The Graduate School of Education has begun to approve plans for the use of a five-year $2.4 million federal grant for research on individual differences in the educational process at the pre-college level, Paul A. Perry, director of publications at the GSE, said last night.

The projects are designed to study the effects of different ethnic, cultural, and psychological backgrounds on learning in elementary and secondary schools, and to find ways of adjusting teaching methods to these differences.

This summer the GSE will run a summer school for 300 Boston elementary school students at the Kennedy School in Jamaica Plain. The staff will be composed of teachers, administrators, and guidance councillors from school systems all over the country. They will be supervised by a small group of professors led by Robert H. Anderson, professor of Education.

During the mornings, the staff will teach the children using new and experimental methods such as team teaching, combined age groups, and separate groupings in each subject on the basis of the students' individual characteristics. In the afternoons, the teachers will become students while they attend seminars given by the college professors.

Three other research projects will begin this spring. In one, a new curriculum will be developed for teaching history to college-bound students in Newton.

In the second, David C. McClelland, professor of Psychology, will study ways of equipping high school students to improve their achievement motivation.

In the third, an attempt will be made to apply what has been learned about child development to improving the educational process, thereby developing different teaching methods for different types of students, such as different age groups and psychological types.

The studies will be conducted under the auspices of the newly-formed Research and Development Center, a partnership of the GSE, local public school systems, and various New England educational organizations.