ScienceDaily has an article up about a new Northwestern University study researching the effects of class size on academic achievement in elementary school students. Decreasing class size is beneficial overall, but a new study found that not only does the achievement gap between the higher academic achievers and the lower academic achievers still exists, but it’s more pronounced when class size is decreased.
While decreasing class size may increase achievement on average for all types of students, it does not appear to reduce the achievement gap within a class,” said Spyros Konstantopoulos, assistant professor at Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy.
Konstantopoulos’ study, which appears in the March issue of Elementary School Journal, questions commonly held assumptions about class size and the academic achievement gap — one of the most debated and perplexing issues in education today.
The Northwestern professor worked with data from Project STAR, a landmark longitudinal study launched in 1985 by the State of Tennessee to determine whether small classes positively impacted the academic achievement of students.
Considered one of the most important investigations in education, STAR made it abundantly clear that on average small classes had a positive impact on the academic performance of all students.
“Given that class size reduction is an intervention that benefits all students, it’s tempting to expect that it also will reduce the achievement gap,” he added. Previous research, however, has provided weak or no evidence that class reduction benefited lower-achieving students more than others. The Northwestern study underscores that research.
Smaller class size should always be a priority, that much is obvious. It’s better for all parties involved—the minds and the psyches of the students, the sanity of the teachers, and it certainly helps to tone down the spazziness of hyper parents. As Konstantopoulos suggests, the next step is to research how to improve academic achievement for lower-achieving students.
“It is unfortunate that data about classroom practices that could be useful in identifying ways of improving academic success for lower achieving students were not available in Project STAR,” Konstantopoulos said. “A new randomized experiment with the objective of collecting high-quality observational data in the classrooms would provide invaluable information about the effects of small classes.”
Posted by Alexa Harrington