Size Matters for EFA
This monograph reviews literature on school and class size. It estimates the numbers of small schools and numbers of children learning in small schools worldwide, and concludes by looking at implications for on-going and future CREATE studies, in particular the Community and School studies in Bangladesh, Ghana and India.
It is clear from the review that school and class-size effects on learning are contingent on social and economic context. The distribution of schools by size varies greatly from country to country. The proportion of small schools within developing country systems appears to be higher than in developed country systems. The limited evidence cited on class size in developing countries suggests that the range of class sizes in developing countries is greater than that in developed countries. The range of variation of both school size and class size within a system is likely to impact on the relationships found between either and on learning outcomes.
Implications for CREATE include that:
- size may need to be treated as a categorical rather than continuous variable since in many systems resource additions of various kinds are dependent on threshold sizes
- it is possible that highly skilled teachers can manage a wide range of class sizes because they can deploy a range of teaching strategies. Less skilled and qualified teachers may find that large classes pose too many pedagogical challenges
- while information on school size is included in the Community and School Studies (COMMS) formats, as is grade by grade enrolment, information should also be collected on the size of any centre offering pre-school provision and the daily attendance
- students in larger classes and schools may perform better than in smaller classes and schools, but this difference may arise more as a function of the rural or urban school and home background of the students, as much as of the size of class or school. The use of multi-level modeling would lend itself well to the exploration of this question.
