The Influence of Class Size Reduction on Academic Performance

Hamida Qanbari

Prof. Christopher Henderson

English 115

April 20, 2015

The Influence of Class Size Reduction on Academic Performance

Creating a well-taught and attentive community is ranked among any state’s top strategic plans, and the states put forward different policies for achieving such goals. Thus, the goal of high academic performance has allocated a big deal of national revenues on education sectors. The idea of class size reduction has been raised in many states of US nowadays.  However, there are critiques that question the efficiency and effectiveness of class size as a major factor in contributing to academic achievements. Despite few analyses, the argument of better academic standings due to small classes is anecdotal in nature and lacks the support of adequate conclusive data. Furthermore, there are many factors which have influence on students’ academic standings, class size reduction is not a major factor in achieving better academic performance; therefore, it is implied that decreasing the number of students in a class does not have tangible effects on academic success when other variables are not controlled.

The lack of conclusive data that is proving, whether class size reduction contributes to higher grades or not is one of the major challenges in drawing a conclusion for the argument of the influence of class size reduction on academic achievement performance. Ehrenberg et al. (2001) had noted clearly in his article, Does Class Size Matter, that difficulty in studying class size reduction effects, discount many statistical analyses about pupil teacher ratio, since there are thousands of factors that influence pupils’ academic performance. (p.159). Furthermore, in 1998, Blatchford, Goldstein and Mortimore of University of London, admitted that conclusive experiments about CSR effects within the United Kingdom is insufficient. Then, after analyzing some of well-known CSR records in UK, they criticized the official statistics for limitations that the analyses have had in terms of approaches and methods. Broadly he assemblies the limitations in three main concerns: assigning pupils and teachers randomly, lack of a general conclusion about the ideal “small class”, and regional differences in schools (p. 695-698). Blatchford’s article support the argument that reducing class size is not the best approach for achieving academic performance, due to lack of reliable data.

In the previous paragraph, Ehrenberg and Blatchford criticize interpretation of statistical analyses, not well-established experiments. In 1989 Ehrenberg et al. (2001) noted that “the largest, most conclusive study to date” (p. 160), Students Teacher Achievement Ratio project, better known as STAR, was completed in the Tennessee state in the U.S which cost approximately $12 million dollars. STAR was conducted on 10,000 students from kindergarten level to third grade students in 181 schools of Tennessee. The students were randomly assigned to three groups of classes; small classes of 15 pupils, regular classes of 24 and the same ratio of regular classes with a full-time teacher aid.  At the end, STAR introduced a new aspect of analysis to assess the argument of decreasing pupil teacher ratio more confidentially (Nye, 2000, p. 123-124).STAR revealed that smaller classes are more working for ethnic minorities and socioeconomic disadvantaged students in early ages of kindergarten, or elementary level.