5.2.2 Developing interventions related to tracking or ability grouping that are contributing to the puzzling situation

If tracking or ability grouping seems to be contributing to your puzzling situation, various approaches offer alternatives to tracking or ability grouping by grouping students heterogeneously and providing every student with an academically rigorous curriculum.

Mehan, Villanueva, Hubbard, & Lintz (1996) indicated that efforts that involve changes at the school level include the Accelerated Schools Project (Levin, 1987), the School Development Program (Comer, 1980, 1988), and the Coalition of Essential Schools (Sizer, 1984, 1992).

The AVID program attempted to remove tracking incrementally. It offered low-achieving students support (including collaboration as an instructional strategy) while students learned through rigorous curriculum (Mehan, Villanueva, Hubbard, & Lintz, 1996).

Cooperative learning, a diverse group of instructional methods in which small groups of students work together and aid each other in completing academic tasks, is a widely researched and widely used alternative to ability grouping (D. W. Johnson, Maruyama, R. T. Johnson, Nelson & Skon 1981; Sharan, 1980; Slavin, 1990, 1996). Cooperative learning approaches include Cohen's (1994) Complex Instruction, Johnson and Johnson's (Johnson, Johnson, & Holubec, 1992, 1993, 1994) Learning Together, Kagan's (1992) Structural Approach , and Slavin's (1994) Student Team Learning.

However, it is important to note that no approach is a "silver bullet" that will automatically "fix" things because how an approach is used is always influenced by various contextual features (Jacob, 1999; Mehan, Villanueva, Hubbard, & Lintz, 1996; Muncey & McQuillan, 1996).

If you haven't read the CIP pages for Step 5 or Step 5.2, please do so because they provide information about developing inverventions for your CIP study.

Success Stories & CIP studies Related to School Culture

Reconsider question: 3.2.2 
Gather more information on this question: 4.2.2 
Step 6-Monitor Intervention(s) 
Guide for Reading Step 4 and Step 5 Pages