Class Size Influences Academic Performance

In the ever increasing population of the Philippines, the government has always been trying to keep up our education system to accommodate the problem. However, it is not that easy to make facilities, learners' materials and implementing systems because it takes time to make all of them happen. This in turn could result in having low quality education, shifting in classes, sharing of rooms, and most especially overpopulation in class. But the question is, does class size really affects students’ performance?

First and foremost, class size is the number of students in a class taught by a teacher (Glossary Reform Education, 2015). With regards to the definition, it could be said that it is difficult to teach each student in a manner that they could easily understand when there is overpopulation happening. But this idea was contradicted by some researchers because there are cases that this will not be a problem when there is a good teacher. Just that this idea is not applicable to all because there are different characteristics and skills each students possess, the same with teachers.

Some students who are advanced when it comes to knowledge and those who are behind in their expected level of competency is difficult to address as a teacher. Because they could not just ignore their individual capabilities and give something that does not align according to their level. That is why according to Bill Jackson (2018), these students with a wide variety of learning capabilities are more likely to excel and benefit in a small population.

In addition, results from different studies like Glass and Smith (1978) shows that to produce positive academic, social and emotional results, class size needs to be of smaller number. They said that to yield this kind of result, 18 students in a class should be implemented unlike what school administrators normally did. Just reducing 35 to 30 or 30 to 25 students per class will not produce their desired benefit; however, 18 kids per class is also difficult to make or even impossible for most countries, since this kind of project needs a huge fund. But if countries really try to implement this education system then there is no such thing as impossible and in the long run, countries will greatly benefit from this.

So does class size really affects academic performance? Of course it does because student-teacher relationship is an important thing in this world to have the future generation learn the old generations' knowledge and make new ones. Without having the chance to make use of the students' full capability would be a waste that is why teachers’ proximity towards their student that can be greatly seen in a small class size is very beneficial to all.