EPE-Case study: Class Size and Academic Achievement (II)

This is an essay for academic preparation course. I'd like to have it been reviewed and welcome everyone's comments, especially on grammar and structure, thank you.

Is the class size relative to better academic achievement?

To experiment with a specific outcome, in the late 1980s, a Tennessee-sponsored project called “Student-Teacher Achievement Ratio”, or “STAR” was designed to measure students’ performance through widened sample size and exclude the influence factors, such as students’ family background, the ratio of native English speaker. STAR use a different way to optimize the study result, which was assigned students and teachers randomly in different class size. Project STAR continued for four years and analysts conducted multiple records; generally, students have significant improvement in the first grade, even maintained the same performance after they have gone back to large class. Also, another notable result showed that ethnic minority students jumped in achievement impressively compared to previous records.
However, the other analysts have different view, they criticised that the study result did not provide clear evidence of the correlation between good performance and small class size. Despite the fact that, there was consensus among excellent students’ performance when they studied in a class with student number between thirteen to seventeen.

In spite of those remarkable finds related to the merits of small class size, different education styles implementing in Asia tell different stories in contrast to the benefits of small class size. For a long time, Asian schools kept large class size for each grade, usually more than forty students in one class, which is different from American schools, especially Japanese students, who hold the most remarkable achievement records. Those students highly disciplined and honored to be chosen. The teachers have strong established relationship with students. Although the flexibility in large class is not as much as it is in small class, some records showed that without considering the factors of linguistic and culture diversities, Japanese students can still hold high scores under standard test. 

EPE-Case study: Class Size and Academic Achievement (I)

This is an essay for academic preparation course. I'd like to have it been reviewed and welcome everyone's comments, especially on grammar and structure, thank you.

Is the class size relative to better academic achievement?

The importance of education is the core value of all human society. Thus, how to improve the performance of students is the heated subjects of endless debate. When class size is mentioned, most studies refer to 20 students as a small class, and a large one is more than 20. In Asia, large class size is common for every level of school. In the elementary school that I studied, the classroom was usually full of approximately sixty students. Under this situation, our teacher did not give us any free time to discussion nor provide feedback for individuals. The whole school year followed by tight schedule; standard and frequent examinations were the effective ways to test student’s performance. As a result, students tried hard to continue high scored, otherwise, harsh punishment would occur. Considered the improvement academic achievement, there is common consensus among the beneficial ways of class-size reduction in many countries. To be sure, there have been numerous studies in the U.S. concentrating on this topic. This essay will discuss the relative benefits of both small and large class sizes.

There are a lot of factors that contribute to students’ performance. Overtime, the performance of students is widely better as a result of class-size reduction; numerous studies also indicated those benefits following by reducing the class size.  According to these conducts, some major key points are worth to be addressed as: more interaction between students and teachers, encouraging group discussion and these students are more likely to become healthier in their later lives.
First of all, unlike large classes, fewer students in class can avoid interruption from peers, and also give teachers more opportunities to focus on individually. Students are encouraged to team up together and have more discussions, which not only gives teachers more room of flexibility, but it also modifies education style by the ways of examining the students closely. Meanwhile, because the students are well educated, they may have sufficient knowledge to maintain healthy lives and avoid unnecessary medical cost.
In addition, some analysts agreed that those students in kindergarten prosper good study habits and it is likely to persist for long time. However, as maintained by existing records showed that since 1969, over 28 years, the United States has experienced relative decrease in student-teacher ratios dramatically, despite a negligible increase in academic performance.