Effects of Grouping on Children's Progress

Does grouping help or hinder a child's academic and/or social progress? As pointed out by Katz (1992), one of the difficulties involved in determining the effects of grouping on children's progress is that there are many different kinds of grouping strategies in use (e.g., mixed grade/mixed age grouping, ability grouping, cooperative grouping, and cluster grouping) and many of these strategies are used only for specific student populations (e.g., special needs or gifted students).

Therefore, in order to arrive at an answer to the question of the general effects of grouping, it is necessary to examine the research findings associated with specific types of grouping strategies. This report attempts such an analysis toward the objective of determining whether grouping strategies in fact help or hinder children's progress.

According to Winebrenner and Devlin (1991), cluster grouping consists of groups of four to six gifted students (top 5 percent of grade level) being placed in a class of children of mixed abilities with one teacher who has special training in teaching gifted pupils. While it is recommended that classes have only one cluster, in some cases, classes will contain two cluster groups.

Winebrenner and Devlin (1992) report that while cluster grouping is sufficient to meet the academic needs of gifted students, its strongest benefits are social. According to the authors, the existing research indicates that cluster group

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cooperative groups. However, the strength of the effect varied by subject area with the strongest effects being found for language arts and science and the weakest effect being observed for mathematics and social studies. Regarding motivation, Reuman and Mac Iver (1994) found that heterogeneous-ability cooperative groups produced greater levels of academic motivation than homogeneous-ability cooperative groups; however, these effects also varied by subject area. The lowest motivational increase was observed for social studies, while the highest increase was for language arts. It was concluded that subject area variation was due to differences in teachers' implementation of the cooperative strategies. Contrary to the findings of Reuman and Mac Iver (1994), Bode (1993) reported that several studies have found more achievement in cooperative homogeneous-ability groups than in cooperative heterogeneous ability groups. Bode postulated that these mixed findings might be due to the range of the ability spread tested in various studies and/or to differences in class compositional or instructional characteristics. In other words, it is quite possible that in some studies the heterogeneous groups did not have a very large ability ran

Category: Psychology - E