Class Size

Eastern and Western perspectives

Peter Blatchford, Kam Wing Chan, Maurice Galton, Kwok Chan Lai, John Chi-Kin Lee, Peter Blatchford, Kam Wing Chan, Maurice Galton, Kwok Chan Lai, John Chi-Kin Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317643470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Classroom Management

Much debate, research and commentary about class sizes in schools is limited because of an exclusive concern with class size and pupil academic attainment, and a neglect of classroom processes, which might help explain class size effects (or lack of them). Very little is known about the central question: how can teachers make the most of class size changes? Much of the commentary on class size effects has focused on Western and English-speaking countries but there are promising developments elsewhere, particularly the 'Small Class Teaching' initiatives in East Asia in the past decade, which have brought new knowledge and practical wisdom to the class size debate.

This book seeks to move toward a clearer view of what we know and do not know about class size effects, and to identify future steps in terms of policy and research. There is a huge and exciting potential for international collaboration on knowledge concerning class size effects which can help with research-informed policy. The book aims to draw out Eastern and Western international contexts which underpin any understanding of the role of class size in school learning.

The book has chapters by an international team of experts on class size effects, including Maurice Galton and John Hattie. Chapters are organised into four main sections:

• Socio-cultural and political contexts to the class size debate in the East and West;

• Research evidence on class size;

• Class size and classroom processes likely to be related to class size changes;

• Professional development for small class teaching in East Asia.

Part I

Introduction

1 Bringing together east and west approaches to the class size issue

An introduction to ‘Class Size: Eastern and Western perspectives’

Peter Blatchford, Maurice Galton and Kwok-Chan Lai

It is interesting that across the many schools in the many countries of the world the classroom environment is often recognisably similar. There is usually a room dedicated to the education of a class of pupils whether, as in many primary schools, for the whole school day, or, as in the case of older pupils, a room which different classes of pupils will visit for separate lessons. There will be a given size and shape, usually rectangular, and an arrangement of tables or desks for pupils and for the teacher. In the west, particularly at primary/elementary level, pupils tend to sit at tables in groups while in the east they tend to sit in pairs in rows. But perhaps the most basic feature of classroom environments is that it comprises a number of pupils and usually just one teacher. This basic feature of the environment within which pupils receive their formal school education is often taken for granted, but it will implicitly affect the types of interactions and relationships that develop, and the nature of learning experienced by pupils and teachers.

Class sizes in schools have been the subject of intense debate and scrutiny. In fact of all the issues in education, debate about the effects of class sizes in schools is one of the most long standing and contentious. A main reason for this is because variation in class size has important implications for educational planning and resourcing, and also because of the way it may have implications for the interactions and relationships between pupils and teachers, and ultimately pupil learning. It seems highly likely that a small class size, of say 15, will result in different teaching possibilities and different interpersonal dynamics in comparison to a larger class size, of say 35. We know that from the teacher’s perspective smaller classes allow more individual attention, better relationships etc. Still larger class sizes of 40 plus pupils will severely constrain the kinds of teaching approaches that can be used.

Class size and educational outcomes

The debate about class size has centred on whether class size affects educational outcomes, specifically pupil attainment. The key educational and policy question often posed is whether reducing the number of pupils in a class has a beneficial effect on pupil school attainments. One of the interesting features of the debate is the gap between two opposing points of view: between the view of most teachers, practitioners, teacher unions and also some researchers and academics – who feel that small classes are beneficial for teaching and learning – and an alternative view, often favoured by economists, policy makers and think tanks, but also some researchers and academics, that class size is not important. The gap between these two points of view is entrenched and long standing.

The head of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) surveys, Andreas Schleicher, recently wrote a piece for the BBC website (4 February 2015) in which he described seven big myths about top-performing school systems. Myth number four in Schleicher’s list is the view that small classes raise standards. He states that ‘everywhere, teachers, parents and policy makers favour small classes as the key to better and more personalised education.’ In contrast, he argues that high performing education systems invest in better teachers and that high-performing countries (many in East Asia) have large classes so the size of a school class can’t be important.

Far from being a widely held view, however, our sense is that Schleicher’s view that class size is unimportant is currently the most dominant view at least in the west and is becoming more and more accepted by many involved in educational policy and planning, think tanks, and politicians. It has been the view of the OECD for a number of years (PISA in Focus 13, 2012/02), as well as the influential UK Sutton Trust toolkit, and a number of influential reports which include those from McKinsey and Company (2007), Gratton Institute (2012), and the Brookings Institution (Whitehurst and Chingos, 2011).

Class sizes vary markedly between countries around the world. Recent OECD data showed that the average class size was around 21 on average at primary level, with the USA 21, France 23, UK 25 and China 38 (OECD, 2014). Class sizes also vary significantly within countries, e.g. between different regions within China, Japan and the USA, and between different types of schools in the same city. As we shall see, much of the debate about class size has taken place in the west and mainly in English speaking countries, with a lot of attention in the USA, Canada, UK, Holland, Australia and New Zealand. As long ago as the mid 1970s one of the editors (Peter Blatchford) can recall taking part in the construction of a large-scale (unfortunately not funded) research proposal which was designed to investigate the effects of class size differences – an effort to bring systematic evidence to inform a debate that was raging in the UK at the time. The meta-analysis by Glass and colleagues in the US about the same time (Glass and Smith, 1978) shows that even then it was possible to pull together evidence from a number of studies, again to try and bring some clarity to the debate about class size effects in the USA in the 1970s. In the 40–50 years since this time the debate about class size has ebbed and flowed at regular intervals.

An interesting feature of the interest in class size, of direct relevance to this book, is the way that debate about class sizes has become of more recent interest in East Asia. As we shall see in a number of chapters in this book, there is a different history to the debate in East Asia and the focus on class size has been different. In a number of countries and regions, e.g. in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau, there have been government and state-led initiatives to reduce the number of pupils, but the approach to small classes has often been expressed in terms of a distinct approach to teaching (called ‘small class teaching’ or ‘small class education’), rather than just (or even) a reduction in the number of pupils. The reasons for an interest in class size reduction are also different, owing more to demographic changes and a wish to change predominant teaching approaches, than efforts to boost academic attainment, as in the west.

A recent source of data, often referred to in views about class size, are the cross-country comparison of PISA results (e.g. OECD, 2012). These show that countries and regions performing at the higher end of the attainment chart, particularly East Asian countries and regions like Hong Kong and Shanghai, have relatively large classes in comparison to the OECD average. These findings have led a number of people, including Andreas Schleicher, as we have seen, to argue that class size cannot be important. As is discussed in a number of chapters in this book, understandable as this conclusion might be, such cross-country comparisons are fraught with difficulties and there are a host of reasons why high-performing countries do well (or less well). The causal role of class size is very hard to determine using this kind of evidence.

There are a number of western misperceptions about class sizes in East Asia. To give one example: there is a perception by some in the west that high-performing countries not only have larger classes, but are content with them (which might be expected to follow from their success in league tables). But the argument that high-performing education systems are in some sense comfortable with larger class sizes is outdated. This is developed in several chapters in the first section of this book, but here we just mention that the average class size of primary schools in Korea is now, contrary to the view of many in the west, on a par with UK (OECD, 2014). We shall see that deliberate policies are being adopted by governments in the east to reduce class sizes because they are no longer satisfied with their school education which is seen as characterized by a teacher dominated, high stakes examination-oriented culture, high pressure on students and lack of creativity and independent learning. It is perhaps telling that despite the high performance on test scores, PISA results have also shown that Korean students have the lowest expressed interest in mathematics, of all the OECD countries where we have data.

It is the view of the editors of this book that the class size debate, though it now occurs across the world, has often proceeded with, and been limited by, a lack of attention to the cultural and political context which frames the situation and debate in each country. One aim of this book is therefore to draw out the international contexts which underpin any understanding of the causal role of class size in school learning.

Given the ubiquity of meta and secondary analyses like those of John Hattie and Erik Hanushek as the basis for much contemporary discussion about evidence on class size effects, it might be thought that there are many studies of class size effects. But it is interesting that despite some useful reviews of research (Anderson, 2000; Biddle and Berliner, 2002; Blatchford, 2012; Blatchford, Goldstein, and Mortimore 1998; Ehrenberg, Brewer, Gamoran and Willms 2001; Grissmer, 1999; Hattie, 2005; Wilson, 2006) there have been relatively few high-quality dedicated studies of class size, and this is very unfortunate given the importance of class size in educational debate and resourcing.

This no doubt reflects the fact that getting a firm hold on the causal role of class size presents huge challenges for research. Although this book is not designed to be a technical volume, the authors will discuss issues of design and method where this is judged important to make sense of claims made. For example, as discussed in more detail in Blatchford (2012), much research on class size effects has used a simple correlational design, in which associations between class size and pupil attainment are examined at a given point in time. (This characterises many econometric analyses and the cross-country comparisons of PISA results.) The problem with such cross-sectional correlational designs is that they cannot overcome the problem that extraneous factors might explain the results. In other words, it could be something about the kinds of pupils (or teachers) in small or large classes, or outside-classroom factors like parental pressure and private tutoring, that explain any differences in pupil attainment found.

This is one reason for the high profile achieved by the Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) research, in Tennessee. The principal investigators, who included Jeremy Finn, a contributing author to this book, and state politicians and teacher representatives, set up a study with a bold experimental design involving the random allocation of pupils and teachers to three types of classes in the same school: ‘small’ classes (13–17), ‘regular’ classes (22–25), and ‘regular’ with full-time teacher aide. The project involved over 7,000 pupils in 79 schools and students who were followed from kindergarten (aged five) to third grade (aged eight). Pupils in small classes performed significantly better than pupils in regular classes and gains were still evident after Grade 4, when pupils returned to normal class sizes (Konstantopoulos and Chung, 2009; Nye, Achilles, Zaharias, Fulton and Wallenhorst, 1993; Word, Johnston, Bain, Fulton, Boyd-Zaharias et al., 1990).

The STAR project was an important and timely study and results have provided the basis for a number of educational initiatives and policies in the USA and other countries. It is without doubt the single most important study in the class size field and in this book it will be discussed from different points of view, most notably by one of the original principal investigators, Jeremy Finn, and his colleague Michele Shanahan in Chapter 8 and by Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach in her review in Chapter 4.

An alternative approach to the issue of causality is to examine relationships between class size and pupil academic outcomes, as they occur in the real world, and to carefully control and make adjustments for potentially confounding factors such as pupils’ prior attainment, level of poverty, teacher characteristics and so on. This was the approach adopted by a large-scale study in the UK (the Class Size and Pupil-Adult Ratio (CSPAR) project), which Peter Blatchford, one of the editors, directed. This study used a longitudinal, naturalistic design and studied the effect of class size on pupils’ academic attainment, and also classroom processes such as teaching and pupil attention (Blatchford, 2003; Blatchford, Bassett, Goldstein and Martin, 2003). The study tracked over 10,000 pupils in over 300 schools from school entry (at four/five years old) to the end of the primary school stage (11 years old). This is discussed in more detail by Peter Blatchford in Chapter 6.

Interestingly, the STAR project and other western studies have been an inspiration in a number of Asian countries which as we have seen have more recently embarked on class size reduction initiatives, even though they often have a different profile of class sizes and different traditions of teaching and learning. What is also interesting, as we have seen, is that recent cross-country comparisons of academic performance, e.g. as in the PISA surveys, have convinced a number of commentators in the west that class sizes are unimportant. By any standards this paradox is fascinating and important and this book allows a good opportunity to explore it fully.

In the east, there have been numerous papers discussing principles of small class teaching and action research, which have not received much attention in the west (see Blatchford and Lai, 2010). But there has been a paucity of published empirical research on class size effects, with the exception of a quasi-experimental study of Hong Kong schools by Galton and Pell (2010).

This book contributes to the literature on class size effects by bringing together authors from the UK, mainland Europe, East Asia, the USA and Australia, all of whom have had extensive experience of dedicated research on class size effects. In the first section of the book we provide a cultural and political context to studies of class size and in the second section provide a review of key findings and conclusions on class size effects. The book will provide background on developments in the east which may not be known to western readers and which we believe will greatly help in understanding the evidence on class size effects.

One of the advantages of a book which explores international perspectives is that we have been able to include important studies of class size conducted in non-English speaking countries and which may not have figured in western journals or other outlets. As well as East Asian studies this also applies to Europe. In particular – and this is a sad reflection on the barriers to communication between academics that can still exist between near neighbours – this book allows us to bring to an English speaking readership a review of some very important studies of class size in France, which deserve to have a wider readership and place in the literature on class size...