with children of this age group, could have an adverse effect on the amount and quality
of teaching and the quality of pupils’ work and concentration in these groups. Some
teachers felt that it was group size rather than class size which more directly affected
their teaching and classroom management. So while debate and research on class size
differences has often been in terms of direct effects on attainments, it is important
educationally to consider the mediating role of within class groupings.
2. Effects on teachers: Class size and teaching
It might be expected that one set of classroom processes affected by class size would be
aspects of teaching. Our concern was with the interactive side of teaching - the moment-
by-moment interactions between children and teachers. In brief, we were informed by
research on teaching or instructional time in promoting students' educational attainments,
research on effective teaching, and research and thought on teaching influenced more by
cognitive psychology and the role of scaffolding in effective teaching/tutoring. However,
there has been little work that draws out the role that classroom environmental factors
like class size might play in affecting classroom teaching. We were particularly
interested in finding out whether large and small classes differed in terms of the
amount of teacher-child contact and individual attention from teachers. We made use
of four forms of data, i.e., teacher estimates of time; systematic observations of selected
small and large classes; teachers’ experiences of the effect of class size on teaching and
learning; and case studies of selected small and large classes, conducted by field
workers.
We found consistent relationships between class size and teaching. There is a wealth of
information from this part of the study and full details can be found in Blatchford,
Moriarty, Edmonds and Martin (2002). Here we concentrate on a few key results.
Looking first at the teacher time estimates, the relationship between total percentage
time in teaching (i.e., time teaching to individuals, groups and the whole class) and class
size for the reception year is shown in Fig. 1. It can be seen that apart from a little upturn
in the case of larger classes (there were few of these) the smaller the class the more
teaching overall, or, conversely, the larger the class the less teaching. The result was
statistically significant in the case of reception and Y1, and in the same direction but not
significant at Y2.
Fig. 1. Relationship between class size and percentage teaching time in morning session
(reception year)