Extent of Differentiated Instruction in NAV1 124L3 Course: Benchmark Data for Teaching Strategy Adoption

Abstract

The NAV1 124L3 (Navigational Instrument with Compasses) course provides students with the proficiency in the use of different navigational instruments. For effective learning, professors teaching navigation courses shall have good instructional skills. However, there has been the notion that maritime instructors in the Philippines are not pedagogically-equipped to be teachers. It is therefore valuable to gauge the teaching strategy of maritime professors specifically in the application of differentiated instruction as the results will be used as benchmark data in the adoption of the above teaching strategy. Employing a 65-item standard Differentiated Instruction survey tool, with internal consistency of 0.94 (Cronbach alpha), data were taken from 197 randomly selected Bachelor of Science in Marine Transportation (BSMT) students enrolled in NAV1 124L3 course and 17 marine transportation faculty members who handled NAV1 124L3 during the school year 2019-2020. Descriptive-comparative was employed to determine significant differences on the perception of each respondent group. Frequency and percentage (for demographic profile), weighted mean (for differentiated instruction) and T-test (for significant difference) were used to treat the data. All the faculty members are male and majority are master’s undergraduate. A considerable number is from 26 to 35 years old and 55 years old and above. Most of them have a sea service of 6 to 10 years. The professors themselves perceived that they have highly applied differentiated teaching strategy as they strongly agreed in applying all its domains. However, the students’ perception of application is lower compared to the marine transportation professors. Perhaps, this relates to the comparative inferential result indicating that a significant difference exists on the perception of differentiated teaching strategy between the professors and the students. It was recommended that the Marine Transportation Department shall benchmark on the data elicited from this study in order to promote the utilization of differentiated instruction as teaching strategy in various technical courses of the BSMT program.