I never took much my education professors said for granted. I knew most of them had political agendas that informed most of what they taught, agendas which usually didn't match up with mine - for most of them numbered among the "educators" who would like nothing better than to see gifted programs ground into dust as punishment for their supposed inequity. I didn't believe them, for example, when they told me of the supposed worthlessness and bias of IQ testing; when they told me the academic world was staunchly and unanimously aligned against the whole concept of IQ; when they tried to ram Howard Gardner's ridiculous suggestion that grace, poise, and a love of butterflies should be considered facets of intelligence down my throat. I went out and found the research for myself - the research that found, despite the Sledgehammers of Equality's cries of unfairness, that IQ scores were the single greatest predictor of school achievement, educational attainment, job success, crime, poverty, marital happiness, and even physical health.
Well, I should've done the same when they talked to me about "heterogeneous grouping".
The concept, as it was put to me, is as follows: intentionally grouping students so that each group contains the maximum possible range of ability levels is educationally beneficial. Lower-ability students are helped by their peers, while high-ability students cement their knowledge by helping others to understand. On the surface, it makes sense, to a point; it is true that one of the surest ways to make sure you understand something is to explain it to someone else. But a part of me always wondered whether the whole thing was worthwhile nonetheless. Seems I should have looked into it, rather than take the enormous emphasis my professors placed on the concept as support of its rightness, because I've just opened the textbook for my upcoming course, Introduction to Talent Development, and found this gem on page 13:
Students grouped in lower- and middle-level tracks learn the same amount as equivalent pupils do in mixed classes. However, 'students in the top classes in [ability-grouped] programs outperform equivalent pupils from mixed classes' [...] The achievement of low-ability students has not been harmed by homogeneous grouping, but the even more important conclusion [...] is that there are, absolutely, losses in achievement test scores when gifted students are regrouped heterogeneously."
There's a chart on the next page showing the effect sizes of various methods of homogeneous grouping, showing that gifted students grouped together learn 33-78% more, depending on the particular structure used. Interestingly, nongraded schools also show a 38% gain for gifted students. The authors also suggest that cooperative learning experiences, even with other students of similar abilities, are not as valuable to gifted children as they are to mainstream learners.
Furthermore, flying in the face of everything my professors said about "self-esteem", this text points out that low- and middle-ability students often feel better about themselves and increase their effort and participation when they are not faced with the overpowering presence of gifted students. In other words, children will more readily compare themselves unfavorably to the more intelligent people in the room with them every minute than to the class of more intelligent people down the hall, who they may never interact with in an academic setting. Not only is this staggeringly logical, but I've seen it quite clearly in my own class: when one of my girls, whose giftedness is obvious to everyone even though her parents don't want it spoken about (!!), is out of the room, my three boys are all significantly better behaved and more focused. (Yes, I have a very small class - six chilren. They're wonderful, and you should never let me start talking about them unless you have a whole afternoon to devote to listening.)
There's nothing like a new perspective - especially a new perspective on something you've already had nagging doubts about for years. A few cogently reasoned paragraphs were all it took to jump-start my methodic doubt (see this earlier post), and I've realized that nothing I was taught at uni about how to "properly" group students actually makes sense. I wonder what else they got past me....
The book, if you're interested, is Education of the Gifted and Talented by Davis, Rimm, and Siegle - I won't bother to name the individual researchers cited in the passage I quoted as there were quite a number of them.
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