Tennessee's Student Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) project

Overview The Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) was a four-year longitudinal class-size study funded by the Tennessee General Assembly and conducted by the State Department of Education. Over 7,000 students in 79 schools were randomly assigned into one of three interventions: small class (13 to 17 students per teacher), regular class (22 to 25 students per teacher), and regular-with-aide class (22 to 25 students with a full-time teacher's aide). Classroom teachers were also randomly assigned to the classes they would teach. The interventions were initiated as the students entered school in kindergarten and continued through third grade. In 1996, Health and Education Research Operative Services (HEROS), Incorporated was funded to conduct a tenth grade follow-up study of Project STAR. To be on-schedule during the 1995-1996 school year, Project STAR students would be high school sophomores (10th Grade). The researchers reviewed the Tennessee Competency Examination (TCE) data for the 1993-94, 1994-95, and 1995-96 school years. Schools begin administering the TCE to students in eighth grade and they are required to pas s the TCE prior to graduating from high school. Data were collected for each administration of the TCE to a Project STAR student. 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. Additional data were collected from Nashville-Davidson County Schools for the school dropout pilot study. Researchers had access to three years of data from this system (1993-94, 1994-95, and 1995-96 school years). When STAR students were not found with their appropriate grade level cohort (grade ten, 1995-96), investigators searched all grades from these years and were able to identify students who were still in the system, but who were appearing at a lower grade level. This rev iew showed that more regular and regular/aide class students than small-class students had been retained in grade levels prior to tenth grade. In the 1993-1994 school year, a significantly higher percentage (12 to 19%) of students in regular and regular/aide classes were in lower grades than their counterparts in small classes (about 8%). This difference grew with time. By