Class Size Reduction Thesis
Shabnam Tanha
Christopher Henderson
ENG 115
21 August 2017
Class Size is a Major Factor in Contributing to Academic Success
Education is considered as an essential phenomenon that lays the foundation of today’s civilized world, and it is the main cause of prosperity and development of societies. Therefore, today one massive concern of experts is improving the quality of education worldwide by building up a better educational system and updating the curriculum, structure and methodologies of schools. Among all the ideas of improving educational quality one is the concept of Class Size Reduction (CSR). Developed countries have spent billions of dollars in order to implement the concept of CSR in their education systems and research its effects.
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Researches indicate that students in smaller classes gain better scores than normal classes. One of the most convincing researches done to investigate the significance of reduced class sizes was the Student Teacher Achievement Ratio also known as STAR project which was conducted in the state of Tennessee (1985-1989). According to this project, 10,000 students were randomly assigned into 3 different types of classes: small sized class (13 to 17 students) and normal sized class (22 to 26) with full time teacher assistant and a normal sized class without a teacher’s aide (Ehrenberg, Brewer, Gamoran, & Willms, 2001). After reviewing the STAR project’s data, Finn and Achilles stated that STAR project clarified the positive effect of smaller classes on student’s achievement because the students in these classes outperformed by the fifth of standard deviation. It is necessary to compare two average pupils when they first start school, in order to comprehend what a fifth of a standard deviation improvement means. The term two average students mean that half of their peers have worse performance and half of their classmates perform better than them. Now that we have these two average students, one should be assigned to a normal sized class and the other one in a small class. After a year, the student from small class will show an increase of 8% in his/her academic performance, while …show more content…
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