Teachers use student grouping to reduce the complexities of the classroom. Grouping has been credited with making behavior more predictable, improving interpersonal skills, and making instruction easier by increasing homogeneity. Research suggests that teachers' grouping decisions are influenced by characteristics of the student, the teacher, the task, and the environment. Research on grouping has centered on elementary classes, with little investigation of secondary classes. The purpose of this study was to describe the influences on secondary laboratory teachers' grouping decisions in a naturally occurring secondary school setting.

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the inhibitors affecting classroom teaching by surveying the perceptions of secondary teachers. This purpose was based on the growing crisis of "teacher burnout" which was thoroughly documented. Since it appears that burnout most often affects those teachers who work in conventional classrooms, characteristics of teaching effectiveness within these classrooms were the basis for inhibitor comparison. Seven characteristics were produced by a crosstabulation of studies on effective teaching spanning the last fifty years. The inhibitor choices presented with these seven characteristics were extracted from an extensive list produced by the literature and classified under six areas of origin. The characteristics and inhibitors ultimately selected were surveyed among teachers in a large Southwest metropolitan area.