Today I read a quantitative study of class-size effects, conducted in Tennessee around 1990. This study (Finn & Achilles, 1990) randomly assigned teachers and students to one of three conditions – small class size, regular class size, or regular class size with aide.

The findings are interesting, but I’d like to point out something unusual about this piece of research: it actually compared different policy options in real school settings to see which was better.

It’s remarkable how rare this type of experimentation is in education. Perhaps it’s the ethical difficulties, which are numerous.

First, we must do no harm to students in conducting research. Second, if it turns out that one option is superior to the other, how do we make it up to the students who received the inferior treatment? Or, at the very least, how do we justify to parents and other stakeholders that the research did no harm?

The Huffington Post uses A/B testing to see which of two headlines gets more clicks. After a few minutes of testing, the superior headline is declared the winner, and is the only one used from that point forward.

How much improvement could we see in education if we were able to regularly employ this type of “which is better?” experimentation?

Photo by Flickr user Sacks08