Keeping Track or Getting Offtrack: Issues in the Tracking Of Students

Abstract

Key Findings: Book chapter. Results are mixed; however, inequalities in assignment to ability groups are well-documented with consequences for the pace of instruction, quality of instruction, poor classroom climate, lack of teacher encouragement, and labeling. Evidence of tracking’s effectiveness in fostering learning is tentative, with some agreement over a positive, persistent, nevertheless small effect of within-class ability grouping on student achievement. Research findings also lend some support to the idea that tracking produces its effects, in part, through social psychological mechanisms such as social comparison. The tracking debate continues to rage due to limitations in research such as the atheoretical nature of tracking research, inconsistent evidence, the absence of randomized experiments and appropriate comparison groups, selection bias in estimating tracking effects, and a paucity of appropriate models for the study of achievement growth. We conclude by reiterating what Adam Gamoran (1992) proclaimed, that tracking’s effects are variable and that grouping for instruction is an extensive and complicated process that needs to be understood as part of a broad and hierarchical organizational context (Gamoran et al., 1995). Scholars must employ analytical strategies that incorporate student-level variables in addition to school organizational variables (Kreft, 1993). Statistics: None Sample: Focuses on tracking in junior high and high school Tracking is a generic term that covers ways that most educators keep track of students' academic progress by matriculating them into curricula of varying difficulty. Contests over tracking's practical and theoretical viability — getting offtrack — concern what Oakes (1985) asks about whether tracking makes most children smart or only some smart children smarter? In other words, does the school fairly advance students on the basis of their merits or does it reproduce the inequalities they bring with them at the starting gate (Argys, Rees, & Brewer, 1996; Cohen & Lotan, 1997; Oakes, 1985, 1994; Oakes, Gamoran, & Page, 1992; Slavin, 1987, 1990a, 1990b; Wheelock, 1992)? While clearly tracking may be a well-intended practice for organizing instruction, international and cross-cultural research fails to support the belief that it improves academic achievement and the debate remains unresolved (Ansalone, 2003; Resh, 1998). In a study of thirty countries the official rationale for tracking is largely based on student ability and not to ascriptive characteristics (Marks, 2005). Other evidence from Palestinian Arab High Schools points to an ongoing disagreement over social stratification within the school remaining largely obscure and requiring further research attention to unravel the tangled threads of the issue (Mazawi, 1998).