The impact of tracking by attainment on pupil self-confidence over time: demonstrating the accumulative impact of self-fulfilling prophecy

Abstract

The impact of self-fulfilling prophecy in education, and of attainment grouping on pupil self-perception, remain topics of longstanding debate, with important consequences for social in/justice. Focusing on self-confidence, this article draws on survey responses from 9,059 12-13 year olds who were tracked by subject (‘setting’). They provided survey responses when placed in ‘ability’ sets at the start of their secondary schooling, and again late the following year; enabling analysis of impact over time. After controlling for prior attainment, the gap in general self-confidence between students in the top and bottom sets for mathematics is shown to widen over time, and high set students’ self-confidence in English had also grown significantly; although there was not further widening in the cases of self-confidence in mathematics or in general self-confidence between students in the top and bottom sets for English. Implications of these findings for interventions directed at addressing educational disadvantage are discussed.

Keywords:

• Tracking
• self-confidence
• social justice
• social inequality
• attainment grouping
• setting

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Or ‘ability’, as it is commonly conceived.

2 See Author 1 et al (2019a) for elaborated discussion.

3 We do not ascribe to a view of ‘ability’ as fixed, hence our adoption of inverted commas.

4 Setting is a form of attainment grouping whereby pupils are grouped together by prior attainment in the study of particular subjects. It is sometimes referred to as ‘tracking by subject’ in the US. It is more flexible than tracking (streaming) wherein students are banded into the same ‘ability’ groups for most or all subjects: in the case of setting, a pupil might be in a high set for one subject and a low set for another. However, often in practice the approaches are blurred – for example setting can take place in addition to streaming, and/or there can be clustering of set applications across a number of subjects. Setting is prevalent in English secondary (high school) education, and increasingly in primary schooling (Author 1 et al, 2019a.

5 See endnote iv.

6 NFER were commissioned by the Education Endowment Foundation to perform the post-testing and to evaluate our key intervention outcomes. See https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/our-work/projects/best-practice-in-grouping-students/ for information on the wider study, and the published RCT protocols.

7 Those schools in the intervention group had beeen instructed not to additionally apply other forms of tracking; but some of the schools from the control group applied streaming as well as setting.

8 It is worth noting here that there are more pupils in the top sets than bottom sets. This is because schools frequently have larger top set groups, for example two parallel top sets (and middle set tiers) and a single – sometimes deliberately small – bottom group (Dunne et al, 2007; Author et al, 2019).

9 Key Stage 2 assessments are completed by pupils in England in Year 6 (age 10-11), the final year of primary school education.