Date of Award

2000

Degree Name

M.S. in Education

Abstract

Step into an eighth grade basic math class on any given day and the challenges in the classroom are enough to test the skills of any seasoned educator. The educator’s class size will be reduced to allow for more individualized instruction, usually around fifteen students instead of twenty-five, but the fifteen students within the class will severely test the educator’s ability to overcome a long history of lack of student success in mathematics. The students in a basic math class view mathematics with the same zest that some people view a trip to the dentist. The atmosphere in a basic math class, at times, can be very depressing for the educator (Peterson,1989-B). The educator must find a way to get the students past their negative attitudes towards mathematics and make them aware of the beauty and necessity of mathematics. The problem here, however, is that a basic math course is usually a review of skills that the students have already failed in previous grades (Useem, 1992). The students are then reminded daily of their past failures and inability to master certain math skills (Peterson, 1989-B). The basic math class then becomes a vicious cycle for the students, a continuous reminder of their failures, and the students eventually feel that it is easier to just give up and fail than to actually work hard, fail, and prove to their peers that they are, indeed, not very bright when it comes to mathematics (Hoffer, 1992). The educator then becomes stuck with a difficult decision - should he/she review old material that the students will recognize as concepts that they could not master earlier, or should he/she go ahead and introduce new concepts to the students so that the beauty of mathematics, as revealed in the higher math classes such as algebra and geometry, can be made available to the students if the students choose to explore them? A further challenge to the educator in a basic math class is to break the students out of the peer groups that they have formed. Ability grouping seems to split the school’s population into pro-school and anti-school groups (Gamoran, 1992). Students tracked into the lower-ability group form friendships with others in their classes, thus, peer pressure to have a negative attitude towards mathematics tends to prevail among the group (Gamoran, 1992). This negative attitude taken on by the group can lead, not only to a failure in the mathematics course, but also to involvement in anti-social activity as well as dropping out of school (Kelly, 1975). The challenge for the educator in a basic math class, then, is not only to overcome the attitudes of a single student but also to try and change the attitudes of a group of students. Students in a basic math class, through ability grouping, are tracked away from students that show excitement and confidence in learning math; therefore, they don’t have any positive role models showing them how a mathematics class can be a positive experience for them (Peterson, 1989-B). Without any positive role models, the students are left in the hands of their educator. The educator’s job is not only to teach the students math but also to move the students past their own inhibitions about math; consequently, the students may truly grow in their skills in mathematics. So why, then, if some of the research on ability grouping in mathematics seems to point out that it is harmful instead of helpful to group mathematics by ability, do some schools still insist on forming classes of homogeneously grouped students? The author’s school is at a crossroads in their design of the school’s mathematics curriculum and the staff of math educators at the school has raised this very question and has decided to not offer a lower-level math class this coming year. The author has taught basic math to eighth-grade students for several years with varying degrees of success. The author is interested in determining the attitudes of his students in the general math classes after being heterogeneously grouped into a math class. It is the author’s hope that, through this study, the attitudes of the mathematics students in the general math classes will help him to make a recommendation as to the design of the mathematics program at this school. The author will consider his student’s attitudes into his recommendation for the direction of the math program at his school.

Keywords

Ability grouping in education Case studies, Ability grouping in education Ohio, Eighth grade (Education)

Rights Statement

Copyright © 2000, author

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