge.

4.5.2 Information Technology as a Learning Tool to Cater for Learner Diversity

Used appropriately, information technology (IT) can be very effective in catering for different learning styles and expanding students’ learning beyond the classroom. Students who are quiet in class may participate actively and contribute useful ideas in an online discussion forum. Online assessment tools, with mechanisms to support learning, can also be used to motivate students and promote “assessment for learning”. The multimedia and interactive elements in IT are particularly useful for students who prefer visual or auditory approaches to learning. Besides, web-based learning resources can enable students to learn at their own pace and follow up their own interests. Students are encouraged to establish a learning community with their teachers and classmates by using IT tools such as e-mail, web-based instant messages and bulletin boards.

4.5.3 Catering for Gifted Students

Students with a very strong interest or talent in science need to be helped to fulfill their full potential. One way of achieving this is through acceleration – that is, by allowing gifted students to move quickly through particular courses (e.g. the Physics Olympiad programme), while keeping them with their peers for most classes. Another approach is through enrichment which provides gifted students with additional challenging or more thought-provoking work, while again keeping them with their peers in school. Such students should be given more challenging scientific inquiry activities. For example, in conducting scientific investigations, teachers should not only design more complex tasks for them, but also allow them to choose more challenging tasks to work on. Gifted students can set the objectives for their own investigations, thus allowing them to act independently as learners in various processes, such as defining a problem, using a wide range of information sources and evaluating investigation procedures.

In addition, arrangements can be made for gifted students to participate in a variety of learning programmes (e.g. the Young Scholar Programme for Biology) or science competitions (e.g. Hong Kong Chemistry Olympiad for Secondary Schools, Hong Kong Student Science Project Competition) and research projects which develop their capabilities.

In this way, they can explore their own personal interests in the learning of science.

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