VIEWPOINT FROM NAGC (National Association for Gifted Children)
Addressing Excellence Gaps: Ability Grouping By Jonathan A. Plucker
In several of my recent columns, I’ve shared research-backed recommendations for how to identify advanced students in more equitable ways than those traditionally used in American schools. But advanced learning is about programming, not identification. They go hand-in-hand of course, but there is no point in trying to identify talented students if your district or school doesn’t have high-quality, advanced learning opportunities. With this issue’s column, we start to dig into what the research says about advanced learning programs and services, and how they can be designed with both equity and excellence in mind. Let’s start with a topic completely lacking in controversy: ability grouping. I’m kidding, of course. If you want to get a group of educators riled up, walk into the room and say the words “ability grouping.” That’s a fair reaction, because the expert opinion on the topic is confusing. When I went through my preservice teacher prep program in the early 90s, I would go from one class where we were told that grouping is always bad to another where we were told grouping is always good, with other professors sharing perspectives in between. And with conflicting studies appearing to emerge on a regular basis, it is understandable that educators are confused about the effects of ability grouping. A quick note on terminology before we get much further: “Ability
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grouping” has little to do with ability. A better term is “performance grouping,” as most decisions about how to differentiate for students are based on their current performance level (i.e., are they working below, at, or above grade-level?). I’ll use grouping as shorthand for flexible ability grouping throughout this column. Why group at all? Well, we have to group students in some way – I don’t know of any schools where the students wander around the building like free-range chickens. We choose to group student by age in most schools, but there is nothing magical or predestined about grouping primarily by biological age. So we must group, but how? Several colleagues and I conducted a study that provides some insight into the need for grouping (Peters et al., 2017). We were interested in estimating the percent of students who start the school year having already shown they had mastered the standards for that year. In other words, what percent of fourth graders show up for the first day of school having already performed at the fifth grade-level or higher on the previous year’s state achievement test? That’s a pretty conservative definition of above-grade-level, as it doesn’t take into account students who have the potential to work above-grade-level, just those who are already performing at such high levels. The results suggest that for third through eighth graders, 20-49% were above grade-level in
American Consortium for Equity in Education
