T he concept of learning styles has tremendous logical and intuitive appeal, and educators' desire to focus on learning styles is understandable. Recently, a growing emphasis on differentiated instruction may have further increased teachers' tendency to look at learning styles as an instructionally relevant variable when individualizing instruction in increasingly heterogeneous classrooms. We discuss the overlapping concepts of individualized instruction and differentiated instruction, briefly review the evidence base for learning styles, and argue that instruction should indeed be individualized and differentiated. We conclude that there is insufficient evidence, however, to support learning styles as an instructionally useful concept when planning and delivering appropriately individualized and differentiated instruction.

Differentiated instruction is considered the way of teaching that aims to achieve success of all students, taking into account the needs of each one of them in a class (Morgan, 2014), reinforcing their responsibility and choice, peer tutoring and flexible grouping (Grimes & Stevens, 2009). It is also very important as the diversity in student population is only increasing and so are their educational needs. Productive diversity in learning is possible with new educational media and inclusive pedagogy that incorporates learner diversity rather than being built on the one-size-fits all teaching philosophy. In today‘s technologyenhanced leaning environments, it is possible to engage students more deeply than was the case in traditional approaches. Students can begin learning from their own level of expertise and achieve the expected mastery at their own pace. The presence of new technological means has created a shift towards a more personalized learning (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012; Mentis, 2007). Technological tools and media like smart phones and tablets, cloud-based computers, learning management systems, Google and many more provide the opportunity to learners to define their own learning, based on their own personal needs, to collaborate and interact with their teachers and peers and, as a consequence, to be co-designers of the learning process and content. Therefore, in today‘s information society, which is overwhelmed by so many technological means, we can observe a shift in the balance of agency (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012), meaning that learners have more opportunities to participate in the learning process, be engaged and modify it according to their needs and preferences and all these become real in the spectrum of the principles of differentiated learning

In theoretical terms, differentiated learning is the achievement of comparable ends in ways which are not necessarily identical. For instance, students may work at a different pace. They may address general disciplinary objectives as outlined in a rubric, but the content or subject matter may be of their own choosing. They may become actively involved offering each other peer feedback, where the differences in perspective become a resource for learning. Here we call the difference ―productive diversity‖ rather than the templated architecture of sameness—textbooks in which all students are on the same metaphorical page, lectures that everyone must hear together, and tests that are ―standardized‖. In a pedagogy of productive diversity, learner differences become a valuable resource for learning. However, any such learning is logistically complex—far more complex than traditional, didactic pedagogy. One of the affordances of computer mediated, networked learning is the potential to manage this complexity.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/522d/d67bbb12a01aeef25dd8ee7541669a526aeb.pdf

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09362830903462441