Breakthrough Followup

After the last post about testing differentiated instruction in the classroom, I tried the same strategy again with our lesson on logarithmic differentiation. I added the following graphic to the notes packet as a metacognitive exercise.

The biggest difference I've noticed with grouping students according to preparedness and/or feelings about the material is that the groups are much more self-sufficient than randomly grouping students. Especially yesterday, I noticed that though groups had questions for me, they were able to resolve many more questions among themselves. Another difference I've noticed is significantly reduced cell phone use. When the groups were randomized, some students would finish too fast and spend most of class on their phone waiting to take the end-of-class quiz. Now that problems are stratified by difficulty, the students who were bored before now remain occupied almost the entire time.

Now that I've replicated the success of differentiated instruction, I want to see if this success continues through some of the notoriously difficult Calculus topics, which are coming up soon in the course.