size of the class affect students performance

KEYS TO ACHIEVING A SMALL CLASS EFFECT (again from “Class Size Reduction: Lessons Learned from Experience” by Joan Mc Robbie, Jeremy D. Finn, and Patrick Harman)

· Adequate supply of good teachers. No organizational arrangement, including small class size, can compensate for poor teaching. In Tennessee, all STAR teachers were state certified and qualified to teach in their assigned grades. Even among the small classes, some teachers were more effective than others; researchers have yet to study what may have caused these differences.

· Sufficient classroom space. STAR’s participating schools had no problem finding appropriate space to create enough classrooms for the reduction in numbers of students per teacher.

· A representative student mix in each class. In STAR, the mixture of students in the class was determined at random and so mirrored the diversity in the school as a whole. Research has not revealed what would happen if, for example, 17 pupils with learning or behavior problems were assigned to a small class. In such a case, positive effects are less likely without the infusion of significant additional resources.

· Teacher access to adequate materials and services. STAR teachers had no change in the materials and services normally available to them. Small- and regular-class teachers had access to reading specialists, school psychologists, special

education programs (although there is evidence that the need for these services was reduced), and other school wide services.

· Small classes were not intended to serve as a substitute for other programs with demonstrated efficacy (including bilingual programs).