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Essay on Looping/multi-year grouping
Among the other practices that advocates promote for supporting the broad goals of the middle school concept, looping is one of the more recent. The idea behind looping is that keeping groups of students together for two or more years with the same teacher will improve teacher-student relationships and the teachers' ability to recognize their students' academic strengths and weaknesses. Despite the intuitive appeal of looping and its apparent potential for maintaining continuity of experience for young teens, only 17 percent of teachers in our SASS analyses indicated that their schools used this practice.
A limited number of studies attest to the benefits. Comparing the social relations and academic achievement of middle school students in looped and nonlooped classes, Researchers found that looped classes had advantages with respect to test scores, self-efficacy, and attitudes toward schools. Similarly, report on a Massachusetts district that used looping for students in 1st through 8th grades (Bryk A. S., Lee L. E., & Holland P. B. 1993). Research over a seven-year period found that, after the implementation of looping, student attendance and retention rates increased, disciplinary actions and suspensions decreased, and staff attendance improved. Thus, based on a very limited research base, looping appears to be another promising practice. How well this practice would be implemented across many schools on a larger scale is not known (Lipsitz J., Mizell M. H., Jackson A. W., & Austin L. M., 1997).
Evidence from student surveys after just one semester of implementing student team literature in the first TDMS, Central East, indicated that student team literature had significant effects on 7 of 10 attitudinal measures shown by previous research to be associated with higher academic achievement...............
