Knowledge of Individual Differences in Learners
Knowledge of Individual Differences in Learners: Teachers must be aware of their students’ cultural, developmental, and learning charac- teristics and how to include those differences in instructional decisions. This is a vast field. Cognitive developmental differences, for example, can cause unrealistic expectations in mathematics of primary students who are still in the Piagetian concrete operations stage or who haven’t yet achieved conservation of number. Quite differently, but equally important, knowledge of a student’s culture can have a profound effect on a teacher’s ability to interpret student behavior or to make culturally relevant connec- tions between academic content and student experience.