Does class size matter?

Last year students in one of my classes complained about the class size. As a teacher I want the best outcomes and wanted to see whether class size is a factor. Recently I analysed results from 4 years worth of data. Each year we have had approximately 4 classes- with 4 tasks per year. I created a mean outcome for the 4 tasks. (note the result per task was similar).

I inserted the data into Excel and then used R programming to create a regression. The end result was this:

Residuals:

Min 1Q Median 3Q Max

-0.44148 -0.06739 0.02072 0.08497 0.23279

Coefficients:

Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)

(Intercept) 0.788780 0.044691 17.65 <2e-16 ***

Class_Size -0.003223 0.002708 -1.19 0.235

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Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 0.1228 on 250 degrees of freedom

Multiple R-squared: 0.005635, Adjusted R-squared: 0.001658

F-statistic: 1.417 on 1 and 250 DF, p-value: 0.2351

The coefficients indicate that for every student added there is a 0.003 decrease in marks. This is insignificant.

To my surprise the data is not significant and therefore we cannot prove that class size makes a difference. R squared data is low- and it indicates that the class size only accounts for 0.06% of the difference in results.

The. P value more than .05 which means our original thought (Hypothesis- Class size has an impact on task achievements) is incorrect- in this context.

Note that this is for Business Studies at year 12 level and this is for one school. We cannot generalise and make an assumption for all levels etc. There are many factors at play. It would be interesting to see if students classes got to a size above 30 whether that would make a difference.

Moving forward it would be great to see some up to date research on:

1. Class sizes versus outcomes,

2. Teacher (qualifications, qualification institutions, age, gender, nationality) versus outcomes,

3. Teacher experience versus outcomes,

4. Influence of other subjects such as Mathematics, Science and English to the result outcomes,

5. Teaching methods,

6. Time of the day (Friday last periods?) and

7. Duration of lessons....

Interested to hear similar educators views.