A Comprehensive Look at Multi-Age Education

Abstract

Multi-grade schooling has been used in many countries around the globe. It is a cost effective model of schooling especially in rural areas where teacher retention and recruitment is a major problem. The findings of various research studies indicate that multi-grade education is as effective as single-grade schooling in terms of academic achievement and better in terms of social learning. The success of multiage education greatly depends on teaching techniques. Our universities prepare teachers for single-grades. Therefore, teachers in multi-grade settings face many challenges such as inadequate training, social and cultural isolation, instructional, lack of time, lack of community understanding, and rural nature of most of the multi-grade settings. Some of the issues can be overcome through proper pre-service and in-service teacher training.

DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2015.v5n2p285