Question

In 1985, then-governor Lamar Alexander and the Tennessee legislature implemented the Project STAR experiment. a. What was the goal of this experiment? b. Describe the experimental design. c. Describe the findings. d. Discuss the threats to the experiment and how Krueger (1999) proposed to address each threat.

Answer 1

A. Project STAR(Student Teacher Acheivment Ratio) experiment was part of an educational reform to see whether reduced size of a class would assist the teachers in improving student acheivments.The objective of Class size reduction reform was to  increase the number of individualized student-teacher interactions intended to improve student learning.

B. Project STAR was a three-phase project. In first phase over 7000 students in 79 schools were randomly assigned to one of the three groups -small class (13 to 17 students per teacher), regular class (22 to 25 students per teacher), and a paid aide and class (22 to 25 students with a full-time teacher's aide).

The second phase sought to determine whether the benefits of CSR persisted into upper grades when all students entered standard size classes. The studen's acheivments were measured using Standford Acheivment Test(SAT) and Basic Skills First(BSF) test. The primary STAR analyses used the total math and reading score s from the two tests.

In the third phase (Project Challenge) the 16 economically poorest school districts(based on per capita income) were adequately funded to provide smaller class sizes for their K-3 students.

C.  The STAR students took the SAT and BSF tests. Kindergarden results showed that the small-class students outscored their peers from the larger classes, and the differences in scores were statistically significant. During the following years of the experiment, in grades 1 through 3,test results continued to show statistically significant differences between small and regular-size classes.The outcomes on both the SAT and BSF always favored the small classes.A significantly larger percent of small-class students (52.9%) versus students who had attended regular (49.1%) and regular/aide (48.0%) classes passed the TCE Language requirement at grade 8. The same was true for the mathematics requirement, where 36.4% of the small-class students passed versus 32.3% of the regular class and 30.3% of the regular/aide class students.

In grades 4,6,and 8— after all pupils had returned to regular-size classes—STAR students who entered small classes in kinderg a rten had better long-term outcomes than those who began in first gra d e .Also , there were statistically significant differences in achievement between students who attended small classes for one,two,three,or four years.Long-term effects were significant on some tests in some grades (4,6,and/or 8) for pupils who attended small classes for three years, and on all tests in all grades for pupils who attended small classes for four years.

STAR students who attended small classes in K-3 we re more like ly, as high s chool students, to be enrolled in advanced classes and honors courses (e.g., foreign language s , geometry, and honors English) than STAR students from the larger classes.

D. Dr. Eric Hanushek claimed  that the bulk of scientific research on small-class sizes shows no or statistically insignificant effects and that there must be another explanation, like flawed random assignment, that produced the result rather than small class size. However in 1999 Dr. Alan Krueger reanalyzed the data on which Hanushek based this claim and found that Hanushek placed a disproportionate share of weight on a small number of studies that frequently used small samples and estimated misspecified models. When this was corrected, the literature actually revealed a strong correlation between reduced class size and academic performance and suggested that the internal rate of return from reducing class size from 22 to 15 students is around 6 percent.