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Do you have evidence that class size doesn't matter? It seems intuitively obvious that class size does matter. Consider a single teacher teaching 60,000 avera

Do you have evidence that class size doesn't matter? It seems intuitively obvious that class size does matter. Consider a single teacher teaching 60,000 average students in a stadium sized classroom versus a single teacher in a classroom with 20 average students. It seems to me that the probability of success in the latter classroom would be significantly higher than in the former. I don't know this to be true but it seems like it should be true. I'd be interested in knowing if there is research supporting your position.

evgen 16y ago
He can't really provide the evidence because it does not exist in any meaningful manner. There is an overwhelming amount of data showing that reduced class sizes lead to better overall student performance and that smaller classes have a disproportionately large effect when used in disadvantaged/urban schools and when used very early (e.g. K-2nd grade.)
- luu 16y ago
  It’s not nearly as clear as you make it out to be. Of the randomized controlled trials that I know of [1], one study has shown that reducing class size from 25 to 15 has a large positive effect, but another has shown that reducing class size from 40 to 30 has no effect. Also, assigning a teacher’s aide, so that a class of 50 is taught by two people also has no effect. The problem is that such studies are expensive and hard to generalize. Is it really that going from 25 to 15 always has an effect and that going from 40 to 30 never does, or was there something about the particular circumstances of those trials that made class size matter in one case and not the other? Another problem is that even if reducing class size is effective is that, in the short run, there’s a fixed supply of good teachers. This isn’t a problem when you’re running an RCT on a few schools, but if you want to initiate state-wide (or nation-wide) reform, it’s not clear that throwing a bunch of unqualified teachers into small classrooms will help. [1]Hacsi’s Children as Pawns: The Politics of Educational Reform has a good summary of evidence to date, as of 2003
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  If the data is overwhelming, how come you don't cite any of it? The first few google results that address this point [1] seem to disagree with your claim that the data is overwhelming. At the college level at least, student performance is unaffected by class size: http://sigmaa.maa.org/rume/crume2010/Archive/Gleason.pdf http://sigmaa.maa.org/rume/crume2010/Archive/Gleason.pdf In french grades 1-2, teacher education and class size (variation of 10 students) affects outcomes by only 3%, which they claim is statistically significant: http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/international/events/upload/ProstTeachers.pdf http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/international/events/upload/Prost... But I'm no expert. If you have data, can you cite it? Because a quick google search suggests patrick is right and you are wrong. [1] A few of the studies at the top of google results don't address student performance, but instead focus on student satisfaction.
  - evgen 16y ago
    Since "google it" seems to be the alpha and omega of your research abilities, here are some papers and research from the last five years that supports the case that smaller class sizes leads to better student outcomes when applied to K-6 education (as in long-term quantitative results and not just "student satisfaction"): Spyros Konstantopoulos and Vicki Chun, What Are the Long-Term Effects of Small Classes on the Achievement Gap? Evidence from the Lasting Benefits Study, American Journal of Education 116, November 2009. Peter Muennig and Steven H. Woolf, Health and Economic Benefits of Reducing the Number of Students per Classroom in US Primary Schools, American Journal of Public Health, published online September 27, 2007. Philip Babcock and Julian R. Betts, Reduced-class Distinctions: Effort, Ability and the Education Production Function, NBER Working paper 14777, March 2009. Sarah Theule Lubienski et.al., Achievement Differences and School Type: The Role of School Climate, Teacher Certification, and Instruction, American Journal of Education 115, November 2008. Elizabeth Graue, et.al. The Wisdom of Class-Size Reduction, American Educational Research Journal, September 2007, Vol. 44, No. 3. Douglas D. Ready and Valerie E. Lee, Optimal Context Size in Elementary Schools: Disentangling the Effects of Class Size and School Size, Brookings Papers on Education Policy, 2006/2007, pp. 99-135. Fatih Unlu, California Class Size Reduction Reform: New Findings from the NAEP, Princeton Univ., Nov. 2005 Jeremy D. Finn et.al., Small Classes in the Early Grades, Academic Achievement, and Graduating From High School, Journal of Educational Psychology, 2005. The best that the opponents of initiatives to reduce class sizes can muster are exemplified the recent efforts by anti-tax groups to fight Amendment 9 in Florida (see http://floridataxwatch.org/archive/amendment9.html http://floridataxwatch.org/archive/amendment9.html for an example) where there is a a great deal of political weaseling to try to minimize the available data. No studies are presented that show that reduced class sizes have a detrimental effect and a lot of words are spent trying to spin the results that are available. We are not talking about college-level instruction and you know that. The attempt to claim that research on college pedagogy is in any way applicable to elementary education is poor sophistry at best. To return the favor, how about you start listing some studies that show that reduced class sizes in K-6 have no long-terms effects on student outcome?
yummyfajitas 16y ago
Patrick is focusing on class size variations typically encountered in the real world (typically 0-40). You are focusing on class size variation in a world populated by straw men (0-60,000).
- yequalsx 16y ago
  I guess this is an implicit admission on your part that class size matters. Very good. I agree with you. At most large universities freshman and sophomore classes can be found in the hundreds. (They typically come with recitation but these are usually glorified tutoring sessions.) At my college class sizes in the department of mathematics run at 45. Typical depends on what institution you are talking about. Given that class size matters it becomes a relevant topic on what the optimal size is. He made the statement with regard to class size: " They do little, if anything, for education." This is clearly not the case.
rmc 16y ago
Not all teachers are created equal. Your pro small classes point applies if all teachers are just as good. However if one teacher teaches 60,000 people, you can pick the best teacher in the city. If one teacher teaches 20 then 20 students get the best teacher, and the other 59,980 dont. Instead of just hiring the top 1 teacher, you must now hire the top 3,000 teachers. The average skill of the top 3,000 will heavily affect the average level of teaching of the whole 60,000 students. If you doubled all class sizes you might be able to double the quality of teaching.
bugsy 16y ago
The last time I looked into the empirical evidence on this in primary school, the finding was that class size makes a big difference if there are 13 or fewer students in a class because the teacher can use a style where he spends individual time with each student. But from 15 to 40 it flat lines because the teacher has to switch to lecture mode. So, unless you can reduce class size to 13, there's no benefit to doing it. And there really aren't any schools that are taking it that far. So they might as well ramp up to 40 students (above this discipline and control becomes a problem in K-12) and use the salary savings to buy textbooks or other materials, things that many school districts are now opting out of because their administrative, salary and other such costs are now so high. Many countries that do better achievement wise than the US (assuming measured achievement results are valuable, which is debatable) have large classroom sizes in primary education. Japan's average is 40 students: > The 1999 Pennsylvania State University study done by Suetling Pong concluded that the effect of class size on achievement is very small. It compared ten industrialized nations other than the U.S. and found that students in Australia, Flemish Belgium and France did significantly better in larger math classes. Class size had no effect on students in Canada, Germany, Iceland, South Korea and Singapore. And students in Japan, who consistently outscore U.S. students in math and science, frequently attend math classes of 40 or more students. source: http://www.edreform.com/Archive/?Debunking_the_Class_Size_Myth_How_to_Really_Improve_Teacher_Effectiveness http://www.edreform.com/Archive/?Debunking_the_Class_Size_My...

evgen 16y ago

He can't really provide the evidence because it does not exist in any meaningful manner. There is an overwhelming amount of data showing that reduced class sizes lead to better overall student performance and that smaller classes have a disproportionately large effect when used in disadvantaged/urban schools and when used very early (e.g. K-2nd grade.)

luu 16y ago
It’s not nearly as clear as you make it out to be. Of the randomized controlled trials that I know of [1], one study has shown that reducing class size from 25 to 15 has a large positive effect, but another has shown that reducing class size from 40 to 30 has no effect. Also, assigning a teacher’s aide, so that a class of 50 is taught by two people also has no effect. The problem is that such studies are expensive and hard to generalize. Is it really that going from 25 to 15 always has an effect and that going from 40 to 30 never does, or was there something about the particular circumstances of those trials that made class size matter in one case and not the other? Another problem is that even if reducing class size is effective is that, in the short run, there’s a fixed supply of good teachers. This isn’t a problem when you’re running an RCT on a few schools, but if you want to initiate state-wide (or nation-wide) reform, it’s not clear that throwing a bunch of unqualified teachers into small classrooms will help. [1]Hacsi’s Children as Pawns: The Politics of Educational Reform has a good summary of evidence to date, as of 2003
yummyfajitas 16y ago
If the data is overwhelming, how come you don't cite any of it? The first few google results that address this point [1] seem to disagree with your claim that the data is overwhelming. At the college level at least, student performance is unaffected by class size: http://sigmaa.maa.org/rume/crume2010/Archive/Gleason.pdf http://sigmaa.maa.org/rume/crume2010/Archive/Gleason.pdf In french grades 1-2, teacher education and class size (variation of 10 students) affects outcomes by only 3%, which they claim is statistically significant: http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/international/events/upload/ProstTeachers.pdf http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/international/events/upload/Prost... But I'm no expert. If you have data, can you cite it? Because a quick google search suggests patrick is right and you are wrong. [1] A few of the studies at the top of google results don't address student performance, but instead focus on student satisfaction.
- evgen 16y ago
  Since "google it" seems to be the alpha and omega of your research abilities, here are some papers and research from the last five years that supports the case that smaller class sizes leads to better student outcomes when applied to K-6 education (as in long-term quantitative results and not just "student satisfaction"): Spyros Konstantopoulos and Vicki Chun, What Are the Long-Term Effects of Small Classes on the Achievement Gap? Evidence from the Lasting Benefits Study, American Journal of Education 116, November 2009. Peter Muennig and Steven H. Woolf, Health and Economic Benefits of Reducing the Number of Students per Classroom in US Primary Schools, American Journal of Public Health, published online September 27, 2007. Philip Babcock and Julian R. Betts, Reduced-class Distinctions: Effort, Ability and the Education Production Function, NBER Working paper 14777, March 2009. Sarah Theule Lubienski et.al., Achievement Differences and School Type: The Role of School Climate, Teacher Certification, and Instruction, American Journal of Education 115, November 2008. Elizabeth Graue, et.al. The Wisdom of Class-Size Reduction, American Educational Research Journal, September 2007, Vol. 44, No. 3. Douglas D. Ready and Valerie E. Lee, Optimal Context Size in Elementary Schools: Disentangling the Effects of Class Size and School Size, Brookings Papers on Education Policy, 2006/2007, pp. 99-135. Fatih Unlu, California Class Size Reduction Reform: New Findings from the NAEP, Princeton Univ., Nov. 2005 Jeremy D. Finn et.al., Small Classes in the Early Grades, Academic Achievement, and Graduating From High School, Journal of Educational Psychology, 2005. The best that the opponents of initiatives to reduce class sizes can muster are exemplified the recent efforts by anti-tax groups to fight Amendment 9 in Florida (see http://floridataxwatch.org/archive/amendment9.html http://floridataxwatch.org/archive/amendment9.html for an example) where there is a a great deal of political weaseling to try to minimize the available data. No studies are presented that show that reduced class sizes have a detrimental effect and a lot of words are spent trying to spin the results that are available. We are not talking about college-level instruction and you know that. The attempt to claim that research on college pedagogy is in any way applicable to elementary education is poor sophistry at best. To return the favor, how about you start listing some studies that show that reduced class sizes in K-6 have no long-terms effects on student outcome?

yummyfajitas 16y ago

Patrick is focusing on class size variations typically encountered in the real world (typically 0-40). You are focusing on class size variation in a world populated by straw men (0-60,000).

yequalsx 16y ago
I guess this is an implicit admission on your part that class size matters. Very good. I agree with you. At most large universities freshman and sophomore classes can be found in the hundreds. (They typically come with recitation but these are usually glorified tutoring sessions.) At my college class sizes in the department of mathematics run at 45. Typical depends on what institution you are talking about. Given that class size matters it becomes a relevant topic on what the optimal size is. He made the statement with regard to class size: " They do little, if anything, for education." This is clearly not the case.

rmc 16y ago

Not all teachers are created equal. Your pro small classes point applies if all teachers are just as good. However if one teacher teaches 60,000 people, you can pick the best teacher in the city. If one teacher teaches 20 then 20 students get the best teacher, and the other 59,980 dont. Instead of just hiring the top 1 teacher, you must now hire the top 3,000 teachers. The average skill of the top 3,000 will heavily affect the average level of teaching of the whole 60,000 students. If you doubled all class sizes you might be able to double the quality of teaching.

bugsy 16y ago

The last time I looked into the empirical evidence on this in primary school, the finding was that class size makes a big difference if there are 13 or fewer students in a class because the teacher can use a style where he spends individual time with each student. But from 15 to 40 it flat lines because the teacher has to switch to lecture mode. So, unless you can reduce class size to 13, there's no benefit to doing it. And there really aren't any schools that are taking it that far. So they might as well ramp up to 40 students (above this discipline and control becomes a problem in K-12) and use the salary savings to buy textbooks or other materials, things that many school districts are now opting out of because their administrative, salary and other such costs are now so high. Many countries that do better achievement wise than the US (assuming measured achievement results are valuable, which is debatable) have large classroom sizes in primary education. Japan's average is 40 students: > The 1999 Pennsylvania State University study done by Suetling Pong concluded that the effect of class size on achievement is very small. It compared ten industrialized nations other than the U.S. and found that students in Australia, Flemish Belgium and France did significantly better in larger math classes. Class size had no effect on students in Canada, Germany, Iceland, South Korea and Singapore. And students in Japan, who consistently outscore U.S. students in math and science, frequently attend math classes of 40 or more students. source: http://www.edreform.com/Archive/?Debunking_the_Class_Size_Myth_How_to_Really_Improve_Teacher_Effectiveness http://www.edreform.com/Archive/?Debunking_the_Class_Size_My...