Ability Grouping Across Kindergarten Using an Early Childhood Longitudinal Study by D. Betsy McCoach Ann A. O’connell Heather Levitt

Title:  Ability Grouping Across Kindergarten Using an Early Childhood Longitudinal Study by D. Betsy McCoach Ann A. O’Connell Heather Levitt

General Description:  

        The current standard in education is that all students entering kindergarten, regardless of the prior knowledge and experience, are exposed to a rigorous curriculum to advance reading achievement.  Teachers in order to efficiently teach are grouping students into ability groupings where the students are organized by achievement, skills, or ability.  The most common types of grouping are between-class ability grouping where the students are separated according to their ability.  This is also known as tracking as well as cross-grade grouping and regrouping.  The other is within-class grouping.  The class is a heterogeneous mix of ability level and experience, and the teacher creates homogenous groups within the class to promote effective and efficient learning.  

        Some of the arguments against ability grouping include the destruction of class community, elitism, and lowered expectations in the lower ability groups along with unfair advantages and disadvantages given to the higher and lower groups.  The students in the lower group may fall farther and farther behind the higher ability groups and never achieve a level of success high enough to be promoted to a higher ability group.  Finally, students are aware of the group that they are placed in have a self-concept of what kind of learner that they are.  At the end of the study, it was concluded that by grouping kindergartners by ability allowed for an increase of early literacy and reading achievement in kindergarten.  

Procedures:  

        The researchers began by collecting information from The National Center for Education Statistics.  After removing students of limited-English proficiency, learning disabled, or of schools having less than 5 students in kindergarten, the study size was 10,191.  The kindergarten students were assessed using the ECLS-K reading assessment which measures early literacy skills including printed word recognition, sound identification, word reading, vocabulary and reading comprehension.  Additionally, teacher and administrator surveys were used to collect information about the students.  

Method of Analysis:  

        Using the data from the ECLS-K, the researchers developed a gain score for each school.  Overall the school’s, the students gained an average of 10 points over the kindergarten year.  The researchers then focused on the schools that had very low gain and those that had very high gain.  Comparing the results from the two schools for consistency variables, the researchers identified these school-level variables: average attendance, Title 1 funding, funding from other grant sources, a summary scale of the emphasis that principals place on instructional goals, summary rating scale measuring principals’ perceptions of teachers’ success at meeting instructional goals.