I sat the most important maths exam of my life when I was twelve
The self-fulfilling prophecies of ability-grouping
I am among the most examined maths students of my generation. Hailing from the UK, the original high-stakes testing capital of the education world, I sat national exams at age 11, 14, 16 and 18. At university, the assessment regime did not relent; I undertook 33 hours of written exams through my undergraduate maths degree.
That’s a lot of testing.
But none had the significance or impact of a half-hour test I sat aged twelve. I didn’t know it then, but those thirty minutes would set the course for my schooling career. And while this story has a happy ending, for the majority of my peers that same test had catastrophic consequences.
I had just arrived in secondary school. The maths department was tasked with organising 300 students into so-called ability groups. With little to go on, they opted for their own assessment tool — a thirty-minute test, which was administered to all 300 students. It covered a range of familiar topics.
Soon after, we received our results by proxy of our ability group placement. I must have scored well, as I was assigned one of the two top sets (available to 60 of the 300 students). From there I never looked back. A few blips notwithstanding, I sauntered my way through the curriculum, culminating in top grades in the national GCSE and A Level exams.
My top set placement was vindicated. My less fortunate peers, who were placed in the lower sets, did not scale the same heights. Of the 240 students who were placed below top set, not a single student achieved the top GCSE grade.
Wow, that maths test was really on the money; in thirty minutes it was able to forecast the learning outcomes of 300 students over the next five years, and group them accordingly…
…do you see what’s wrong with this picture?
The placement test became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The high performers were rewarded. We were afforded top set status and enjoyed access to the full breadth and depth of the school maths curriculum. Meanwhile, our peers languished. After being explicitly told that they couldn’t quite cut it, they were duly stripped of access to more advanced topics.
As a consequence, any knowledge gaps that may have existed between the top setters and those lower down only amplified with time. It became increasingly difficult for our peers to climb into top set; I can remember two such instances over five years. No surprise then, that the top performers on that initial placement test were precisely the ones who entered the higher-grade GCSE papers five years later and took the spoils.
In an alternate reality, I turned up to the same placement test and bombed it. Perhaps I was ill that morning, with my focus and cognition impaired. Or perhaps the sample of questions did not align as closely with my background knowledge. So I performed poorly and was subsequently placed in a lower set. My enthusiasm for maths bled away as I lingered there for five years. I dread to ponder what has come of my alternate self.
Talk about high-stakes.
No single exam should carry the influence of that placement test. Thirty minutes of written form answers is woefully inadequate at evaluating the ability and potential of students. It rewards the select few who happen to perform well, with devastating consequences for the rest.
Placement tests expose the toxic attitudes of formal schooling. In our urge to stratify students, we trust that primitive tests can gauge students’ potential. We prescribe ability labels that students find impossible to shake off. Educators are warming to Carol Dweck’s work on the importance of a growth mindset — endowing students with the belief that their ability is not fixed.
The growth mindset is not merely taught; it must also be espoused by the structures and processes of schooling. Ability-grouping is the antithesis of the growth mindset because it makes crude assumptions about each child’s potential and bends the system to fulfil its own prophecies.
Streaming by ability is also a social injustice. Too often, ability groups serve as a proxy for race and socioeconomic status. The very students who would prosper from an inclusive schooling experience see their opportunities crushed before they even get started.
Research has repeatedly cast doubt on streaming by ability. PISA has linked ability grouping to lower overall performance of education systems (that is about all PISA has done; the evidence is purely correlational). In its summary of evidence, the Education Endowment Foundation reinforces the attitudinal effects: “it appears likely that routine setting or streaming arrangements undermine low attainers’ confidence and discourage the belief that attainment can be improved through effort.”
In one of the few randomised control trials (the apparent ‘gold standard’ in education research), a study in Kenya provides a mixed view: “to the extent that students benefit from high-achieving peers, tracking will help strong students and hurt weak ones.”
There is useful insight here, but the language of research should alarm us. Did you notice the casual references to low attainers and high-achieving peers? These terms privilege the judgements of blunt tests. Research on streaming runs dangerously close to making the same mistaken assumptions around students’ capacity for growth.
We need a paradigm shift in the way we evaluate and forecast students’ maths abilities.
If we are to truly embrace a growth mindset, we must break the glass ceiling that entraps many students.
Let us embrace each child’s infinite potential for growth. This philosophy is entirely compatible with the understanding that students have varied strengths. In fact, it’s the ultimate expression of it because it says that, by definition, every group of students has mixed abilities, and that every student is entitled to full access to the maths curriculum.
Our vision and hopes for personalised learning must be predicated on that philosophy of inspiring every child with unwavering belief in their growth potential, and backing that up with equal opportunities to succeed.
