By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org, @profkeithdevlin.bsky.social
The title question applies—and has often been asked and debated—at both school and (first-year) university level.
The issue is particularly acute for 9th Grade high school students with regard to Algebra 1. If they fail that course, they are unlikely to meet the admissions requirements when they apply to college as graduating seniors (and may in fact fail to graduate at all).
A common approach schools use with students who enter 9th Grade below the grade level to take Algebra 1, is to place them in a remedial course. Unfortunately, there is a significant likelihood that such a student will not catch up in time to get into college .
A number of educators have argued that better long-term outcomes would be obtained if those students were simply allowed to take Algebra 1 alongside their peer students.
Having experienced math learning in groups—at my level—and having observed and read studies about group learning in middle- and high-schools, I find those arguments convincing. If taught as step-by-step common-sense reasoning—which is what school algebra is at core—the chances should be high that if those “failing” students remain with their peer group, they will eventually “get it”.
Still, that’s just one person’s opinion (mine), albeit an informed one. It would be helpful to have some concrete evidence; the kind you can get only from a randomized control trial.
Well, such a study was completed last year by education researchers at Stanford University in the nearby Sequoia Union High School District (SUHSD) in San Mateo County in California.
San Mateo is the county where San Francisco Airport is located. It’s a sprawling mix of family housing, extensive industrial parks, and warehouses. SUHSD serves a diverse body of nearly 9,000 students across four high schools. Enrollment in advanced high school math courses was/is highly stratified by race and socioeconomic status, with evidence showing that Black, Hispanic, and poor students complete fewer college-prep classes than their white, Asian, and affluent peers. (Yes, this study would likely have been prohibited by the current US federal administration. Tragic, in my view, but that’s what can happen with a democracy.)
SUHSD began re-examining their math placement policies in 2018 as part of a larger effort to promote critical thinking and collaborative skills, and to address achievement gaps across the curriculum.
Stanford’s Graduate School of Education had begun working with nine San Mateo school districts (including SUHSD) in 2016, conducting studies on various educational challenges and opportunities. The researchers built a huge database to track student outcomes from elementary to high school, bridging gaps in knowledge about students’ progress from one level of schooling to the next. That rich resource made it possible for all nine districts to see students’ experiences across districts and over time. It also enabled the GSE researchers to study learning patterns and factors that predict different academic outcomes.
A key finding of the Stanford study was that below grade-level 9th graders placed in mixed Algebra 1 classes went on to do substantially better on 11th grade math tests than their peers who were placed into a remedial course.
Moreover, the initiative also increased attendance and subsequent take-up of other college-ready math courses for those “failing” 9th graders. And, to counter a point that gets bandied about a lot in debates about mixed-ability classes, there was no sign of any negative effects for the students who were at grade level in the mixed groups.
What was (surely) key to the program’s success was an intensive program to support all students in a mixed-level classroom. At the start, teachers participated in two week-long intensive trainings over the summer with the district’s instructional coach and outside consultants. During the year, the teachers received on-site coaching, had an extra planning period each day to prepare for the mixed-level class, and met regularly as a cohort to learn and practice instructional strategies for “teaching at the speed of learning,” to help all students in differentiated classrooms improve. (Echoes of the system that made Finland a world-leader in mathematics education.)
In short, when it comes to education, “It’s not the students, it’s the teaching.”
To learn more about this study, check out the Stanford Graduate School of Education’s extensive news release, from which I abridged this summary. That article links to the researchers’ more in-depth working paper on the study.
References
Cover image from High school group with whiteboard - EDUimages by All4Ed