My thoughts on ability grouping…

I guess I am somewhat naive about ability grouping or tracking as some might call it.  I truly believed that ability grouping was a thing of the past, something my parents experienced in school, not me.  I was not taught in ability grouped classrooms, some students went out for remedial and that was the extent of it.  Nor, have I taught in ability grouped classrooms besides the streaming that occurs in the high school courses; general, academic or advanced streams.  I have heard of experiences however of some of my colleagues who were taught using ability grouping as young as elementary school.       

Boaler has certainly opened my eyes to this controversially subject in education.  Reading this week’s chapter allowed me to understand the negative experiences of students taught in ability grouped classrooms and researching this week for our weekly discussion and this blog has allowed me to realize just how popular ability grouping is. “The educational systems of most industrialized countries around the world use some form of achievement grouping (also known as tracking or streaming). [Furthermore, significantly] in many countries, achievement grouping has been the subject of heated political and scientific debate for many years now” (Trautwein et al., 2006, p. 788).

Advocates for ability grouping argue that placing students in sets allows teachers the ability to enhance the learning of higher achieving sets of students and lower achieving sets of students by meeting their needs within different learning environments.  Teachers teaching higher sets can spend more time on difficult learning activities and cover more material, while teachers teaching lower sets can spend more time on helping individual students meet the basic outcomes they need.  Boaler’s research flies in the face of these advocates in that it suggests that grouping by ability is doing more harm than good.  She is in line with many researchers who “have argued that placing an individual student in one of these clusters—commonly referred to as streaming, tracking, or ability grouping—will affect her or his achievement, future educational career, morale, and happiness" (p. 789).

Lucas’s (1999) work on tracking in the United States, “reported evidence suggesting that students in low-track classes received low-quality teaching in unsupportive learning climates and cited research indicating that placement in low tracks was associated with less favorable outcomes than placement in high tracks” (p. 789).  Boaler suggests something that is both in agreement with this and somewhat opposite to this.  She does demonstrate how placement in lower sets is detrimental to students’ success.  Once students are placed in lower sets their ability to achieve higher than the set they are in is almost non-existent.  She demonstrates the students’ feelings that they had “unfair restrictions [placed] on their potential mathematical achievement” (p. 164).  Also, along with Boaler’s conclusions there is an enormous amount of research that proves the negative effects on students’ motivation and self esteem when placed in lower sets.

I think it is important that Boaler demonstrates that students in the high-set were just as disadvantaged if not more than students in the low-set classes.  Through questionnaires given to students during her research at Amber Hill, who used the ability grouping approach, she illustrates Set 1 students at Amber Hill to be the most negative with regards to mathematics (Boaler, 2002, p. 161).  She asked students to respond to the question, whether they enjoyed mathematics lessons always, sometimes or never (p. 161). Students in Set 1 were the smallest proportion of students who responded that they always enjoyed mathematics, with not one single student saying they did (p. 161).  As well, they were of the greatest proportion of students who responded that they never enjoyed mathematics, with 27% stating this (p. 161).  Through the questionnaires and her observations Boaler summarizes that “the top two sets were made up of students who, at one time, were doing well in mathematics” and “despite this, the students liked mathematics less than other students and had less confidence in their own ability to do mathematics” (p. 161).   As she indicates, “for these students something had clearly gone wrong,” normally individuals who are good at math usually enjoy it (p. 161).  The students she interviewed and observed reiterated that they enjoyed grades 6 and 7 where they were taught and worked in mixed ability classes using an individualized approach (p. 161).  This is probably due to, as Boaler points out, that the top sets encompass an environment that has features of “rapidly paced lessons, competition among students, and pressure to succeed” (p. 159).  Students in the top sets at Amber Hill indicated that “the nature of their top set environment had diminished their understanding of mathematics” (p. 163). 

After reading chapter 10 and doing my own research, I agree with Boaler when she states that “placing students in academic groups often results in the fixing of their potential achievement” (p. 176).  Students in low sets feel like they are trapped and can never increase their achievement whereas many students in top sets break under the pressure.  In both cases, students love for learning and mathematical understanding suffer the consequences.

References:

Boaler, J.  (2002).  Experiencing School Mathematics.  New York: Routledge.

Trautwein, U., Ludtke, O., Marsh, H., Koller, O., Baumert, J.  (2006).  Tracking, Grading, and Student Motivation: Using Group Composition and Status to Predict Self-Concept and Interest in Ninth-Grade Mathematics.  Journal of Educational Psychology, 98 (4), 788-806.