Schools for Tomorrow Blog

A recent study finds that small class sizes help students.  USA Today reports:

Breaking up large classes into several smaller ones helps students, but the improvements in many cases come in spite of what teachers do, new research suggests.

New findings from four nations, including the USA, tell a curious story. Small classes work for children, but that’s less because of how teachers teach than because of what students feel they can do: Get more face time with their teacher, for instance, or work in small groups with classmates.

"Small classes are more engaging places for students because they’re able to have a more personal connection with teachers, simply by virtue of the fact that there are fewer kids in the classroom competing for that teacher’s attention," says Adam Gamoran of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who analyzed the findings.

The study is reminiscent of the famous Tennessee class size study, which yielded similar findings:  smaller classes are better for kids.  What made that study remarkable was that it was one of largest “true experiments” ever conducted in the field of education.  7,000 students were randomly assigned to one of three types of “treatments”, based on the student-teacher ratio in the class.

The Tennessee study is unusual, indeed.  What makes education research so confounding is that it simply does not conform to the typical experimental methods available in other fields like medicine of physics.  For a variety of logistical, financial, political, or ethical reasons, we usually cannot create the “gold standard” scientific experiment, in which children are randomly assigned to treatments and their results are precisely tracked over time. 

In the absence of the type of experimental control available in other disciplines, we’re often forced to conjecture, hypothesize, or just plain guess more often than we’d like.  In the world of school choice research, for example, there have been few, if any, studies in which children have truly been randomly assigned to one type of school or another. 

Instead, we must draw conclusions from the limited information available, which is problematic because kids who choose different school choice options may be different:  their motivations may be different; their parents may be different; their skin color or religion or language may be different.

In the rare case in which a true experiment is possible – as in the Tennessee study – educators gobble up the results.  But until we’re all allowed to randomly assign kids into courses or schools or districts like so many laboratory mice, we’ll have to acknowledge that our passionately held policy positions are based on a little more conjecture and guesswork than we’d like.

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 10:13 am and is filed under Classroom, Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.