In a Times Educational Supplement article on England's excellent performance in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), I read the following boneheaded statement:
Timss appears to provide little evidence to support the view that cutting class sizes will raise test performance. The country with the best results in primary science, Singapore, also has the largest classes: 95% of pupils are in classes of more than 32.
I'm not sure, but is this the equivalent of saying that since you don't need to peel pears, you don't need to peel oranges? There are likely to be huge cultural differences in Singapore that eliminate many of the problems faced in western nations when we have large class sizes. The key variable is disobedience in the classroom: you can clearly get away with large class sizes absent significant disobedience, but when that variable is factored in the maximum acceptable number of students in the class must surely need to go down. So the Singapore number has little to say about our own questions about class size, given the inevitability of widespread disobedience in our classrooms.
