Multiage Grouping in the Elementary School and Children's Affective Development: A Review of Recent Research

Abstract

Bonny E. Ford Southern Methodist University Dallas, Texas Multiage grouping-also known as multigrade grouping, vertical grouping, vertical all-age grouping, and family groupinghas been described by Mary A. Mycock, who is deputy principal of England's Manchester College of Education and a specialist in research on the subject, as a method of school organization in which children of different ages are, as a deliberate educational policy, placed together in the same class (1). Virginia A. Stehney, a teacher of a multiage class in Kingsley School in Downers Grove, Illinois, defines multiage grouping as an arrangement whereby children of various ages, abilities, and interests are put together in a learning situation in a school on the basis of philosophy, not from administrative convenience (2). In a British primary school that uses multiage grouping each class would have an equal proportion of children of all the ages represented in the school. In these schools children's ages usually range from four and a half years to seven and a half years. British junior schools experimenting with this procedure are likely to form class groups of children from seven years of age to nine years, from nine years to eleven years, or even from seven years to eleven years. John Goodlad and Robert Anderson describe American