Differentiated Instruction to Support High-Risk Preschool Learners

Differentiated instruction is a strategy for meeting the needs of diverse learners. In this paper, I describe a differentiated instruction model and examine the effects on high-risk children. One hundred twenty-eight children and their teachers from eight Head Start classrooms participated in this study. Teachers provided developmentally sequenced, bi-level instruction in small group formats. Children made gains on all areas assessed (vocabulary, emergent reading, alphabet knowledge, print concepts, phonological awareness, emergent math). A subgroup of higher-risk children was defined as those who scored in the bottom 5 th percentile on English vocabulary at the start of the school year. This higher-risk group comprised 26% of the sample. Higher-risk children made much larger gains on vocabulary over the course of the year than did their lower-risk classmates and showed similar or slightly lower rates of change on other measures of early academic skills. Practical issues relating to the implementation of a differentiated instruction model are discussed. 3 High-Risk Preschool Learners Inequality in educational opportunities and outcomes as a function of poverty, parent education, ethnicity, and native language status remains a shameful fact of American life and these educational disparities exist even for our youngest citizens. Preschool attendance strengthens early academic skills and the benefits of preschool may be stronger for at-risk children (Magnuson, Meyers, Ruhm & Waldfogel, 2004). However, preschool quality is a key issue; only programs of exceptionally high quality are likely to result in long-term reductions in academic disparities (Magnuson & Waldfogel, 2005). Initiatives such as Early Reading First were developed with the goal of significantly improving the quality of curriculum and instruction provided to at-risk preschool children in order to close the readiness gap. Even within high-risk populations there is considerable variation in terms of children's school readiness and rates of progress in the classroom over time. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the issue of achievement disparities within at-risk populations. The relevant data do not present a clear picture. Molfese et al. (2006) found that half of low-SES four-year-olds in a compensatory preschool program made no gains in alphabet knowledge over the school year. These children started the school year with low assessment in all domains and showed little benefit from being in preschool, thus suggesting that the Matthew effect operates even within a high-risk sample. The FACES 2000 study (Administration for Children and Families, 2003) shows the opposite pattern—here the poor got richer and …