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1 Predominant Explanations of Individual Differences and Methods of Handling These Differences LO Mun Ling and PONG Wing Yan Introduction In 2000, the Curriculum Development Institute in Hong Kong initiated research with an aim to find ways to cater for individual differences in students attending mainstream schools in Hong Kong. Our research team, comprising twelve researchers and a consultant from Göteborg University, was one of five independent teams that worked on the project. The first task that we faced was to create a working definition of “individual differences,” with the understanding that the term might mean very different things to different people and as a result would lead to varying ways of addressing the issue. The initial discussion focused on why people were so concerned about individual differences. We asked, “In a pluralistic society, don’t we need people with various abilities, temperaments, and interests, who are able to contribute to, and take up, diverse roles in society? Indeed, is the world not a more interesting place when people are different from what it would be otherwise? ” We tried to grapple with the concerns of educators and the government, to understand why “individual differences” is such a great issue. In Hong Kong as in other places, students are put together in schools and in classrooms. They are often expected to learn at the same rate and achieve the same learning outcomes through engaging in the same activities. However, in practice it is observed that some students learn more effectively or faster than others, and this is often attributed to individual differences. As it is perceived that, within the same classroom, students learning at different rates and achieving at different levels is problematic, the fact that students differ is also regarded as problematic and as something that must be dealt with in one way or another. Students’ success and failure at school is often explained either by the individual differences between learners in their innate abilities or motivation, or by the appropriate or inappropriate application of teaching arrangements that the teachers use (e.g., see Entwistle, 1984). Each of these explanations is 2 Lo and Pong associated with certain viewpoints on how the school or the teacher should handle the problem or remedy the situation. These are also the most predominant views held by teachers, teacher educators, and policy makers in Hong Kong. In the space below, we explain why these views, though each has its own merits, are rather unproductive in helping children to achieve mastery of basic competences. Neither do they provide adequate help to teachers in dealing with the issue of individual differences within the constraints that they face. However, the reader must be cautioned that, throughout our discussion, we refer to children within the range of “normal” abilities; that is, they are neither mentally impaired nor exceptionally gifted to the extent that they cannot benefit from an inclusive education. Difference in learning outcomes and difference in ability It is often observed that some pupils learn more quickly or more easily than others. An easy explanation of such a fact is that they are born with different innate abilities. The popularity of such a viewpoint is evident by the abundance of “check your own IQ” type publications available in local bookstores. It is believed that, because children are pre-wired with relatively stable but different abilities, the way to cater for individual differences is to identify and classify children into groups according to such abilities, and then teach them only those things they are capable of learning. This appears to employ the metaphor that children are different kinds of vessel with varying capacities. As you cannot pour one litre of water into a 500 ml vessel, you should try to fill it up only with 500 ml of water, or it will overflow. So, different strategies have evolved to match the input to the child’s assumed capacity, including streaming, banding, the use of graded worksheets and differentiated curricula, and so forth. Whereas psychologists are divided on the question of whether there exists a general intellectual ability, whether such an ability (if it exists) may change significantly over time, or whether intelligence is in fact multiple rather than singular (Gardner, 1984), we would argue that, whatever the merits of the argument or usefulness of associated teaching arrangements suggested, there are two inherent problems associated with these viewpoints. First, children classified as having lower abilities are deprived of the opportunity of learning that which they are perceived to...

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