Project Update: Highlights from 2017

– Dr Anna Mazenod

This has been a busy year for the project and we would like to share with you some of our highlights in 2017:

We have completed data collection…

• We have worked with more than 140 schools over the two years of the project to collect quantitative and qualitative data
• Teachers and students from participating schools have completed the final round of questionnaires and we have been busy matching the 2015 baseline questionnaire data from over 14 000 students and over 700 teachers with the final questionnaire data
• We now have qualitative data from over 50 teacher interviews and nearly 50 student focus groups

We have published more findings from our project…

• We published a paper discussing the relationship between student’s self-confidence and setting, ‘Attainment Grouping as self-fulfilling prophesy? A mixed methods exploration of self-confidence and set level among Year 7 students’ in International Journal of Educational Research
• We have written about our project in publications aimed at practitioners and researchers (Mathematics Teaching; Research Intelligence)

We have presented our research at national and international events…

• Academic conferences in the UK (British Sociological Association Conference, British Educational Research Association Conference, and the British Psychological Society’s Psychology of Education Section Conference) and in Denmark (European Conference on Educational Research)
• Practitioner and policy events, including British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics conference, ResearchED, the Westminster Education Forum and Hampshire school leaders’ conference
• Symposia and seminar presentations (International symposium on ‘ability’ grouping at UCL Institute of Education, funded through the UCL Global Engagement Fund and Centre for Research on  Learning and Life Chances seminar)

And there’s still plenty to look forward to in 2018!

• We have many more project papers out soon with topics including students’ negative views of setting, why teachers struggle to equitably allocate students into sets, teacher constructions of students in bottom sets and students’ experiences of mixed attainment, and will notify you as these are published (you can follow us on Twitter @GroupingStudy to get the latest updates on the project)
• The evaluators for our project, NFER, arranged for students to take Progress Tests in English and Mathematics last summer. This will enable us to know what the impact of our interventions has been on students’ progress, and our funders, the Education Endowment Foundation, will be reporting on the outcomes in Spring/Summer 2018
• Look out for new materials developed with English teachers to support mixed attainment English teaching in secondary schools
• And we’ll be inviting you to come and hear more about our project findings at events in 2018

Lastly we would like to wish you a very happy festive period from the Best Practice in Grouping Students team!