Reassessing the Effects of Combination Classes*

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article reviews the research on combination classes–an often debated grouping structure in which students from two or more grades are placed with one teacher for most or all of the school day. Because researchers and disseminators of research have generally overlooked key distinctions between combination classes and their most common counterparts–single‐grade and multiage/nongraded classes–we begin by distinguishing combination classes, formed as a result of imbalanced or inadequate enrollments, from single‐grade classes, formed as a part of traditional schooling, and multiage/nongraded classes, formed as a result of pedagogical or philosophical interests. We show that conclusions about the effects of combination classes are confounded by (a) the merging of combination class studies with those that included several multiage/nongraded components, and (b) the slighting of a unique and important feature of combination classes–the assignment of certain types of students and teachers to these classes. Although comparisons between combination and single‐grade classes generally show no student achievement differences, we conclude that consistent findings from observational research, interviews with practitioners, and comparative studies in which selection bias was naturally controlled point to a plausible hypothesis that, all things being equal, combination classes have at least small negative effects. *This work was sponsored by the California Educational Research Cooperative of the School of Education at University of California, Riverside (UCR); the Minority Student Intern Program of the Graduate Division at UCR; intramural grants from the Academic Senate of UCR; and University of California Regents Faculty Fellowship Grants. We want to thank information specialists Loes Knutson and Julie Mason, from UCR's Information Dissemination, Exchange, and Access Service, for their invaluable assistance with document identification and retrieval. Further, we are grateful to Jorge Castro Armesto, Margie Baumann, Cathy Colwell, and Mark Shien for administrative assistance, and to three anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions about an earlier version of this article.