Adaptive Teaching: A Smarter Way to Reach 60 Students

The Daily Challenge We All Know

If you’ve ever stood in front of a Bangladeshi classroom with 60 (or more!) students staring back at you, you’ll know the feeling:

• One group gets it before you’ve finished explaining.

• Another is still copying the question.

• A few are gazing out of the window, and one is trying to sneak a nap.

Welcome to mixed-ability teaching — every teacher’s reality.

The big question is: how do we reach all of them without driving ourselves mad?

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Differentiation: The Strategy That Didn’t Quite Work

For years, the advice was “differentiate”: prepare one task for the high-flyers, another for the middle, and yet another for those who struggle. Sounds great in theory. In practice?

• You end up writing three lesson plans for every class.

• The “lower group” gets stuck with watered-down work.

• The “top group” finishes in five minutes and asks, “Sir, now what?”

And the research agrees: traditional differentiation doesn’t raise outcomes. Too much work for teachers, too little impact for students.

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Enter Adaptive Teaching (and Why It Works)

Instead of three lesson plans, adaptive teaching asks: what does each student need right now?

This is where some fascinating research comes in — the Expertise Reversal Effect (ERE). A huge meta-analysis (Tetzlaff et al., 2025) looked at 60 studies, nearly 6,000 learners, and 176 different comparisons. The findings were crystal clear:

• Novices (low prior knowledge)

  • Learn best when given high levels of support: worked examples, scaffolds, teacher modelling.

  • The numbers show a moderate-to-large benefit (d = 0.505). In classroom terms, that’s like 15 out of 30 students making noticeably better progress just because they had structured help.

• Experts (high prior knowledge)

  • Struggle when forced through the same step-by-step scaffolds. Too much support actually gets in their way — it feels redundant, slows them down, and reduces their motivation.

  • The data shows a negative effect (d = –0.428) — meaning experts literally learned less when they were over-scaffolded.

• The overall gap

  • The difference between novices and experts was almost a full standard deviation (d = 0.971). That’s not a small, subtle effect — it’s big enough for any teacher to see play out in class.

👉 Translation for a class of 60 in Bangladesh: If you use the same strategy for everyone, you’ll always help one group while holding another back. Adaptive teaching works because it flexes the level of support — scaffolds for novices, independence for experts — without demanding three separate lesson plans.

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Why Formative Assessment is Central

So how do you actually put the Expertise Reversal Effect (ERE) into practice?

First, a quick recap of what the ERE means:

• When novices (students with little prior knowledge) are given worked examples, scaffolds, and step-by-step support, their learning takes off. The research shows a clear boost (d = 0.505).

• But when experts (students with strong prior knowledge) are forced to sit through the same heavy scaffolds, their learning slows down. They actually perform worse compared to when they work independently (d = –0.428).

• The overall difference between how novices and experts respond to the same teaching strategy is huge (d = 0.971).

👉 In plain terms: what helps one group can hurt the other. That’s why adaptive teaching matters.

But here’s the catch: in a class of 60, how do you know who’s a novice and who’s an expert? You can’t just guess. That’s where formative assessment comes in.

Formative assessment gives teachers quick, low-stakes ways to check prior knowledge and adjust teaching on the spot:

• Starter quizzes: five short questions at the start of a unit can reveal who needs scaffolds.

• Hinge-point questions: one carefully chosen mid-lesson question tells you instantly if the class is ready to move on.

• Exit tickets: a 1-minute summary at the end helps you plan tomorrow’s scaffolds.

• Whole-class feedback: instead of marking every script, highlight novice errors (“many of you missed step 1…”) and expert errors (“those of you who finished early, check your reasoning in step 4…”).

This way, teachers can reallocate support dynamically:

• Keep scaffolds in place for novices.

• Strip away scaffolds and add challenge for experts.

👉 In Bangladesh’s large classrooms, this doesn’t mean tailoring for 60 individuals. It means using simple formative checks to split students into broad groups — novices, intermediates, experts — and planning tiered support within the same lesson.

In short: the ERE tells us why adaptation matters, and formative assessment tells us how to do it.

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The Role of Summative and Formative Assessment in Bangladesh

The Expertise Reversal Effect (ERE) shows us that novices and experts need very different kinds of support. Formative assessment is what helps teachers work this out in real time — identifying who needs scaffolds and who is ready for independence. But where does summative assessment fit?

1. The Limits of Summative Assessment Alone

In Bangladesh, exams dominate. They certify achievement and open doors to higher education — but they arrive too late to adjust teaching during learning. On their own, they can push classrooms towards rote memorisation and miss the vital novice–expert differences that matter for adaptive teaching.

2. How Formative Prepares Students for Summative

The good news is that adaptive teaching powered by formative assessment actually strengthens exam preparation.

• Novices, supported with scaffolds, build a secure foundation of knowledge.

• Experts, stretched through independence, learn to apply and extend ideas — exactly the skills demanded in exams.
  By flexing support, teachers can make sure all students move towards the exam with the right tools in hand.

3. How Summative Feeds Back Into Formative

Summative results are not useless to teachers. Instead, they provide a big-picture diagnostic tool:

• Exam scripts show patterns of common errors.

• These patterns can highlight which students are still novices in a particular skill, and which have reached expertise.

• Teachers can then design better hinge questions, starter quizzes, or feedback loops in the next cycle of formative assessment.

👉 This creates a continuous loop:

• Formative assessment identifies novices and experts now.

• Adaptive teaching allocates support accordingly.

• Summative assessment checks long-term learning and feeds back into the next round of formative diagnostics.

Both assessments have value — but it’s the combination that makes adaptive teaching sustainable in Bangladesh’s large, diverse classrooms.

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What This Means for Teachers in Bangladesh

No teaching approach is ever a magic wand — especially not in a classroom of sixty. But the evidence is clear: adaptive teaching gives teachers a smarter way to work with the mixed ability that’s always in front of them.

For Bangladeshi teachers, this means:

• Forget unmanageable differentiation. You don’t need three lesson plans for every class.

• Use formative assessment as your compass. Quick checks tell you who needs scaffolds and who needs independence.

• Let summative assessment guide the long view. Exams still matter — but think of them as a map of where your students have reached, not the steering wheel of your daily teaching.

• Plan for growth. Today’s novices should become tomorrow’s experts. That means fading support over time, not locking students into the same role forever.

👉 Adaptive teaching isn’t about being perfect. It’s about making small, evidence-based adjustments that make lessons fairer, smarter, and more effective — for every child in the room.

And in a Bangladeshi classroom of 60, that’s not just helpful. That’s transformative.

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📚 References

• Education Endowment Foundation (EEF). (2021). Teacher feedback to improve pupil learning: Guidance report. London: EEF. Retrieved from https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/guidance-reports/feedback

• Kalyuga, S., Ayres, P., Chandler, P., & Sweller, J. (2003). The expertise reversal effect. Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 23–31. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15326985EP3801_4

• Kalyuga, S. (2007). Expertise reversal effect and its implications for learner-tailored instruction. Educational Psychology Review, 19(4), 509–539. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-007-9054-3

• Ofsted. (2019). Education inspection framework: Overview of research. Manchester: Ofsted. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/education-inspection-framework-overview-of-research

• Sweller, J., Ayres, P., & Kalyuga, S. (2011). Cognitive load theory. New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8126-4

• Tetzlaff, L., Simonsmeier, B., Peters, T., & Brod, G. (2025). A cornerstone of adaptivity – A meta-analysis of the expertise reversal effect. Learning and Instruction, 98, 102142. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2025.102142

• Wiliam, D. (2018). Embedded formative assessment (2nd ed.). Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.