Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy rigor and clustering

Help. I need research supporting rigor and clustering of enrichment students. My childrens' school is implementing randomly scheduling students for science, reading, language, and history. In the past they clustered the gifted and accelerated math students.

I've just done a fair amount of research on this to try to support clustering of the few gifted kids in my dd's class next year. Turns out the principal did some masters work on that concept and understands the benefits to the high achievers, which is great. The downside is that the research interestingly shows that homogeneous grouping only actually provides a benefit to the high achievers. It has little benefit or detriment to the other kids. So that could make it more of an uphill battle.

Here are some things that I read.

A good summary in Q&A format
http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10173.aspx

A short one
http://www.ericdigests.org/2001-4/cluster.html

I found looking at the list of references at the end of some of the articles to be good startign points for further research.

This one is really long.
http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/nrcgt/reports/rm99138/rm99138.pdf

A good place for all sorts of papers on gifted ed.
http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/nrcgt/nrconlin.html

good luck.

Research is all over the map about levels and grouping - seems to help high achievers but can hurt lower ones, although none of it is perfectly clear, if you ask me (and I've been reading the research in this area a ton lately as our school district revisits levels). However, there is some good research on cluster grouping, that suggests it helps the not highest group kids too, because it creates a chance for new leaders to emerge (maybe this is one of the articles posted by SL9): http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/nrcgt/newsletter/spring96/sprng964.html.

Be careful when you get into the leveling/tracking/grouping research - because it is very nuanced and if you read just the gifted research it will seem as though everyone agrees that it helps G/T kids, but don't talk about the effect on lower achievers (which makes sense, in that it is G/T research, but won't be very convincing to your district perhaps). You have to look closely at how the groups are formed, how broadly, how flexible, how often regrouped, etc.

A good bibliography is here: http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/sem/semart11.html

Good luck, I hate to say it, but there is no substitute for just sitting and reading the studies.

Cat

I grew up during the time where we were "grouped". I believe in it totally with chances for others to advance. My daughter's school used modified grouping and it allowed them to advance.

With a class all studying the same material, the more advanced kids "help" the slower kids by giving them the answers. When they are older, many of the slower kids bully the smarter ones.

When I approached my daughter's principal about her English course - where they work on a third grade level in a 7th grade course, he said that he wants here there to pull up the slower ones. In reality, they bully her and say that she stinks, etc during class. There is no help there.

Sorry, I don't think they benefit by this and need to actually learn the material instead of just getting the answers.

As an active teacher, I see that the higher level kids definately need to be grouped. This allows for higher level thinking to be pursued especially in science and social studies. They go into depth on many subjects. The rest can be more randomly grouped. For the lowest students materials remain concrete and need more actual experiance with the concepts. The kids are more literal and unable to make inferences. That is what frustrates our higher kids when things stay concrete without any depth, the highest kids want to know why, how, purpose. I have seen both approaches in action. Schools definately do not want the lowest kids with the highest, it frustrates both groups.

I came across this list tonight of schools practicing cluster grouping:
http://www.susanwinebrenner.com/cluster.html