| School administrators and other individuals who make decisions that affect the education of young children are often looking for ways to provide the best opportunities for academic achievement. Primary students who attend school in classes with fewer children have been shown to have increased achievement (Word, Johnston, Bain, Fulton, Boyd-Zaharias, Lintz, Achilles, Folger, J., & Breda, 1990). More information is needed to discover what happens when fewer children are in primary classrooms (Finn, 1998).; This study was designed to discover the nature of interactions between effective teachers in regular-size classes with 25 or more students and small-size classes with less than 18 students. Eleven primary classrooms were observed and the interactions between the teacher and students were studied. Verbal and nonverbal interactions were recorded and categorized using emergent and a priori categories to discover similarities and inconsistencies when comparing regular and small-size classes.; French and Galloway's (1970) a priori categories of institutional, task, personal, and mixed were used to determine if the data gathered were consistent with interactions previously recorded (Evertson & Folger, 1989). As in previous studies, teachers in the small-size classes spent more time on task-related interactions than the teachers in regular-size classes. Those teachers in regular-size classes spent more time on institutional interactions (Achilles, Kiser-Kling, Owen, & Aust, 1994).; The emergent categories of positive attention and examples, negative attention, acknowledgement, directives, and procedural were documented. When all of the interactions were compared, the teachers in small classes were observed during more separate directive interaction events than the teachers in regular-size classes. The small-size class teachers were devoting more time to interactions that were task-related and less time to negative behaviors than the regular-size classroom teachers. The regular-size class teachers spent more of their time on interactions that were not related to the learning objectives. |
