Multigrade Education

Multigrade education groups students from two or more adjacent grade levels into a single classroom taught by one teacher for most or all of the school day, known under various names in different countries including composite, combination, split, mixed age and vertically grouped classes. Its roots run back to the one room schoolhouses common in rural areas from the 1800s, through the deliberately ungraded classrooms of the 1960s and 1970s, to the smaller, cost driven combined-grade classrooms schools use today, and it remains common where a school's enrollment is too small to support one class per grade or where distance makes a single larger school impractical for a surrounding community. Multigrade classrooms rely on distinct instructional practices, among them cross age peer tutoring, structured self directed learning tasks, and deliberate organization of curriculum and grouping across grade levels, and research on the approach finds that students in multigrade classrooms are not disadvantaged in academic performance, social relationships or attitudes compared with students in single grade classrooms.