|
|
|
The views expressed on this page are
solely
those of the author and do not
necessarily represent the views of County
News Online
|
|
Dreamstime
EdSurge
K-12 Class Sizes Have Ballooned With Online Learning. It’s Not a Good Thing.
By Stephen Noonoo
Oct 21, 2020
When leaders at Megan Claffey’s Colorado district decided to give
parents a choice between online and hybrid learning, they didn’t expect
many to choose the all-online option. But instead of the 100 or so
families they had planned for, more than 2,800 opted to keep their kids
home full time. Without an influx of new teachers, Claffey and her
colleagues were left scrambling to adjust.
“Part of it is that they just were not prepared, I guess, for that many
people to say that they wanted to be online,” says Claffey, who teaches
third grade. “So the day before teachers were called back, I got a call
from my principal asking me to go online.”
In addition to the challenge of quickly adapting her teaching, Claffey
also encountered an unexpected frustration: a class size of 60,
featuring students from every elementary school in the district, which
was later reduced to around 50 as new teachers were added. Despite
sorting students into groups based on reading ability and spending
extra hours combing through various data dashboards, she is still
adjusting to the demands of teaching so many students at once.
“As a teacher, I don't feel like I'm doing the best work I can,”
Claffey says. “I don't feel like I can give them what I could give them
in the classroom as far as individual attention and differentiated
lessons. I’m doing my best, but sometimes kids just need that
one-on-one time.”
Claffey’s is hardly an isolated case. In New York City, schools can now
double the in-person limit of 34 students per class when it’s all
online. From Rhode Island to Arizona, families and teachers complain of
online class sizes that routinely creep past 50 students. And
elsewhere, parents are taking note of swelling online classes in
districts where socially-distant, in-person classes hold as few as 13
students.
Yet much like the debate over the appropriate length of a remote school
day, Claffey and others are asking a single, pressing question of
administrators, fellow educators and even social media communities:
Where are these numbers coming from?
“Where are they getting the research to say, ‘Here's 50 kids for one
teacher’?” Claffey says. “What does the research say on that?” So far,
she says, she hasn’t received a good answer.
No One-Size-Fits-All
When it comes to research, part of Claffey’s dilemma may stem from the
fact that not much has been conducted on the topic at the K-12 level
(most has focused on online class sizes in higher education.) And the
limited research that is out there is hardly prescriptive.
According to one 2018 paper, led by Chin-Hsi Lin at the University of
Hong Kong, “there is no one-size-fíts-all solution to the ideal class
size question.” Instead, Lin and his co-authors contend that various
environmental factors, such as teacher experience and the subject being
taught, should help determine class size. When classes require a dense
amount of collaboration between students, for example, smaller class
sizes of around 15 students are preferable. In a separate study, Lin
used models to determine that students’ final grades began to suffer
once class sizes reached 45 students—a number he uses as an upper limit.
“The context was different from what teachers are experiencing right
now,” explains Lin in an interview. “Teachers are using synchronous
learning [now], but I think findings can be applied to the current
situation.” Here, he points to a finding that extreme class sizes—in
either direction—can be detrimental to student learning. If classes are
too small, say 5-10 students, classroom discussion and group work may
be more difficult. Yet in larger classes, teachers will find it
difficult to give attention to every student, especially if they teach
upper grades and have multiple classes and hundreds of students overall.
Really, Lin says, a better rule of thumb for schools may be to keep
online class sizes level with the traditional sizes teachers are used
to. “If 20 is a normal class size in face-to-face settings, I would say
keep that the same.”
Over the past two decades, researchers have paid the most attention to
online charter schools and state virtual academies regarding online
class sizes. A 2019 paper from the National Education Policy Center
found that most virtual academies have class sizes much larger than
those found in traditional public schools—nearly three times as many or
about 44 students to a teacher.
While other factors are surely at play, the same paper noted the “body
of evidence is overwhelming in its critical conclusion that virtual
schools are performing terribly with no signs of improvement.” As part
of its recommendations, the authors suggested reducing student-teacher
ratios, and suggested that district-specific virtual programs with
smaller class sizes are likely to see better outcomes.
Falling Between the Cracks
By and large, administrators in New York and elsewhere report that
larger online class sizes are a necessity given the need to allocate
enough teachers to keep in-person classes small and the difficulties in
finding substitutes during the pandemic. Other times, supersized
classes may be the result of administrative or logistical challenges.
“We’re putting out fires and not planning for success,” says Jessica
Camacho, whose English language learning classes in Cedar Rapids, Iowa,
have shot up from her usual 30 to somewhere between 43 and 46 students.
“I think a lot of that comes from the need to plan at the district
level without input from the people that have their boots on the
ground, so they’re missing super important parts of teaching kids.”
At Camacho’s district, where families were given a choice of virtual
and hybrid options, teachers who had health concerns were given
priority for online teaching. “Many times those are the ones that are
teaching online, but that doesn’t mean that you have the most effective
online teachers.”
Between the large class sizes, families on the margins of poverty, and
spotty internet access among the students she teaches, “there
definitely could be kids that are falling between the cracks,” she adds.
Another point in favor of keeping class sizes as low as possible:
student perception. Lin did not use this metric in his research, but
it’s an important factor overall. “Who wants to be in a large class
size? Nobody,” says Lin. “Every student wants their teacher’s full
attention. It may not affect their online performance for
high-performing students but I wouldn’t recommend it.”
|
|
|
|
