ABSTRACT
Accumulating evidence demonstrates that there are multiple sources of influence on children’s cognitive development that contribute to individual differences. This has important implications when children reach early and middle childhood, and as they negotiate challenging learning environments in classrooms. How well teachers’ instruction is able to accommodate these individual differences has serious consequences for students’ learning and cognitive development. In this chapter, we focus on several key issues, particularly the achievement gap and the implementation gap. We first review the existing research on cognitive development and individual child differences during early and middle childhood. We then discuss these individual differences and how this impacts the ways we design and implement literacy instruction. We discuss how a better understanding of how to accommodate students’ individual cognitive strengths and weaknesses, considering the multiple sources of influence that both create and sustain these differences, might help to transcend the perplexing gaps in literacy achievement observed among our most vulnerable students when compared with their peers. Finally, we discuss challenges to bridging the implementation gaps between what we have learned through research and what we see enacted in the classroom, and new approaches that show promise in bridging these gaps, including assessment, technology, and research-practice partnerships.
