Heterogeneous Grouping in Advanced Mathematics Classes
Friday June 9, 2006
Can you mix students of varying abilities into the same advanced math courses and improve student performance and graduation rates? Many teachers will tell you it can't be done. However, the research might just indicate something else. According to this research brief, significant improvement in performance just may be the end result. Full story.
Comments
When students of below average abilities are placed in the same math class with students that are well above average, the low students struggle and fail. You can do all of the “research” you want to disprove this, but I have been teaching math since 1994 and it is what it is. Sorry you research is bogus.
That should read “your” and not “you”
I agree with what Richard S. Jak has to say, but the low students still need to be given a chance to catch up. From what I’ve seen throughout my math classes and in the people I tutor, the ones who struggle, but who read the book and come to tutoring to be tutored (not for answers), are always more successful then their peers with equal ability. These low students need to have a chance to break into the classes with “high” students. More often than not (in high school and lower), the advanced classes are closed off to anyone who didn’t make it in to an “advanced” section of the class their first year of high school.
As a victim of a bad teacher-student relationship when I was in elementary school, I was placed in the lowest possible math class the next year when I entered middle school, despite the fact that I was the top math student in the class (others in the class went on to the more advanced classes). Fortunately, this has not held me back in my academic career, since I now compete in college-level mathematics competitions.