Student Achievement: Student Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR)

Class size reduction has been a heated debate for years, there have been different research done on weather class size reduction is a major factor in student academic achievement or not. Some of this research have been designed poorly and have been criticized by some other educational researchers. One of the most reliable researches done, which was called one of the United States Greatest Educational research by Frederick Mosteller is the project Student Teacher achievement Ratio (STAR) (Ronald, Brewer and Gamoran). The Project was a four year project between the years 1985-1989. The project included 10,000 students from Tennessee State. The students were assigned to small size classes of 13 to 17 students and regular classes of 22 to 26 students with and without assistant teacher in regular sized classes for every teacher. The findings of this project have shown that students in reduced size classes had higher academic achievements and the more time students spent in reduced size class even more long lasting their achievements were.

However, Hanushek have criticized the project STAR and has mentioned that the student achievements after the returning of students to the normal size classes is not assured. He agrees that small class size may have an impact on students' achievements, but this is not the

Some characteristics of this program are as follows, large-scale, longitudinal (four-years) study, involved nearly 80 schools from 42 school districts, included about 10.000 K-3 students from families ranging from very poor to very fluent, required schools to commit to the four-year time frame as a condition of participation and required schools to agree to random assignment of teachers and students to small (13 to 17 students) at large (22 to 26 students) classes as a condition of participation. Thus, Hanushek’s argument is argued to be