A raft of classroom practices widely considered to promote learning are more likely to be found in small classes, a study of English-language lessons in the city's secondary schools has found.
Findings of the three-year study by Gary Harfitt, assistant professor in the University of Hong Kong's faculty of education, were unveiled yesterday at a public lecture at the Hong Kong Institute of Education.
The qualitative study compared the teaching and learning processes in small and large English-language classes taught by the same teacher at junior secondary level in six schools over five to nine lessons.
Harfitt examined teachers' perceptions and surveyed the views of the 305 pupils involved as well as making detailed observations of classroom behaviour and interaction of 79 lessons. The large classes had 37 pupils or more and the small ones had 27 or fewer.
The study found that in smaller classes teachers were far more likely to use pupils' names in class, and made greater use of humour, open questions and addressing pupils individually.
Interaction between pupils was also more common in smaller classes, with one case study showing 38 examples of pupils helping each other in class compared to 15 in the larger class.
And there was less than half the number of instances of pupils lying with their heads on desks and not taking part at all in the smaller classes compared to the larger ones.
