Class Size

Christmas seems to be over; Happy New Year! Sandra Carter has contributed a Class Size page to Hamilton Central Options:

But to appreciate the impact of class size on student achievement one must look beyond personal experience to get the bigger picture, a view that is enabled through educational research and analysis of data. Toward this end, we’ll be looking at some state-wide class reduction plans that have been carried out in the United States. One such began in 1985 with the advent of the class reduction plan for primary schools in Tennessee. Since then, several other states have implemented their own class-size reduction plans. This is not a comprehensive treatment of class-size reduction programs but it is a look at three statewide projects referred to fairly often when the subject is broached. The first, Project STAR, seems to be the gold standard....

The conclusion offered by the researchers cited is that smaller classes are good, especially in the lower grades. My own feeling is that this is convincing, and that school consolidation discussions need to take it into account; expanding class size is a risky way to save money -- and communities that want to take that risk shouldn't merge with communities that don't.
In the longer run, I'd add that the research will eventually need to be redone in a variety of contexts: different kinds of learning, supported by different kinds of technology, works for different kinds of kids with different kinds of teachers on different subjects in different ways. Some learning is best done alone; some with one other student; some with two; etc. To each group size 1,2,...N, we add a physical teacher, a virtual teacher, or none.
I do have thoughts about patterns worth trying, e.g. at Khan's Ideal Classroom, but I don't think anybody knows what the results will be. I do think that we're likely to end up with a system in which each kid knows from personal "self-experimentation" research whether he or she memorizes new Spanish vocabulary best early in the morning, after a meal, late at night... and similarly for dozens of different tasks. And I do think we're likely to end up finding that physically large classes are among the least cost-effective way for kids to learn.

Or then again, maybe not.

Update:I should have noted that I've seen a number of articles challenging the "smaller class-size is good" notion, and other articles based on these, e.g. Half the Facts You Know Are Probably Wrong

Dinosaurs were cold-blooded. Increased K-12 spending and lower pupil/teacher ratios boost public school student outcomes. Most of the DNA in the human genome is junk. ...
In the past half-century, all of the foregoing facts have turned out to be wrong.

There are studies pointing that way, but the response seems to be that most if not all of these are conflating class size with student/staff ratio, which is a convenient but inaccurate indicator of class size. Other things being equal (which they often aren't), smaller class-size is good, especially in the lower grades.