Grouping Students for a Math class

Correct Option B

While 49% chose D as the right option, 22% chose the correct option.

This question tests teachers’ ability to group students based on different criteria, and how they are likely to look in a classroom (grouping being a commonly used classroom management technique). In the question, the three groups are working on different concepts or learning goals in geometry. The topics are in increasing order of difficulty and typically covered in sequence, i.e. understanding perimeter, measuring perimeter in standard units and calculating the area. This points to the grouping being based on ‘learning levels’ that refers to which concepts have been mastered by a student so far. Irrespective of what a student’s learning style or interest is, all three concepts need to be eventually learnt. 

• Choosing Option A indicates that this difference of lesson goals has not been noticed and instead the more superficial difference in the type of activity is driving the answer. Ideally, while grouping based on learning styles, a teacher should have similar lesson goals for all the groups.
• Choosing Option C indicates a misunderstanding of the idea of catering to various interests in a classroom and potentially a ‘layman’ level usage of the word ‘interest’. Students, when grouped based on interest, are involved in different aspects of the same theme like research, model creation etc. 
• Option D could have been chosen assuming that the activities are at different levels of cognitive ability (i.e. knowledge, understanding, application), which is not exactly true for the activities themselves. Option D could have also been chosen assuming that the students are at different levels of cognitive ability, which would make it an ‘absolutely wrong’ answer since there is no data on cognitive ability available here.