Free What's Math Got to Do with It?: How Teachers and Parents Can Transform Mathematics Learning and Inspire Success by Jo Boaler Page B

opportunities to learn: “Obviously we’re not the cleverest, we’re group five, but still—it’s still maths, we’re still in year nine, we’ve still got to learn.” 8
    When teachers have lower expectations for students and they teach them low-level work, the children’s achievement is suppressed. This is the reason that ability grouping is illegal in many countries in the world, including Finland, a country that tops the world in the international achievement tests. 9
    Tracking Leads to Damaging Fixed Mind-sets
    When students are put into ability groups, they get hit with a damaging message—that their “ability” is fixed. This leads many students with healthy growth mind-sets—that is, they believe that the harder they work the smarter they get—to change to a fixed mind-set, believing that they are either smart or that they are not. Fixed mind-sets, as explained in the preface, result in significantly lower achievement for students and disadvantages that continue throughout life. In one of Carol Dweck’s then doctoral students’ studies, Carissa Romero found that when students moved into ability groups in grade seven, positive growth-mind-set thinking reduced, and the students who were most negatively affected were those going into the top track. Many more of the students started to believe that they were smart, and this sets students on a very vulnerable pathway, where they become fearful of making mistakes and start to avoid more challenging work. The consequences, especially for high-achieving girls, are devastating.
    Student Differences
    When students are placed into a tracked group, high or low, assumptions are made about their potential achievement. Teachers tend to pitch their teaching to students in the middle of the group, and they teach a particular level of content, assuming that all students are more or less the same. In such a system, the work inevitably is at the wrong pace or the wrong level for many students within a group. The lower students struggle to catch up,while others are held back. While a teacher of any class, including a mixed-ability class, can wrongly assume that the students all have the same needs, tracking isbased on this erroneous assumption, and when teachers have a tracked group, they often feel license to treat all students the same. This is true even when students clearly have different needs and would benefit from working at different paces.
    In a mixed-ability group, the teacher has to open the work, making it suitable for students working at different levels and different speeds. Instead of prejudging the achievement of students and delivering work at a particular level, the teacher has to provide work that is multileveled and that enables students to work at the highest levels they can reach. This means that work can be at the right level and pace for all students.
    Borderline Casualties
    When teachers assign students to different groups, they make decisions that affect their long-term achievement and their life chances. Despite the importance of such decisions, they are often made on the basis of insufficient evidence. In many cases, students are assigned to groups on the basis of a single test score with some students missing the high groups because of one point. That one missed point, which students may have scored on another day, ends up limiting their achievement for the rest of their lives.
    Researchers in Israel and the UK found that students on the borders of different groups had essentially the same understandings, but the ones entering higher groups ended up scoring at significantly higher levels at the end of school because of the group they were placed into. Indeed, the group that students were put into was more important for their eventual achievement than the school they attended. 10 Borderline casualties are those students who just miss the high groups and becomecasualties of the grouping system from that day on. There are many of these students in