The Matthew Effect and Ability Grouping

Whether we're talking about education for the gifted & talented (whatever one means by that), special education, or best practices in a general education classroom, differentiation is the ideal.  Time, money, school politics, etc., all limit the degree to which a teacher can effectively differentiate, but highly skilled educators can find ways to create, within their classroom, a general atmosphere of differentiation.  Along these lines, there are a number of issues I'd like to discuss briefly in the next few posts, including formative assessment, forensic assessment (a term that I use frequently in my interactions with my peers, but one you won't find in print), reconsidering Bloom's Taxonomy, etc.  These issues are, at least implicitly (but in most cases, explicitly), relevant to educators of all stripes.

I suppose that many educators, like myself, find some attraction in the idea that high performing students - i.e., academically gifted and talented - raise the academic bar in the classroom, enabling lower performing student to achieve at a higher level.  Perhaps if the better angels of our nature were at play (if "free riding" didn't exist among lower performing students, if self-preoccupation didn't exit among higher performing students, and if teachers consistently maintained a highly differentiated learning environment), this might, indeed, be the case.  Because we, as teachers, want higher performing students to leaven the classroom, and because we don't want to stigmatize anyone, the idea of ability grouping seems to have fallen into a general disfavor.

Certainly, we wouldn't want to stigmatize anyone.  Indeed, we want students to benefit from the strengths of other students - this is all part of the process of inculcating a sense of citizenship and community.  Nevertheless, the Matthew Effect would suggest that a preoccupation with diversity - grouping students without regard to gifts, talents, strengths, weaknesses, or level of background knowledge - could have a detrimental effect on learning. Some researchers have demonstrated that the various differences students possess are adversely compounded by the Matthew Effect (Hirsch, 2006; Hirsch, 2009; Stanovich, 1986).  In diverse classrooms, students who already possess a wide frame of reference will be able use background knowledge and context clues to grasp newly presented concepts.  Students who don’t, however, will acquire neither the missing context clues necessary to learn the new concept, nor the new concept itself.  They, essentially, fall further behind with each passing lesson (Stanovich, 1986).  Thus, as Matthew 13:12 explains, “for whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him.”  As it turns out, the Matthew Effect not only accounts for, at least in part, differences of academic aptitude among students (e.g., the student who leads the pack in mathematics but falls far behind in reading), but also the achievement gap between economically advantaged and disadvantaged students (Payne, 2005; Stanovich, 1986).

What are the practical implications of this for educators?  First, precisely identifying students' areas of giftedness or talent, and grouping them accordingly, can help them from falling victim to the Matthew Effect.  Secondly, while classroom diversity might have any number of positive benefits for students, making it the guiding principle in classroom instruction runs the risk of creating, rather than circumventing, stigmatization.  In diverse classrooms, where student abilities are ignored, the differences between high performing and low performing students are more pronounced.  Third, the Matthew Effect is, for many students, a case study in diversity.  While some would undoubtedly dismiss the idea of grouping students according to ability level (and certainly, there are ineffective ways of doing this that might prejudice educators against it), isn't ability grouping a form of differentiation....and isn't differentiation the ideal?

I'm not advocating that educators use the strengths and weaknesses as the only consideration when differentiating.  I'm simply arguing that diversity isn't the only consideration.  Educators, particularly those in leadership roles, should give balanced consideration to student diversity and to student similarity.

References

Hirsch, E.D. (2006). The knowledge deficit: Closing the shocking education gap for American children. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Hirsch, E.D. (2009). The making of Americans: Democracy and our schools. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Payne, R.K. (2005). A framework for understanding poverty (4^th ed.). Highlands, TX: aha! Process, Inc.

Stanovich, K. (1986, Fall). Matthew Effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21(4), 360-407.