Class culture matters more than class size writes Pamela Felcher, a high school English department chair in Los Angeles. She makes some smart points about the classroom experience:
“I do not mean racial or ethnic or socioeconomic culture, I mean the culture of a particular group of students in a particular room in a particular institution. I have two 10th-grade classes of about 30 students each. One of them is an “honors” class; the other, “regular.” In my honors class, the 30 students are engaged and demanding. They probe texts, cultivate questions, encourage discourse and write analytically. My regular class, on the other hand, is allergic to homework; students belch aloud and feel no shame because this is “just school”; they bully and curse at one another; they cannot sit still; they cannot listen; and their distraction is heightened by the gadgets they carry.”
In both of her classes, writes Felcher in the L.A. Times, her expectations exceed her students, however the best students in the regular class, she notes “often collapse under the weight of the apathetic, the rude, the defiant, the indolent mass that defines that class’ culture.”
Hi Robert,
Though I didn’t click over and read the article, one way of reading her argument is that size matters more for poorly behaved students, a point that’s been made to explain conflicting findings in the class size literature:
Edward Lazear, an economist at Stanford Business School, used this idea – that the ideal class size for learning varies by the behavior/attention span of the students – to explain the conflicting findings in class size research. The trouble is that observational studies – i.e. studies using data from the real world – are mixing together the effects of class size on very different kinds of kids. In a very nice theoretical paper, he concludes that class size matters – but that the effect of class size reduction on learning varies by the behavior of the students in it.
More on this over here:http://eduwonkette2.blogspot.com/2007/12/bonus-prize-more-thoughts-on-class-size.html
Comment by eduwonkette — June 20, 2008 @ 7:04 pm
Hi, EW. When research reinforces my classroom experience, it’s exhilirating. This sounds like one of those times. Lazear’s findings, as you describe them, make all the sense in the world. Thanks for the tip!
Robert
Comment by Robert Pondiscio — June 20, 2008 @ 8:42 pm
Class Size Won’t Matter…
Well-behaved students are capable of learning even in extraordinarily large classroom situations. If it weren’t for the paperwork involved in grading, most of my honors and IB courses could have been 10 students larger. In college, introductory l…
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