Examining the Australian educational landscape of differentiation through document analysis
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(Published version)
Date
2025
Authors
Scarparolo, G.
Porta, T.
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Journal article
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The Australian Educational Researcher, 2025; 52(3):2137-2161
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Gemma Scarparolo, Tom Porta
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Abstract
Teachers in Australia have the professional responsibility to differentiate teaching to meet the needs of students across the full range of abilities. However, it is often reported that there is a need for greater definitional clarity of the term differentiation to support teachers’ understanding and implementation. In this article, we examine differentiation in the context of Australian education with a focus on how differentiation is communicated to school leaders and teachers. A document analysis tool was utilised to review publicly available documents from 2008 to 2024 to establish how differentiation is communicated to school leaders and teachers in Australia. The analysis of 60 documents revealed that the nomenclature and definition of differentiation is varied and that there is a strong need to provide a nationally consistent definition and distinction between the term adjustments (used in Australian disability legislation), and differentiation as distinctly different approaches to addressing the diverse needs of all students, and not just for students with disability as it currently being positioned in many educational documents. Three recommendations are presented that have implications for Standard 1.5 of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers, and other national documentation.
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Published online: 4 February 2025
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© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.