Students can perform better and connect to their learning in an environment where their differences in readiness, interests and learning profiles are accommodated, respected and valued (Gregory & Chapman, 2002).
When teachers differentiate by readiness, they design lessons that vary in degrees of complexity and difficulty so as to challenge learners at all levels of the achievement spectrum-high, low and middle. This does not mean that higher-performing students do interesting tasks and lower-performing students do dull drills. On the contrary, all learners are engaged in meaningful work and study important skills and ideas. The goal of the teacher when using readiness to differentiate content, process and product, is to push the students a little bit beyond their comfort zone so as to expand on their knowledge and progress at their own pace (Tomlinson, 2001).