Differentiation of instruction is a student-centered approach to instruction that recognizes the varied and diverse nature of the learners, including the way they learn. In recent years, the United States Army Cadet Command has completely adopted differentiation of instruction for its Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (JROTC) curriculum. A key emphasis within JROTC is the teaching of leadership principles that were validated by the U.S. Army in 1970. While the JROTC curriculum has become differentiated, it is taught by retired members of the military who have spent years advocating instruction that was performance and lecture-based. Although the U.S. Army Cadet Command has expended a great number of resources revising the curriculum and training its instructors to facilitate differentiated instruction, studies have yet to ascertain whether differentiated instruction was in fact more beneficial for teaching the leadership principles.

This quantitative, quasi-experimental study explored the differences and effect of JROTC leadership instruction delivered through direct and differentiated means of instruction. This study used a pretest and posttest, administered to a convenience-sampling at one of the largest, and most successful inner-city U.S. Army JROTC programs. In spirit of the authentic assessment emphasis of differentiation of instruction, one control and one experimental group each received an assessment on identifying the leadership principles in action, after viewing short video clips. While both the control and experimental groups achieved statistical significance between the pretest and posttest, the experimental group that received differentiated instruction achieved a statistically significant effect size and scored higher than the control group on each test.

Along with the literature that supports differentiated, student-centered instruction as a means of raising achievement in JROTC, these findings can be used by JROTC and other professional development administrators to support continued emphasis for of the differentiated method of instruction.