The Pedagogical Implications of Ability Grouping on Students Performance in Secondary Schools in Tanzania

Students learning abilities vary from one individual to another. This implies that teaching instructions must be modified to reflect students’ capacities, leading to ability grouping as one of the strategies for this purpose. This study was conducted to examine the effects of ability grouping in secondary schools in Tanzania. A descriptive phenomenological design embedded with qualitative approach was used for this study. Ten secondary school teachers were interviewed for the study, among them five were male and five female teachers. The findings of the study revealed some various opinions about ability grouping. The positive implications were shown, whereby, higher-achieving students were grouped in the fixed grouping and some positive implications when learners in the low-ability group were placed in the mixed grouping. However, there were also negative effects of ability grouping, whereby ability grouping is not effective as it causes many harms and damages to students; there are no overall effects of ability grouping on academic performance if students are grouped by achievement; it is not only ability grouping itself that increases students’ performance but also the role of peers. It is also not clear whether teachers really use appropriate strategies to instruct groups with different abilities. Many teachers use the ability approach as a mechanism to identify low achievers in learning; in some cases, teachers even demoralize lower achievers or pay less attention to the lower achievers, attributing their poor performance to laziness. Consequently, the tendency towards labelling results in the declining performances of lower achievers. This study recommends the use of effective practices and alternatives to ensure equality and access to learning. There is a need to conduct a study to determine teachers’ use of strategies along with ability grouping.