About Me

I'm 19 years old. I grew up in North Attleboro. I'm majoring in special ed. I love sports, reading, playing field hockey, chilling with my friends, and just being outside. Live life with a passion.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Oakes

Premise:
curriculum
tracking
strategies
grouping
skills
labeling

Oakes's Argument:

Oakes argues that teachers need to find a curriculum that will work for students of all different learning levels because tracking is doing a poor job in educating children.

Evidence:

"In fact, studies that control for instructional differences - providing identical curriculum and instruction to both tracked and mixed groups of students - typically find that high ability students do equally well in either setting. The fact that the students are tracked seems less important than that they have the other instructional advantages that seem to come along with classes that are highly able."

This shows that students of a higher level learn just as well in a mixed track group than if they were in all one level. It also proves to be a better learning environment for students of lower tracks also.

"...Students with high abilities or with handicaps had the effect of making students in the middle "unspecial" and guaranteeing that they were taught in "unspecial" ways."

Tracking is unhelpful because it teaches students that others are valued more and that they should be at a higher level. They are treated differently.

Comments:

Tracking can be erased from schools entirely if the school system put in the effort to create a curriculum that would be conducive to everyone. Until this happens though we are stuck with a tracking system that leaves students feeling left out and unimportant. It is hindering their learning, instead of learning from each other by being mixed, they only have others to work off of that are in the same track that they are in. Tracking needs to be stopped starting from a young age.

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