Education Week - August 29, 2018 - 17

Studies Question
Value of Classroom
Reading Groups
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

12,000 students from kindergarten through 3rd grade in more
than 2,100 schools, following them
through high, middle, and low reading groups or ungrouped reading
classes.
He found about half of children
who were in the lowest reading
group in kindergarten were able
to improve to at least the median
group by the end of 1st grade. By the
end of 3rd grade, 46 percent of those
who had previously been in the lowest group in 2nd grade were able to
move up. However, Jean found that
none of the students initially placed
in the lowest kindergarten group
ever caught up to the reading level
of their classmates who had started
out in the highest reading group.
"The structural inertia is considerable," Jean noted, finding that
having been in the highest reading
group in an earlier grade tended to
protect students from being put in
a lower group later, even with significantly lower scores. Students in
lower reading groups not only progressed more slowly academically,
but while they were in lower reading groups, they were also slower to
develop "learning behaviors," such
as varied interests, concentration on
tasks, and persistence in the face of
difficulty. Those behaviors, in turn,
reduced the students' likelihood to
move up to higher reading groups in
later grades.

Potential Bias?
"If you are more motivated and
the teacher perceives that about
you, you are more likely to be put
into a higher reading group," Jean
said. "But there was also some evidence for bias: Even after controlling for prior reading achievement
and learning behaviors, students in
poverty were more likely to be assigned to lower groups, and their
wealthier peers more likely to be
tapped for higher reading groups.
They were small effects, but they
are there and consistent across
grade levels and statistically significant."
Similarly, in a series of three new
studies in Switzerland, researchers
asked practicing teachers and college students to evaluate profiles of
students whose scores put them on
the borderline of more or less academically rigorous tracks in high
school; the students' achievement
scores were held constant but their
backgrounds were altered to make
them appear to be either high- or
low-income. Over multiple studies,
recently published online in the
journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, both student and
practicing teachers were more likely
to refer lower-income students to a
lower academic track and higherincome students to a more challenging track, even though their scores

were the same.
"Because of inequality outside of
schools, children from different socioeconomic and racial and ethnic
backgrounds often come to school
with different levels of preparation.
And so by separating the children by
their initial reading ability, the teachers are also separating [them] by socioeconomic status or race or ethnicity," said Gamoran of the William T.
Grant Foundation. "And, of course,
when teachers have low expectations
for their weaker readers, they slow
down the pace even more than they
would need to, so the low-achieving
students fall further and further behind instead of catching up."

Fluid Groups
Besser Elementary School in
Alpena, Mich., switched to ability
grouping in its early-reading classrooms about three years ago. It's
not clear yet how well the practice
is working. About half the school's
students live in poverty, and their
achievement gap with higherincome students has stayed stubbornly wide.
"We were focused on making instruction more meaningful for all
students. Teachers need to focus
on struggling students, but on the
other end of the continuum where
students needed to be enriched,
those students were being left behind," said Eric Cardwell, the principal of Besser Elementary. "The
challenge teachers have seen now is
they're having to plan for three to
four different groups."
Those high-achieving students
have improved, he said, but the
groups themselves have remained
more stable than he'd like.
"What we frequently see is slight
movement of students. You don't
generally see them jumping two
levels at a time when we only do
data reviews three times a year,"
Cardwell said. "Ideally, there would
be more [reviews] so that there
would be more fluidity, but time is
always the monster that's chasing
you: time to review data, time to
plan."
Internationally, the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development found that countries that
predominantly use ability grouping
showed significantly deeper performance inequality on the Program
for International Student Assessment but no significant benefits for
the countries' overall performance.
OECD noted that more than 9 in
10 U.S. 15-year-olds attend schools
where they are grouped by ability.
"What we know now that we
didn't know back in the '80s is that
when you group up students, it has
to be specifically relative to the
content that's going to be taught,"
Gamoran said. "There're no IQ
tests, not even a general readingability test that can tell you how
to form the groups so that you can

HOW ARE TEACHERS USING READING GROUPS?
Teachers are more likely to place students in reading groups based on ability than they are to
randomly assign them. Among the 4th grade teachers who use reading groups, the majority of
them report using ability-based groups often or always.

Never or hardly ever

24%

Once in a while

Sometimes

Often

Always/almost always
0

31
10

PERCENT

Create groups for English/language arts by random assignment
Createn groups
for English/language
arts by
Create groups
for English/language arts
n achievement
Create groups for level
English/language arts
by random assignment

by achievement level

READING ACHIEVEMENT
High- and low-poverty classes that
used ability-based reading groups
"almost always" scored lower on
average than those that used them
"hardly ever" on the 2017 National
Assessment of Educational Progress.

High Poverty
Schools

Low Poverty
Schools

Never or hardly ever
(use ability grouping)

220

228

Always/almost always
(use ability grouping)

219

226

SOURCE: NAEP Reading 2017

meet their needs. You have to form
the groups specific to the instruction
that's coming and then reassess to
form new groups specific to the next
instructional unit."

Changing the Calculation
One California program has
shown promise in making reading
circles more flexible and less stigmatizing. In Assessment to Instruction, or A2I, teachers give a diagnostic assessment to all students every
eight weeks to identify strengths
and weaknesses in particular reading skills in four areas of literacy:
decoding, fluency, comprehension,
and usage. An algorithm based on
the assessment tells teachers how
much individual, small-group, and
independent working time each
student needs, and students are
grouped for instruction based on
particular focus skills rather than
overall reading ability.
"What we've discovered is that it's
fine to have a group of students of
different levels, as long as they all
are working on the same learning
needs," said Carol Connor, an education professor at the University
of California, Irvine, who developed
the program. "You can have students
of different reading abilities who all
need to work on decoding. ... What
doesn't work is if you put your kids
who already know how to code in a
group to learn how to code, again.
You receive more behavior problems
because they're really bored, ... and
our research suggests that it has a
negative effect on their growth."

Phoenix Collegiate Academy
(now ASU Prep) in Arizona was
one of the schools that piloted the
A2I program, and Amanda Jacobs,
then-principal, said it changed
the way teachers and administrators approached differentiating
instruction in small groups. Previously, teachers focused on providing equal time with each small
group, but "it shifts your perspective from trying to get to every kid
in the time you have to being more
strategic with how you're spending
your minutes with each child."
In a recent longitudinal, randomized controlled study, students who
participated in the targeted reading groups over three years performed significantly higher than
students in a control group that
used standard reading classes.
Though 45 percent of the students
in the targeted reading groups
came from a low-income background, by 3rd grade, all of them
had higher reading scores than the
national average for their grade,
and none had scores below the expectations for their grade level.
"There are no 'bluebirds' being
the bluebirds all year long," Connor said.

Many people
believe it is
possible to use
ability grouping ...
to maximize
achievement
growth. It often
doesn't work that
way in practice."
ADAM GAMORAN
President,
William T. Grant Foundation

Research Analyst Alex Harwin and
Librarian Holly Peele contributed to this
article.

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