Comparative Studies On Teachers And Students Engagement In Different Class Size Of Low-grade Primary Schools In County Level

With the completion of Nine-year’s Compulsory Education in China, more andmore people pay their attention on educational quality increasingly. Because of theimpletation of rural school closure and consolidation pilicy since2001, the issue ofclass size has been discussed by Chinese scholars. In fact, as early as the1970s,western countries have begun a series of projects for reducing the class size. At thattime, the main concern is the relationship between class size and student achievement.And there are two different opions, one believes that small class size is good forimproving students’ academic achievement, the other one believes that there is noobvious relationship between class sizes and the improvement of students’ academicachievement. But there have a big difference context between China and abroad.Many rural areas in China produce a large number of small-scale classes because ofthe two passive reasons: that is the reduction of student population and the closure andconsolidation of rural schools. Many high-quality schools in urban areas recruit moreand more students which led to a large number of big-scale classes and over big-scaleclasses. Under the promotion of the passive reason and the initiative reason, the studyof class size in China shows itself an unique characteristics. And when we evaluate aclass size whether suitable for China’s conditions or not, we can’t use the onlyindicator--students’ academic achievement, we should research and analyse someother fectors such as the behavior of teachers and students which directly affected bythe class size, that is the different of teachers’ and students’ engagement, and then wecan analyse the mechanism that works in different class sizes.Under the guidance of such ideas, this study makes the class size in rural schoolsinto three groups:36people or less,36-46among and46or more, in order toaccordance with the theoretical and practical research results. We use CorrelationAnalysis and Analysis of Variance to study the same and different points among thethree class size’s of teachers’ and students’ academic engagement, social engagementand emotional engagement. And then use the theory of educational equity and thegroup dynamics to explain the mechanism that works of class size and to explore themost suitable class size for teachers to teach and students to learn.In my study framework, I divided teachers’ and students’ academic engagement,social engagement and emotional engagement into2-3observations dimension, whichcarried out a comparative analysis. Because thers are many other influencing factorson student’s and teacher’s behaviors except class size, so the fectors of studentbackground, teachers’ teaching style and class cluture are controled strictly. Firstly, Ianalysed the three background factors, and then selected some indicators without the influence of the three background factors to do the follow-up analysis, and to analyeand think about the results. The main intention of this paper is expecting to attractmore people paying attention on this issue.