Arab Educational Information Network

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of a differentiated instruction on the treatment of common misconceptions of a cellular structure of the 7th grade students in Riyadh region compared with the traditional method. The sample of the study consisted of 50 students in two sections. The students in the two sections were distributed randomly to form the experimental group and the control group. While the experimental group received differentiated instruction, the control group was taught by traditionally designed science instruction. All students were administered the cellular structure concept pre-test and post-test. A pretest-posttest control group design utilizing analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) showed a statistically significant difference between the experimental and the control groups in the favor of the experimental group after treatment. The results indicated that while the average percentage of students in the experimental group holding misconceptions has decreased from 70.3% to 10.3%, the percentage of misconceptions of the students in the control group has decreased from 68.6% to 23.4%. (Published abstract)