Summary: What One Hundred Years of Research Says About the Effects of Ability Grouping and Acceleration on K--12 Student Academic Achievement

In ‘‘What One Hundred Years of Research Says About the Effects of Ability Grouping and Acceleration on K--12 Students’ Academic Achievement: Findings of Two Second-Order Meta-Analyses,’’ three researchers examined a century’s worth of evidence on two widely debated educational techniques: ability grouping and acceleration. Researchers Saiying Steenbergen-Hu and Paula Olszewski-Kubilius of Northwestern and Matthew C. Makel of Duke University applied second-order meta-analysis to several dozen previously published syntheses that had analyzed nearly 300 original studies. The findings of their synthesized research are published in the Review of Educational Research. Their conclusion: there is compelling evidence that acceleration and most forms of ability grouping are effective at increasing academic achievement and have the potential to provide widespread benefit to millions of students in U.S. school systems.