What's New in Ability Grouping?.

IV ecently we were asked by a school district to provide an inservice work shop for teachers on "what's new in ability grouping." We were somewhat taken aback by the request and replied that we didn't think there was anything new about ability grouping. (The first reported use occurred in 1867 in St. Louis, Missouri.1) The inservice director persuaded us that a workshop that presented current trends and the results of recent research would be beneficial. The resulting presentation was well at tended, but its substance was not entire ly well received, we thought. Some of the participants were disappointed and frustrated to hear that a practice so long and widely used is not well supported by research evidence. There are many ways of grouping children for instruction. Harold Shane has identified some 32 different group ing strategies, several of which involve grouping students of similar abilities.2 The fact that students are grouped by ability may be disguised (e.g., reading groups may have names like "Blue birds," "Robins," and "Chickadees"), but even first-grade children quickly learn which groups are "smart" and which is "retarded." Classification of students into separate ability categories and instructional units is typically done on the basis of intelligence, aptitude, readiness, and/or reading achievement scores, and this type of grouping re stricts the range of individual differ ences within a unit. Homogeneous abili ty grouping is the generic term often applied to this strategy, and it is homogeneous ability grouping that has been the target of attacks by recent reviewers of the literature. The research suggests that homogeneous ability grouping, common though it is, may be damaging to the achievement and social emotional growth of children. (Here after we will simply use the term "abili ty grouping" for homogeneous ability grouping.) During our workshop an informal survey of the teacher participants showed that they strongly favor ability grouping. We recently undertook a more formal study of teacher attitudes at a regional elementary education con ference on our campus. The questions posed in our study (in slightly modified form) appeared originally in the Moyer Report in the Twenty-third Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of