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INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

According to the dictionary of education:

Individual differences stand for the variation or deviations among individuals in regard to a singular characteristic or number of characteristics.

It is stand for those differences which in their totality distinguish one individual from another.

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES:

To understand the complexity of human behavior and experiences it necessary to study the differences between people.

For example the individual differences approach largely focuses on things such as personality differences, and abnormality.

MAIN ASSUMPTION:

Issue related to the individual differences approach is the ethical issues raised with labeling people as being different.

The tendency to label people as being different, abnormal and so on can have a negative effect on individuals.

Individual differences are essential whenever we wish to explain how individuals differ in their behavior.

Reaction time, preferences, values, and health linked behaviors are just a few examples.

personality, intelligence, memory, or physical factors such as body size, sex, age, and other factors

IMPORTANCE OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES:

Individual differences is the basis upon which one child is compared to another.

In general, understanding of the various developmental levels is enhanced by familiarity with the concept of individual differences.

There are many types of individual differences;

few of them are as follows: PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES: A physical difference academically includesreading, comprehension, memory

capacity,listening span, etc Physical differences includes the differences

TYPES OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES:

Such as differences in reading comprehension

among different students. Individual differences in reading

comprehension may reflect differences in working memory capacity, specifically in the trade-off between its processing and storage functions.

A poor reader's processes may be inefficient, so that they lessen the amount of additional information that can be maintained in working memory

Difference in attitude is psyche related to something.

Few learners have positive attitude towards a specific topic, subject, and profession than other. The role of education in society is to develop positive attitude.

DIFFERENCE IN ATTITUDE:

Values are the things that are given importance by an individual.

Some learners value materialist life style other moral or religious life style etc.

So education must mould the mind of young generation to have a balance values between materialism and spiritualism

DIFFERENCE IN VALUES:

Individuals are seen differing in considerable measure in respect of their general intelligence. It is not possible to send to schools children with an intelligence quotient of below 50.

Children with intelligence quotients between 50 and 70 can learn only the very simplest tasks.

AVERAGE INTELLIGENCE

Children between 75 and 90 I.Q. have considerable difficulty in progressing along with other children in their learning.

Generally, 40 to 60 per cent of the children in schools have I.Q.s. varying between 95 and 105.

Children with intelligence quotients varying between 115 and 120 are considered brilliant or intelligent.

During the junior high school as well as the college stage, the individual's differences in respect of special abilities, in addition to the general intelligence, are also important since special professions and specialized fields of vocation all need certain specific abilities.

Abilities of this kind are concerned with mental, artistic, personality or motor ability.

SPECIAL/INNATE ABILITIES:

In school the differences that the children exhibit is the outcome of their different families and their communities.

Attitudes towards education and authority differ in each family, culture and class. Some of these attitudes are favorable while others are unfavorable to education.

DIFFERENCES OF BACKDROUND:

Education and income of parents and their children are strongly correlated.

More highly educated parents, for example, might place more emphasis on the importance of education and also have different attitudes and social values

such as about the importance of education for daughters than less educated parents.

Parents with higher incomes at any given educational level might place more importance on maintaining the achieved social status and income than parents with lower incomes.

At the same time, the effects of parental income and education on educational expectations might differ for daughters and sons.

Alacrity in learning is visible not only in children of different ages but also among children in the same age group

This difference is dependent upon their maturity and educational background.

Alacrity in Learning

Children of differing ages as well as children of the same age show differences in their respective mental ages.

The child's level of education is determined

according to his mental age.

Mental Age

Motor abilities are inherited which are relatively stable traits that underlie various sport skills.

Normal individual differences in motor ability are common and depend in part on the child's weight and build.

delayed walking may be an indication of developmental delays or problems such as autism, cerebral palsy, or down syndrome

Motor Ability

Girls are more physically and neurologically advanced at birth.

Boys have more mature muscular development but are more vulnerable to disease and hereditary anomalies.

Girls excel early in verbal skills, but boys excel in visual-spatial and math skills.

Boys are more aggressive, and girls more nurturing. Men were more career focused and willing to take

greater risks in order to receive greater recognition. Women, on the other hand, emphasized community, family and friendships

Sex Differences

Makneimer and Terman discovered the following differences between men and women, on the basis of some studies:

(I) Women has greater skill in memory while many have greater motor ability. (ii) Female handwriting is superior while men excel in mathematical logic. (iii) Women show greater skill in making sensory distinctions of taste, pain,

smell, etc., while men show greater reaction and consciousness of size-weight illusion.

(iv) Possessing greater linguistic ability women are superior to men in languages, similitude's, word building, compositions and use of long sentences etc. On the other hand, men are superior in physics and chemistry.

(v) Women are more susceptible to suggestion while there are three times as many colour-blind men as there are women.

(vi) Women are better than men in mirror drawing. Faults of speech etc., in men were found to be three times of such faults in women.

(vii) Young girls take interest in stories of love, fairy tales, stories of the school and home and day-dreaming and show various levels in their play. On the other hand, boys take interest in stories of bravery, science, war and scouting, stories of games and sports, scouts stories and games of occupation and skill.

The word ethnic is derived from the Greek term ethnos, meaning people, ethnicity refers to a sense of membership.

Race and ethnicity are factors contribute to students’ diversity. Through race and ethnicity, we will be able to trace the students’ root and cultural make up.

Cultural features that define an ethnic group include shared expectations for behaviour, such as family roles, health practices, and work and recreational activities; shared values like religion, politics etc

Ethnic differences:

In Asian society, being a girl or a boy has significant impact. The people usually adore boys than girls. It’s because most Asian country are rice bowl or dependent on agriculture where the man are more utilizable in manual jobs than ladies

For example

“One of the most powerful factors influencing school performance is socio-economic status (SES), the combination of parents’ income, occupations, and level of education. Socio-economic status consistently predicts intelligence and achievement test scores, grades, truancy and dropout and suspension rates.” (Ballantine, 1989 in Egan & Kauchak, 1997)

Socio economic differences

Hobbies are an example of those features that signify individual differences. People have their own reasons for taking up a specific kind of hobby. We all can’t like or do the same thing in life.

Among interests in school subjects, those marking off academic or bookish interests from practical and non-literary interests may be of assistance in the allocation of pupils to secondary schools

Differences of interests:

No two pupils are alike. They differ from each other in hundred and one

respects. They differ in age, sex, hereditary potential,

intelligence, achievement, interests, and aptitudes, needs ,physical, social, emotional and developmental.

Each child is a unique individual and differs from every other and presents individual problems.

If there are forty pupils in a class there are forty different problems to solve for a teacher.

The two main causes that account for individual differences are heredity or person’s environment.

Causes of Individual Differences

heredity includes the genetic make- up like the DNA which comes directly from the parents and is nearly formed when a child is conceived. Individuals have various endowments,

abilities, and capacities provided by heredity. Heredity contributes to sex, intelligence, and

other specific abilities and it also decides the path and amount of progress and development of an individual.

Heredity constitutes for individual differences because every individual has different set of genes and different DNA.

Heredity (genetics)

environment includes the family background, the surrounding in which children are brought up and how they are brought up, the experiences they had in life and the culture.

Individual differences occur on the basis of simulation received by individual from his or her internal and external environment.

Family background and environment contributes to shape an individual’s personality.

No person from birth to death gets the same environment.

Environment

1. This can help them to form the proper attitude towards the brilliant and the dull-witted students.

2. A teacher would know any effort to bring all or a majority of the students in the class to the same level is futile.

3. A teacher would know improving only the atmosphere, method of teaching, and the apparatus of education may not lead to the satisfactory teaching of all students since their individual ability to learn differs widely.

Teacher's Advantage in Knowing about Individual Differences

4. Knowing the presence of individual differences the teacher would not be perturbed at the low performance of some of his students.

5. The teacher does not come to expect successes that are impossible.

Continued….

The first and the basic being that teacher must accept individual differences.

The teacher must learn about individual differences like what the types of individual differences are and how they occur.

Teacher should plan lessons that target different learning styles.

Teacher should provide accommodations such as preferential seating to certain students giving cues about what is coming next reading assignments for students writing down the student's ideas and providing handouts of chalkboard or overhead

notes

How to deal or respect individual differences in classroom:

Teacher should create an accessible classroom environment for students with physical differences.

Teacher should celebrate cultural differences by allowing students to talk about their culture, families and the holidays they observe.

Teacher should model respect for all students by treating each student fairly.

THANK YOU !