Individual Differences and School Learning : Alternative Approaches

The success of education depends on adapting teaching to individual differences among learners. This thought has been consistently emphasized throughout instructional procedures and teacher education. Unfortunately, intensive elaboration of educational theory and procedures for accomplishing instructional adaptations of the idea have never been clearly established and validated. The present study reviews some current developments in the adaptation of instruction to individual differences among learners and proposes the developments into three alternative approaches: 1) alterable variable approach, 2) aptitude-treatment interaction approach, and 3) aptitude process approach. The alterable variable apprach is to identify instructional variables that are most likely to contribute significantly to decreasing individual differences in school achievement. This can be done in terms of the magnitudes of effect size of these instructional variables. The aptitude-treatment interaction approach in education aims at understanding how and why different persons benefit from different kinds of instruction, so that educational conditions can be improved by adapting them to the needs and characteristics of each person. The goal of aptitude-treatment interaction is to identity and develop instructional variable and methods which consistently interact with particular aptitudes of learners. This suggests that neither aptitude constructs nor instructional processes can be fully understood without reference to one another and raises the important possibility that common psychological processes underlie both aptitude and learning differences. The aptitude process approach proposes to describe aptitudes or individual differences among students in terms of the cognitive processes that comprise aptitudes. Instead of normatively based, psychometric measures of abilities and aptitudes with their static trait-like properties, the aptitude process approach aims at individually based, idiosyncratic indices of cognitive processes with their dynamic state-like properties. With them, instuction can be optimized by prescribing instructional treatment to support mediational activity or to modify detrimental, interfering mediation activity. The three approaches to the study of individual differences and school learning appear to have important potenital implication for education, respectively. However, these approaches have to be integrated into a unified theory so that individual differences in school learning can be more fully understood beyond the limitations concerned with each approach.이 연구는 서울대학교 사범대학 발전기금의 지원으로 이루어졌음