Effect of Reducing Class Size

The effect of reducing class size

How do you feel when you walk into a class with 50 students? The class room with fifty students and twenty students could give you a different feeling. Because the number of the students in a classroom is one important factor, a lot of parents choose to send their children to the school with a proper class size. Reducing class size affects both teachers and students in both positive and negative ways.

The cause of reducing classroom size affects the teacher in many ways. First of all, a large number of students will give the teacher a lot of work getting everybody’s attention, so the small class size would make it easier to get everyone’s participation. If the teacher cannot get the attention the class would be boring, full of talking, and finally the teacher will not enjoy the class and lose the incentive to teach.

According to the National Center For Policy Analysis (NCPA), if the class has forty students instead of twenty-five, teaching effectiveness will drops to forty-five percent. Another reason for having a small class might be that the teacher could take care of all students equally and knows everybody better than in a big class. When the teachers are able to devote more time to each student, they can figure out the best way to solve each student’s problems in order to make them understand the lesson better, thus teaching is more effective. However, due to a small number of students, in some activities the teacher provide might not be as fun as the teacher expects or the classroom might fall into silence.

The reducing classroom size definitely affects the students. A lot of students might prefer having a big class to having a small class, because there are a lot of friends in the same class and it would make the class environment more fun. More fun in class activities would be acceptable, but if the fun you make is other than the lesson, it would cause a worse standard of teaching and understanding.

According to the NCPA, if students misbehave just two percent of the time, it results in reducing the effectiveness of teaching in a class of twenty-five students to sixty percent. Anyhow, small classes would keep you focus on the lesson more without your friends playing around and might lead to you getting a better grade; however, there are also countries like Japan that the students produce higher test scores although classes are quite large.

Another advantage of having a small class is that it encourages students to answer and ask the questions among the classmates more than being in a big class because when you are in a big class there is a feeling of fear.

After all, reducing class size means hiring more teachers and that means the school need more budget; therefore some school still have a big class of fifty students. But “Do more teacher mean better education?” Some why some studies have a doubt in reducing class size that the expense on this may not be rewarded by greatly improved performance as a result there might be only five to ten percent of the student that shows a small class give a positive impact on performance, and the rest stay the same. So there is still a question that if reducing class size means better education?”