Comments on The Educated Reporter: What the class size research REALLY says.

@Carl, learning IS the issue here, I totally agree...

2010-07-20T13:41:52.714-04:00

@Carl, learning IS the issue here, I totally agree with you. I also agree that this is one of the biggest issues for the teacher unions, and one that - at least i in Sweden - has been left out in the discussions about school and teachers for a very long time. As I see it there has to be a limit somewhere, a limit for what is reasonable in respect to what tasks you are expected to performe in addition to the definition of the teacher job in itself. There has to be some kind of correlation between the amount of time teachers are able to spend preparing and evalutaing their students learning, hasn´t there?

Some of the best teaching I have seen has been in ...

2010-07-10T13:56:27.725-04:00

Some of the best teaching I have seen has been in China and Japan where class sizes are often double or more of those in the U.S. But teaching loads are also about half of what they are here. Isolating class size as the lone variable as in STAR makes for interesting research, but what we really care about is how to improve learning in the most economical way possible. So the real question is: What combination of class size and teacher prep time gives the best results for the least resources? Posing the question this way also has the practical effect of depoliticizing the class-size issue that clouds the issue. Unions can abandon their knee-jerk opposition to large class sizes as just another teacher-bashing tactic. Cash strapped school boards would have harder time cherry-picking data to justify increasing class size with no adjustment to teacher work load.

To play devil's advocate, I should point out t...

2010-07-10T01:17:27.998-04:00

To play devil's advocate, I should point out that Montessori education actually encourages larger class sizes. Because of the mixed age groups and emphasis on independence, it works well. I don't know if there have been any studies on this. It would be an interesting comparison if there were.

I've long susspected that the direct impact on...

2010-07-09T23:45:12.540-04:00

I've long susspected that the direct impact on teachers via the grading load is a huge issue here, and the consequences that you mention here.

But I've never seen any research on that.

As teacher, I've had classes that varried in size by 50% (i.e. 25 vs. 38) in a single semester. Same grade, same course. The larger class was more tiring for me, and -- obviously -- there was 50% more work in terms of grading papers, meeting with students for extra help, trying to contact parents, etc..

I don't know what would happen if I had had an average of 27 kids and then had that upped to 35+ over a small number of years. Would I have changed the kind of assignments I gave, the number, or the amount of feedback?