Measuring differentiated instruction in The Netherlands and South Korea: factor structure equivalence, correlates, and complexity level

Abstract

Differentiated instruction is considered to be an important teaching quality domain to address the needs of individual students in daily classroom practices. However, little is known about whether differentiated instruction is empirically distinguishable from other teaching quality domains in different national contexts. Additionally, little is known about how the complex skill of differentiated instruction compares with other teaching quality domains across national contexts. To gain empirical insight in differentiated instruction and other related teaching quality domains, cross-cultural comparisons provide valuable insights. In this study, teacher classroom practices of two high-performing educational systems, The Netherlands and South Korea, were observed focusing on differentiated instruction and other related teaching quality domains using an existing observation instrument. Variable-centred and person-centred approaches were applied to analyze the data. The study provides evidence that differentiated instruction can be viewed as a distinct domain of teaching quality in both national contexts, while at the same time being related to other teaching domains. In both countries, differentiated instruction was the most difficult domain of teaching quality. However, differential relationships between teaching quality domains were visible across teacher profiles and across countries.

Students’ perceptions of teaching behaviour in Turkish secondary education: a Mokken Scaling of My Teacher Questionnaire

“…Second, the Graded Response Model (GRM), an extended IRT model for ordered polytomous observed variables, was applied to understand the response behaviours and how the set of items performed (Samejima 1968;Perner and Imiya 2005). The MTQ items were visualised using R package 'psychotree' to explore the unidimensionality assumption further (Maulana et al 2015a(Maulana et al , 2019van der Lans et al 2019). The total information estimated by this model indicated the presence of a nonnormal distribution with the highest frequency towards the maximum scores (3-4) in the data (Fig.…”

“…"My teacher teaches me to check my solutions", α = 0.85). Prior studies have shown that the items of the MTQ (Maulana et al 2016c;van de Grift et al 2014b) can be ordered in a unidimensional structure (Maulana et al 2015a(Maulana et al , 2019van der Lans et al 2019) and is valid and reliable across countries (Maulana et al 2019).…”

“…Researchers and practitioners agree that teacher behaviours are complex (Hattie 2009;Kyriakides et al 2009;Muijs et al 2014). Growing attention has been directed towards identifying components of teacher behaviours that have substantial impacts on students' outcomes (Scheerens 2016;Seidel and Shavelson 2007) and ways to promote sustainable teaching quality in learning environments (Harbour et al 2015;Kyriakides et al 2002;Maulana et al 2019;Panayiotou et al 2014).…”

“…These six domains synthesise various research traditions including teacher effectiveness (Creemers 1994;Scheerens and Bosker 1997), learning environments (Opdenakker et al 2012) and teacher support (Klem and Connell 2004). Adressing this conceptualisation, My Teacher Questionnarie (MTQ) was initially developed in the Netherlands and has been found useful for measuring perceived teaching behaviour in international research (de Jager et al 2017;Inda-Caro et al 2018;Maulana et al 2019;van de Grift et al 2017) and for preservice and inservice teacher professional development (Maulana et al 2015a;Maulana and Helms-Lorenz 2016a;Maulana et al 2016c;van de Grift 2014a;van de Grift et al 2014b).…”

Student Perceptions in Measuring Teaching Behavior Across Six Countries: A Multi-Group Confirmatory Factor Analysis Approach to Measurement Invariance

“…The probability of a teacher to implement differentiation within classrooms increases when other teaching behavior domains are demonstrably better. Differentiation is related to other domains in a stage-like manner in which differentiated instruction is one of the demanding domains of teaching behaviors that is typically seen in the lessons of highly effective teachers who incorporate behaviors from other domains in their lessons too (Pietsch, 2010;Maulana et al, 2019). Teachers with relatively high teaching quality, are more likely to teach in a student-centered manner and take into account student differences into their teaching (Pietsch, 2010).…”