The idea of having smaller class sizes to boost learning may be popular around the world, however Singapore’s Ministry of Education has been cautious about adopting the practice.
Singapore’s education minister shared that although MoE does believe that with good teachers, smaller class sizes can help students, he suggested that it may be an overrated practice.
Minister Ong Ye Kung also shared that urging schools to implement smaller classes implies that there is uniformity in Singapore’s classrooms, which is a false assumption.
“There is sometimes still the perception that students study in one class and it is of a certain size,” Ong said. “The reality and the lived experience of students is that they now regularly move around, join different groups and there is no single class size.”
This is especially true for classes with weaker students, he added. In specialised secondary schools with students with special education needs, MoE provides additional teaching resources and the typical class size is about 20 students.
In lower primary, learning support programs are done in groups of eight to 10.
As for Normal (Technical) classes in mainstream schools, classes are typically made up of 20 students or have two teachers in a class of 40.
Additionally, in many junior colleges, consultations between students and teachers are often one-to-one. For sessions with an education and career guidance counsellor, students meet one-on-one or in very small groups.
The case against smaller class sizes
Ong then went on to share why adopting smaller class sizes may not always produce results because “how it is implemented makes all the difference”.
To be an effective practice, schools would have to hire even more experienced teachers, which is not an easy task and may excessively burden the administration cost-wise.
Putting it into practice across the board may also be too rigid for teachers in Singapore, who are currently given the flexibility to configure class sizes depending on the different needs of students.
He then cites studies from Hong Kong, Israel and US to illustrate why smaller class sizes do not necessarily boost student learning.
In 2009, Hong Kong did a study on Small Class Teaching in Primary School, Ong shared. It put about 700 classes through an experiment over three years, varying their class sizes along the way.
The study found that however they vary the class sizes, there were no significant differences on performances compared to the territory-wide averages.
“What Hong Kong did find was that where an experimental school or class did significantly better, it was because the principal was more experienced, took an active role in developing the curriculum and the teachers, and encouraged involved parents in education,” he said.
For the Israeli study, they did not conduct an experiment. They gathered a large volume of data on students’ results and focused the analysis to find out if class size made a difference.
The conclusion was that there was “no significant relationship between class size and achievement.”
The US study observed that smaller class sizes was a popular idea, but after tens of billions of dollars were spent across states, particularly in California and Florida, it did not affect results in a statistically significant way.
“One reason was that in the US’ context, smaller class sizes meant hiring of many new teachers, who were inexperienced and yet to be effective in the classroom,” Ong said.
According to the report, “the evidence on class size indicates that smaller classes can, in some circumstances, improve student achievement if implemented in a focused way.
“But class size reduction policies generally take exactly the opposite approach by pursuing across the board reduction… (They are) also extremely expensive and represented wasted opportunities to make smarter educational investments.”
Do you think having smaller class sizes is the answer to boosting students’ performance? Tell us in the comments below.
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