The effect of differentiated instruction approach on the academic achievement and motivation of 4th grade students in English course

This study was conducted to determine the impact of the tiered instruction technique, one of the differentiated teaching methods, on the academic achievement and motivation levels towards the English course of fourth-grade students. A quasi-experimental design with pre-test and post-test control groups, one of the quantitative research methods, was employed in the research. The study group comprised students from the 4/A and 4/B classes of Şehit Recep Yıldırım Primary School in the Kırşehir Central District during the 2023-2024 academic year, with 18 students in the experimental group and 19 students in the control group. To collect data, the "Academic Achievement Test" developed by the researcher and the "English Motivation Scale" adapted into Turkish by Yılmaz (2007) were used. During the 8-week study, while the teaching process of the themes "Jobs" and "My Clothes" in the 4th-grade English course was conducted using the methods and techniques included in the English Course Curriculum in the control group, the tiered instruction technique was employed in the experimental group. In the analyses conducted to determine the impact of the tiered instruction technique on students' academic achievement, dependent and independent samples t-tests were used. For the analyses aimed at determining the impact on students' motivation levels, the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test and Mann-Whitney U Test were employed. No significant differences were found between the pre-test scores of the experimental and control group students regarding both academic achievement and motivation levels before the study, indicating that the groups were equivalent in terms of both academic achievement and motivation levels towards the English course. According to the findings obtained from the study, a significant difference was found in favor of the experimental group when comparing the post-test scores of academic achievements between the experimental group and the control group. Although there was a significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of the motivation levels of the experimental group students, no statistically significant difference was found when the post-test motivation scores of the experimental group were compared with those of the control group. Recommendations for researchers and practitioners are provided in relation to the study.