What's The Research On...?

Students Respond to Solidarity in Community
Professor Jeffrey Lewis uses the phrase solidarity in community to refer to the collective classroom characteristics, teaching practices, and disciplinary practices that promote positive school outcomes for African American children in low-income urban settings. The concept combines insights from studies of social cohesion, belonging, teacher-learner relationships, and culturally relevant teaching.

New Directions for Mixed-Ability Instruction
How can teachers best organize students for instruction? After a century of research on tracking and ability grouping, one might expect a definitive answer to this question. Yet every approach has disadvantages as well as advantages, and the consequences vary by context. Here’s the dilemma: On the one hand, schools are asked to provide all students with a common set of cognitive and social skills essential for full civic and economic participation in adult society. On the other hand, schools are structured to sort and select students for different career paths based on their individual orientations and capacities. This tension between commonality and differentiation underlies the tracking debate. The former aim is consistent with mixed-ability teaching. The latter is consistent with tracking. The debate has no simple resolution because school systems embody both goals. UW-Madison education professor Adam Gamoran says recent research has advanced knowledge of tracking in three areas. First, international scholarship offers new knowledge about the consequences of tracking in contexts beyond the US and the UK, where most prior research has been conducted. Second, studies of attempts to reduce or eliminate tracking and ability grouping yield important insights into why tracking resists change. For example, teachers oppose detracking when they believe they are not equipped to successfully instruct students of widely varying abilities in the same classroom. Third, studies on classroom assignment and instruction point toward new possibilities. These new approaches don’t resolve the tension between commonality and differentiation.

How Does Desegregation Help Reduce the Achievement Gap?
Peer effects are important determinants of student achievement, but it remains difficult to calculate the actual effects of desegregation directly. WCER researcher Jane Cooley uses a new approach to identify the effect of peer behavior on individual student achievement.

Studying a group of public elementary school students in North Carolina, Cooley found that
1. Peer group effects exist primarily within race-based reference groups,
2. Their influence diminishes across range of student achievement, and
3. Desegregating peer groups narrows the achievement gap only marginally, on average, but this average masks important gains for lower achievers.