A typology of learner profiles to anticipate and guide differentiation in primary classes

While some research has highlighted how teachers prepare their course materials, little is known about how future teachers design support for their students, and thus plan and anticipate what can and will happen in the classroom. We have therefore sought to investigate whether identifiable learner profiles emerge when regular primary school students are offered a complex task: How students respond to the task? How well they perform? The ambition was to develop a typology of profiles concerning student task engagement that would allow any teacher to anticipate regulatory actions that would be matched as closely as possible to the realities of the classroom. To do this, we observed 282 French-speaking Belgian students aged 10-12 years old in the first moments of performing a complex reading task. The data analysis revealed that six learner profiles can be used to plan teaching activities : the ‘regular’ student, the student who gets discouraged because the task seems too complex, the one who gets blocked during the task, the one who bypasses the actual task without achieving the learning objectives, the one who does not engage in the task and the high-performing student who finishes faster than the others