Smaller Classes Not Enough to Close the Achievement Gap, Study Says
RSSThis article originally appeared in SLJ's Extra Helping. <a href="https://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/subscribe.asp?screen=pi8">Sign up now!</a>
SLJ Staff -- School Library Journal, 03/12/2008
Do smaller classes affect student achievement? Not necessarily, says a new study from Northwestern University, which suggests that high achievers benefit more from small classes than low achievers do, especially at the kindergarten and first grade levels.
“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,” says Spyros Konstantopoulos, an assistant professor at Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy, who conducted the study.
Konstantopoulos’s conclusions, which appear in the March issue of Elementary School Journal, question the commonly held assumption about class size and the academic achievement gap—a long-standing and hotly debated issue in the education world.
The professor worked with data from Project STAR, a well-known longitudinal study launched in 1985 by the State of Tennessee to determine whether small classes had a positive impact on the student academic achievement. STAR, thought to be one of the most important studies in education, concluded that, on average, small classes had a positive impact on the academic performance of all students.
As a result of STAR, many school advocates, parents, and policy makers have been calling for smaller class size. And many states and school districts have enacted or are considering class-size reduction with the objective of improving academic achievement.
However, Konstantopoulos’s findings show that children who are already high achievers are the primary beneficiaries of the extra attention they receive in smaller classes.
“It is likely that high achievers are more engaged in learning opportunities and take advantage of the teaching practices that take place in smaller classes, or that they create opportunities for their own learning in smaller classes,” say Konstantoupoulos. “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."
Previous research has provided weak or no evidence that class reduction benefits lower-achieving students more than others. This study, however, found that although all types of students benefited from being in small classes, it did not reduce the achievement gap between low and high achievers.
The Northwestern researcher also examined differences in achievement between students in small and regular classes in the upper and lower tails of the achievement distribution. The sample consisted of nearly 11,000 elementary school students who participated in the experiment from kindergarten through third grade.
