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LAPS symposium discussion. Dylan Wiliam Annual conference of the British Educational Research Association; London, UK: 2007 www.dylanwiliam.net. Plus ça change…. Teacher judgments are the mechanism of social class disadvantage “Ability” grouping Curriculum polarisation
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LAPS symposiumdiscussion Dylan Wiliam Annual conference of the British Educational Research Association; London, UK: 2007 www.dylanwiliam.net
Plus ça change… • Teacher judgments are the mechanism of social class disadvantage • “Ability” grouping • Curriculum polarisation • Concentration of (some) resources • Teachers’ preferred teaching styles trump organization • Scalability of decisions to set by subject • Diversity (and secrecy) of setting practices • The (pernicious) variance hypothesis • Construct-irrelevant (?) variance of setting practices
The unreasonable persistence of ability grouping • Reasonably clear consensus of the impact of setting on attainment • First order effect: small reduction of average attainment • Second order effect: increase of variance • Third order effect: set x sex interactions (esp. top sets) • Persistence of ability grouping practices • Is political, not rational • Popular with parents, and politicians • Popular with teachers (at least those in the schools that set)
Suggestions for future work • Quantification of impact in terms of rate of learning • 1 grade lower is equivalent to learning at half the average speed • Disentangling effects of setting from other factors • Compositional effects (a necessary feature of setting) • Curriculum polarization (a contingent feature of setting) • Teacher quality (a contingent feature of setting) • Students taught by the most effective teachers learn at four times the rate of those taught by the least effective • Likely that school culture mediates all processes in the model • But, setting remains a mechanism that allows middle-class parents to secure the most important advantage in the system: teacher quality