FIVE METHODS FOR DIFFERENTIATING CONTENT PRESENTATION AND LEARNING ACTIVITIES FOR STUDENTS OF VARYING INTELLIGENCE TYPES/LEARNING STYLES WITH RUBRIC

When differentiating learning, whether through presentation of content or in learning activities, teachers must develop an effective cognitive formative assessment.  This will tell the teacher more about a student’s learning style, inter ailia.  Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences theory provides a broad template for the learning styles that teacher’s will encounter, with each student falling somewhere on a spectrum of seven (distinct but permeable) intelligences (visual-spatial, body-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, linguistic, and logical-mathematical).  The names of the seven intelligences largely speak for their mode of learning.  Though there is more to these intelligences than the names alone suggest.  For instance the student whose intelligence is defined as musical may be more sensitive to environmental factors (e.g., background sound) than the student of interpersonal intelligence.  You may read more about this here.

In accommodating the students whose intelligence suggests a predisposition toward social activity (e.g., interpersonal or linguistic), a teacher may adapt her presentation of content to a conversation (class or small group, though small group discussions have the advantage of targeting just those students for this specific differentiation).  The teacher might then engage those students in a debate learning activity as format for their summative assessments. 

The learners whose intelligences could be characterized as graphic or conceptual (e.g., visual-spatial or logical-mathematical) may be provided a visual presentation of concepts that employs graphic representations and problem solving demonstrations.  In a Social Studies classroom, a teacher might use a video that explores political policies in relation to demographic information.  Using math skills, the teacher might create a learning activity where the students plot projected demographic changes in our country and suggest how certain political policy may change as a result.  So much good non-fiction on economic policy today deals with the intersection of Mathematics and Social Studies; again, using graphs from these texts is a good way to engage these visual-spatial and logical-mathematical learners in a Social Studies environment (or other types of learners in a Mathematics classroom).

Another way to engage these types of learners in a History or Social Studies classroom is to employ a very specific type of logic, called Bayesian statistics, which is used by some historians to make estimated guesses about the truth of conflicting accounts in ancient history.  The historian Richard Carrier, is an advocate of this approach and speaks about it in this video.  A teacher could present students multiple and conflicting accounts of an event from ancient history and model an learning activity on Carrier’s description of Bayes theorem applied to history.

For the teachers with open minds to interpretive art forms, they might engage students of the musical and body-kinesthetic intelligences through theatrical content.  They might screen literary adaptations (films or recording of plays) of works their class is reading and ask that they create their own.  They might be required to critique such a performance if this is more practical given the time constraints, and in either event, such students would be of course required to read the source text.

Intrapersonal intelligence learners may require a more considered presentation of content.  Since teaching is a social activity, and these students are considered the most autodidactic group, the teacher will have to consider carefully a set of materials to provide for such a student.  For instance, if a teacher were starting a chapter on certain literary movement, he could provide such a student with an anthology of texts from that movement and direct the student toward writing a research paper on that topic.  Intrinsic motivation will play a large role in engaging an intrapersonal student, so the flexibility of drafting a thesis and researching different topic should help get the ball rolling.

These are examples of the sorts of adaptations to presentation of content and learning activities that a teacher could use to accommodate students of varying intelligences.  It may be possible to create an over rubric that would assess all of these summative assessments.  I designed these learning activities for Social Studies/History and English classrooms, which are the two subjects that I am considering teaching.  However, in my opinion these subjects are fairly permeable, and these sorts of activities could be adapted to conform to many California Common Core ELD standards.  The rubric I created is designed to provide expectations for four basic types of activities, the debate, the graphic analysis projection, the interpretation or critique (these could come from non-fiction source texts, i.e., biographies or journals, for a more Social Studies/History direction).  The overall points achieved through the assignment should reflect same degree of learning, across approaches (i.e., a 2 overall in the debate reflects the same achievement, academically, as a 2 in adaptation or critique).  Finally, because at least two of these assignments are potentially group assignments (the debate, if not one-on-one, and the adaptation), there are effectively two grades, group and individual, that would add to the same overall grade (1,2, and 3 are 4,5, and 6 respectively, but do not denote higher scores than a 3 for an individual activity, like the research paper), as do the other overall assessments.

	Group	Literary Adaptation	Critique of Literary Adaptation	Debate	Research Paper	Graphic Analysis
1	Group failed to meet deadlines (motion or script).	Student does not explain any contribution to script or understanding of source text.	Student demonstrates little or no knowledge of source or comprehension of the adaptation.	The student relied on largely logical fallacies.	Student meets thesis statement deadline.	Student defined the direction of his or her research by defined deadline.
2	Group has clearly defined roles or debate team members have distinct arguments.	The student explains his or her role in performance and creating script.  He or she demonstrates knowledge of the source text.	Students comprehends the source text and adaptation and can interoperate differences between them.	Student understands motion, his or her arguments are not too narrow.  He or she has done useful research.	Student submits rough draft, with annotated bibliography by defined deadline (5 pages with at least 2 sources).	Student creates accurate graphic representation from data.
3	Group works together to create cohesive product or argument (winning debate by poll of undecided voters, or votes changed).  Performers reference source text in post performance discussion.	Student meets standards of 2, and explains contribution to conceptualization in reference to the source text.	Student meets standards of 2, but cited at least on outside source.	Student wins the debate.	Student made good use of suggestions made on rough draft.	Graphic representation includes verbal or written analysis of outcomes and interpretation.