Secondary school teachers’ attitudes towards and beliefs about ability grouping



around in these groups of quite challenging youngsters for the whole of
their time, virtually from the minute they come into school and I think you
end up with a real problem about disaffection. (English teacher, mixed
ability school)

Beliefs about the effects of ability grouping on teaching

Teachers beliefs about the effects of ability grouping on their teaching are given in
Table 5. There was no consensus that setting leads to teachers ignoring the fact that a
class always contains a range of abilities or that only very good teachers can teach
mixed ability classes successfully. There was strong overall agreement that teaching
and classroom management are easier for the teacher when classes are set and that
setting enables pupils’ curriculum needs to be better matched, although there were
significant differences in responses from teachers working in schools adopting
different grouping procedures.

Table 5 about here

Subject domains considered appropriate for mixed ability teaching

Teachers were asked which subjects they felt were suitable for teaching in mixed
ability classes in years 7, 8 and 9, in years 7 and 8 only, in year 7 only or not at all.
Table 5 illustrates the responses. English and humanities were the subjects considered
most suitable for mixed ability teaching. Those considered most unsuitable were

14



More intriguing information

1. Short Term Memory May Be the Depletion of the Readily Releasable Pool of Presynaptic Neurotransmitter Vesicles
2. Spatial patterns in intermunicipal Danish commuting
3. Governance Control Mechanisms in Portuguese Agricultural Credit Cooperatives
4. Change in firm population and spatial variations: The case of Turkey
5. How to do things without words: Infants, utterance-activity and distributed cognition.
6. Cancer-related electronic support groups as navigation-aids: Overcoming geographic barriers
7. Testing Hypotheses in an I(2) Model with Applications to the Persistent Long Swings in the Dmk/$ Rate
8. Poverty transition through targeted programme: the case of Bangladesh Poultry Model
9. The Structure Performance Hypothesis and The Efficient Structure Performance Hypothesis-Revisited: The Case of Agribusiness Commodity and Food Products Truck Carriers in the South
10. Manufacturing Earnings and Cycles: New Evidence
11. The name is absent
12. Unemployment in an Interdependent World
13. Flatliners: Ideology and Rational Learning in the Diffusion of the Flat Tax
14. An Efficient Circulant MIMO Equalizer for CDMA Downlink: Algorithm and VLSI Architecture
15. Altruism and fairness in a public pension system
16. Investment in Next Generation Networks and the Role of Regulation: A Real Option Approach
17. The name is absent
18. The name is absent
19. The name is absent
20. 5th and 8th grade pupils’ and teachers’ perceptions of the relationships between teaching methods, classroom ethos, and positive affective attitudes towards learning mathematics in Japan