The Effects of Student Grouping Practices in England: Addressing the Challenge of Research at Scale

• In Event: International Perspectives on Tracking and Social Injustice

Abstract

The question of whether tracking or mixed attainment grouping is a more effective strategy for grouping students for teaching in secondary schools is currently a contested topic in many educational systems including the USA (Loveless, 2013) and England (Higgins et al., 2018). In England, for example, ‘ability grouping’ was the most frequently searched topic on the Institute for Effective Education’s practitioner-focused ‘Best Evidence in Brief’ site during 2017 (IEE, 2018). Tracking is the dominant practice across secondary classrooms in England, particularly for mathematics; a survey conducted in 2018 indicated that only 4% of schools use fully mixed attainment practices in Grade 7 (Authors, forthcoming). Despite evidence pointing to a small negative effect of setting on the attainment of low attaining students (e.g. Steenbergen-Hu et al., 2016), a recent government-commissioned report in England found that more than a third of schools surveyed had ‘introduced or improved’ setting as a way of raising attainment for disadvantaged students (Department for Education, 2015). This may be because research directly comparing the effects of tracking and mixed attainment grouping is limited and dated (Higgins et al., 2018; Authors, 2020). Further, collecting robust evidence at scale is a challenge for complex whole-school interventions where implementation involves changes beyond individual classrooms (Author et al., 2017). A large-scale study implementing interventions in tracking and in mixed attainment grouping in a randomized controlled trial highlighted difficulties with recruitment, attrition and fidelity (Roy et al., 2018a, 2018b). Additionally, the mixed attainment intervention encountered substantial non-compliance in the control group because schools adopted mixed attainment grouping practices despite their allocation. In this paper, we report on the design of a study that seeks to address this methodological challenge.
The ‘Student Grouping Study’ (2019-2021) uses a matched design to investigate differences in student outcomes of the two grouping approaches in mathematics in Grades 6 and 7. The study will recruit 120 secondary schools already using tracking or mixed attainment practices to compare the outcomes on attainment and attitudes of students (N=18,000). Schools will be matched using propensity score matching (Caliendo & Kopeinig, 2008). Methods are pre-registered and include a mixed methods approach to understanding how and why schools implement particular grouping practices, involving surveys, observations and interviews. Additionally, there is evidence that, in tracked classes, low attaining students are allocated poorer quality teachers (Papay & Kraft 2014; Kelly, 2004; Authors, 2019) and receive a restricted curriculum (Kelly, 2004; Oakes, 2005). In order to investigate these effects, we will design and validate measures of teacher knowledge (Baumert et al., 2010) and opportunity to learn (Suter, 2017; Schmidt & Burroughs, 2016).
This study will contribute to understanding better the effects of tracking and mixed attainment by directly comparing student outcomes at scale. Additionally, the study aims to make a methodological contribution by using the case of grouping practices to demonstrate how the challenges of robustly evaluating complex whole school interventions at scale can be overcome.

Authors

• Jeremy Hodgen, University College London

• Becky Taylor, IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society

• Jake Anders, University College London

• Antonina Tereshchenko, UCL Institute of Education

• Becky Francis, UCL Institute of Education