Viadero Ask a parent or teacher to name the most important factor in children's learning, and you're likely to hear about small classes. But ask a principal or superintendent, and you may get a different response.
Administrators sometimes play down the benefits of reducing the number of students in classrooms.
As part of a two-phase study, the researchers have been tracking classes of 15 to 17 students in 79 schools scattered across Tennessee since 1985. Their efforts make up the largest and longest-lasting experiment ever conducted to examine the effects of small class sizes on student learning and development. Not only do students in the early grades learn more in smaller classes, the project's investigators say. But they continue to have an edge over the rest of their peers years after they return to normal-sized classrooms. What's more, they add, the data they have collected are beginning to show that every time a student is added to a classroom, learning is diminished for the rest of the class.