school size

Does school size affect student achievement?

Though much has been written about the relationship between class size and student achievement, there is less active interest in the interplay between overall school building size and student success. Historical studies focusing on the success of college and university freshmen seemed contradictory. In one 1969 study by W.H. Clements, students coming from small high school graduating class sizes (fewer than 25) appeared to fare better academically than those from larger classes (more than 100). A more recent analysis by R.G. Downey (1978) concluded that the differences in achievement among class sizes were not statistically relevant.

A 2003 study from Claremont Graduate University’s R.M. Eddy focused on California college students’ achievement in relation to the overall size of the high schools from which they graduated. While this study drew some conclusions that smaller schools did indeed produce graduates with more successful college achievement, the study emphasized that variables including the students’ feelings of connectedness, personal accountability, student-teacher communication, peer-to-peer collaboration and parental involvement had much greater long-term effects on student achievement.

In a study done in 1989 by E.D. Edington and H. Martellaro, the performance of New Mexico middle school students was examined. This study showed little or no correlation between school size and student success, but placed high degrees of importance on a variety of socio-economic factors.

More recent work shows a correlation between the culture established and maintained in smaller secondary schools or in large schools that create “small schools” within the larger one. In 2002, J.B. Johnson and C.B. Howley looked at the effect of poverty and student achievement in large and small schools. Their work, studying students in rural and urban Arkansas, found that impoverished students in larger secondary schools were less likely to be high achieving than impoverished students from small schools, where financial status seemed to be less important.

One notion apparent in much of this work does strike a chord. Students in large high schools, as a percentage of the overall student body, are less involved in cocurricular or extracurricular activities than students in smaller schools. Related to the “connectedness” factor cited above and in other studies, it is apparent that administrators and teachers in larger schools must place much more emphasis on efforts to keep all students engaged in some type of school-endorsed, non-classroom activity. Students who do so, regardless of school size, fare better academically than those who do not.

For more information on this topic, visit www.ERIC.ed.gov.

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