In teaching math, few benefits in small classes

ByReutersAugust 10, 1999

CHICAGO
— Even as the education establishment crusades for smaller class sizes in America's public schools, evidence is surfacing that students in such classes score only slightly better in math than students in larger classes.

Interestingly, for students in 10 nations abroad, small class size has the opposite or no effect on math scores, according to research released Sunday.

The findings, by Suet-ling Pong, an associate professor of education and sociology at Pennsylvania State University, come even as President Clinton is pushing a program to cut class size by hiring 100,000 more teachers for public schools in the US, and as California has spent billions of dollars to reduce class sizes in the first three elementary-school grades.

"The perception in the US isboth the HCO and TRANS groups had developed an EFA deficiency before they were sacrificed. The EFA deficiency produced upon feeding the HCO diet had no apparent effect on the synthesis and hydrolysis of cholesteryl esters in rat testes. The TRANS diet influenced the development of the testes as judged by their size, and cholesterol esterifying and cholesteryl ester hydrolyzing activities were suppressed in the testes of the animals of this group. A major difference in the effects of the HCO and TRANS diets on the lipids of the tests was the relatively minor amount of eicosatrienoic acid (20:3) and the elevated level of docosapentaenoic acid (22:5) in the cholesteryl esters of the testicular lipids of the TRANS group.