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eBook details

• Title: Grouping by Ability: A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?
• Author : Australian Mathematics Teacher
• Release Date : January 01, 2003
• Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 186 KB

Description

The practice of grouping students by perceived ability is commonplace in mathematics classrooms. Various terms are used to describe the practice including streaming, setting and tracking, the meanings of which can vary from context to context. The generic term of ability grouping will be used to describe the practice where students of perceived similar achievement levels are placed in the same classroom or group. Mathematics teachers are more likely to support homogeneous grouping than their colleagues in other discipline areas. Cahan and Linchevski (1996) cite figures from the UK where 80% of mathematics teachers believe that it is inappropriate to have mixed ability teaching groups whereas, in contrast, 16% of science teachers and 3% of English teachers held the same view. Ruthven (1987) reported similar trends in primary school where ability grouping was a 'predominant form of organisation in mathematics ... [but] was largely unknown in areas such as science and social studies' (p. 243). Ruthven also goes on to say that ability grouping remains consistent in mathematics but diminishes in other areas as students move through the year levels. While teachers generally may support practices of ability grouping, there is some evidence that parents also value such practices, particularly middle-class parents (Boaler, 1997). Such studies raise questions as to why mathematics teachers, unlike their peers in other discipline areas, support notions of ability grouping to such an extent. Indeed, if ability were an innate construct, it would seem logical that students would have either generalised or specialised abilities across disciplines and yet this ideology does not seem to be supported by teachers other than in mathematics. The reasons for mathematics teachers supporting ability grouping are varied, but can be tied to a belief that sees mathematics as a hierarchical discipline where concepts build on previous concepts (Ruthven, 1987). Teachers often cite pragmatic reasons for ability grouping, that is, where they can tailor learning to suit the students. Unlike other curriculum areas, mathematics is seen to be less amenable to differentiated planning--that is, where students in the one classroom can be working at different levels on the same task. Most often when students are grouped by ability, the outcomes support the practice--that is, the higher streams perform very well, and the lower streams perform poorly. This can be used as evidence to show that the practice is justified and that the groupings are correct since the outcomes 'prove' the effectiveness of the original groupings. However, questions need to be posed as to whether pedagogy is matching the needs of the students or whether the outcomes are a reflection of the pedagogies being used.

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