Secondary school teachers’ attitudes towards and beliefs about ability grouping

Secondary school teachers’ attitudes towards and beliefs about
ability grouping

Introduction

Earlier studies of teachers' attitudes towards structured ability grouping in the USA
(NEA, 1968; McDermott, 1976; Wilson & Schmidts, 1978), Sweden (Husen and Boalt,
1967), the UK, (Daniels, 1961a, 1961b; Jackson, 1964, Barker-Lunn, 1970) and Israel
(Ministry of Education, 1965; Guttman et al, 1972) have revealed that teachers generally
hold positive attitudes towards teaching classes where pupils are grouped by ability,
although variations have been reported based on teachers' prior experience and the
subject that they teach.

In the UK in the 1970s, when mixed-ability teaching was innovatory, teachers who had
direct experience of it tended to hold more favourable attitudes towards it (Newbold,
1977; Reid et al, 1982). The advantages of mixed ability teaching were seen largely in
social terms, while the disadvantage was perceived to be the difficulty of providing
appropriate work for pupils of high and low ability in the same class. Those who were
critical of mixed-ability teaching suggested that it failed to motivate and increase the
achievement of the highly able, although the less able were perceived to benefit.
Experienced teachers appeared to be more supportive of mixed ability teaching
(Clammer, 1985) but they often found it more difficult to put into practice than those
who had been recently trained to adopt such practices (Reid et al., 1982).

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