The “Matthew Effect” in Classroom Groups

In this article in Elementary School Journal, Brian Lack (a K-8 math specialist in the Forsyth County Schools, GA) and Susan Lee Swars and Barbara Meyers (Georgia State University) report on their study of four students (two high-achieving, two low-achieving) working with small groups of classmates on fractions. The teacher in this suburban middle school was making a concerted effort to promote rich discourse around real-world math problems, and the researchers took videos and followed up with interviews to see how it was working.

The focus of the study was equity – who was taking part in classroom interactions and who wasn’t – and the way peer dynamics affected participation. The authors quote a 2000 NCTM study that echoed their concern: “Students are often reluctant to do anything that causes them to stand out from a group, and many middle-grade students are self-conscious and hesitant to expose their thinking to others. Peer pressure is powerful, and a desire to fit in is paramount.” Lack, Swars, and Meyers noticed inequities in three areas:

• Meaning making – All students found it easier to solve the fractions problems at a computational level than to explain the deeper meaning of solutions to their classmates. “Students did not naturally discuss or explain their thinking,” say the authors, “particularly when there was agreement about an answer among some of the group members. Instead, students were fixated on finding answers and immediately moving on to the next problem…” The authors observed:

• Higher-performing students didn’t give more detailed and easy-to-understand explanations than their lower-performing peers.
• Peer-to-peer explanations weren’t clearer and easier to understand than the teacher’s.
• Lower-performing students were hesitant to ask for help or clarification for fear of looking stupid, and when they did ask for help, their questions were sometimes overlooked.

The main issue seemed to be, as one perceptive student noted, “a weak sense of audience awareness.”

• Unequal use of conversational space – Lack, Swars, and Meyers found that higher-achieving students were more likely to seize opportunities to participate in small-group discussions, and lower-performing students spoke less – especially when the teacher wasn’t present to facilitate the discussion and make sure students assigned to different roles were doing what they were supposed to do. “The low-performing students in this study found it difficult to keep pace with high-performing students in problem solving and what they called ‘working it out’,” say the authors. “The low performers reported sometimes being lost and overwhelmed with anxiety when they realized that they were significantly behind their higher-performing peers in generating correct solutions.” In other words, there was a self-reinforcing dynamic – being behind produced emotions that kept struggling students from doing what was necessary to catch up. 

But there was an interesting difference between the two low-performing students in the study. One was mostly silent and unassertive while the other tried to stay in the game, begging other students to “wait” or “hang on.” The first student was mostly ignored by more successful students, who made no attempt to involve her in solving the fractions problems. The other student was only occasionally successful in getting help.

• Peer status – The two high-performing students tended to talk exclusively with each other during task discussions, especially when the math got tricky, and they often ignored or overlooked the two low-performing students. “High-performing students reported a greater level of ease and comfort in communicating with each other,” say the authors, “and described the act of explaining mathematical content to low-performing students as burdensome and challenging.” 

Lack, Swars, and Meyers conclude that there is a strong tendency for the “Matthew Effect” to play out in classroom discussions: students with stronger preparation surge ahead and students with weaker preparation fall further behind. Here’s what the authors believe teachers can do to counteract that tendency:

• There need to be explicit classrooms norms about equitable participation, with roles assigned to each student in a group so low-performing students have a clear, “official” role in the proceedings. 
• Teachers need to think about putting students with widely divergent achievement levels in the same group (the researchers think the math gap between the pairs of students they studied may have been unbridgeable). 
• Low-performing students need to be explicitly taught how to assertively ask for specific, clear explanations from peers.
• High-performing students need to learn how to craft clear and precise explanations so that all group members have greater access to mathematics discourse.
• Students need to be led to reflect on participation levels and group dynamics, perhaps viewing videos of group discussions. “Though video playback is not typical practice and requires the willingness of teachers to use such a method,” say the researchers, “the quality of participation cannot improve without substantial reflection on the part of both teachers and their students.” 

“Low- and High-Achieving Sixth-Grade Students’ Access to Participation During Mathematics Discourse” by Brian Lack, Susan Lee Swars, and Barbara Meyers in Elementary School Journal, September 2014 (Vol. 115, #1, p. 97-123), http://bit.ly/1sPQkVp

From the Marshall Memo #550