@CU123 That sounds a bit too much like the multiple theories that education people keep on coming up with, which they do their best to implement without actually testing them. The people who are claiming that smaller classes are the ideal college setting are similar to the people who tried to sell MOOCs as the panacea to all the ills of academia.
The main reason that people claim that smaller classes are better is the general feeling that they SHOULD be better. Unfortunately, feeling are not facts, nor are they proof of anything. There are many theories which sounded like they were reasonable and should have worked but which failed in real life settings.
One would think that the claim that smaller college classes are better would have been studied extensively, considering that this is considered a very important part of every ranking system. However, this is not the case. Itâs just one theoretical paper quoting a previous theoretical paper, quoting one of the two papers done 20 years ago on first and second graders.
Even if it is true, is it worth the extra money? Are students taking a class with 60 students and an instructor and a TA worse off than a student taking a course with 20 students with an instructor? Are they better off enough that itâs worth twice the price (TAs are payed about half of an instructorâs salary)? Of course, we donât really have much by way of studies of the effects of class size, much less a detailed study as to the effect, size or the nature of the effect.
Then home schooling and/or a class of one - online would produce the best results. I think it is a bit of elitism again and another ranking war game among schools.
The schools with the big endowments drive these results and perceptions. And small schools will be necessarily excellent in these categories unless 25 percent of the student body all take the same class. And itâs a calling card they reference regularly. And it works for them which Is good.
So you track results and incomes and advanced degrees from top lacs and highly endowed powerhouses.
Itâs not the class size I would posit, itâs the students they start with initially.
And it becomes a self fulfilling proposition. Look at these results. Look at our really small classes. See it works.
Many state schools have a different mission and are awfully successful graduating qualified students - plenty of success stories too.
I think it is probably a level where quality is reduced. But who came up with 19. Is 24 really that different. Or 30?
Common Data Set and other sources list class sizes in brackets 2-9, 10-19, 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-99, 100+.
USNWR uses these brackets (except the smallest and largest are lumped together with the adjacent categories) as the class size portion in its rankings.
So if you are a college that wants to game the rankings, it may make sense to adjust class sizes to 19, 29, 39, 49.
In general, Public Universities donât have the resources to game class sizes. They are far too limited in faculty and facilities to play games with class size. If the room can handle 60, 60 is what they will cap the class at, not 49.
GT is a good example of how choice of major can impact class sizes. At GT, 65% of the undergraduate degrees awarded each year are in engineering, as compared to 17% at UM-Ann Arbor. An engineering curriculum tends to drive larger classes (when you have over 1,000 students all wanting to get into ThermodynamicsâŠ), even with upper division classes.
For example, GT has about 400+ mechanical engineering âjuniorsâ, who all want to take many of the same classes and have to follow the same curriculum thatâs filled with classes that have to be taken in a certain order.
On the other hand, an English majorâs curriculum is filled with electives. That optional class in Poetry and Poetics at GT, doesnât have nearly as much demand as the required class in Fluid Mechanics.
Public universities that focus on STEM (âTechsâ), will tend to have larger class sizes, vs more comprehensive universities. GT is an extreme example of this (based on the % of degrees awarded in engineering), but Iâm sure Virginia Tech, NC State and others donât do great on this class size metric.
Virginia Tech reports 27% of classes under 20 students & 22% of 50 or more students.
NC State reports 36% and 16%.
@Gator88NE: I agree with your statements that âIn general, Public Universities donât have the resourcesâŠThey are far too limited in faculty and facilitiesâŠâ
There is no reason to distinguish between required & optional courses as a university should & could offer more sections of any popular course whether required or optional.
However, which of the following is more desirable for the student?
A. Use instructional resources to offer small classes at all levels, but upper level class offerings are the bare minimum for the major, with each course offered once every two years.
B. Use instructional resources to offer a large selection of upper level classes including electives, with the more commonly desired ones offered every semester or at least every year, but with large classes at the lower levels.
Presumably, different students will have different answers. But the assumption that one answer is always better for all students is inaccurate.
Also, there often is a distinction between required and optional classes in terms of prioritizing instructional resources, since ârequired for the students to graduateâ generally means that it is ârequired for the department to offerâ.
Are students able to ask questions and discuss concepts and challenge each other in class? Or are they simply taking in a lecture?
Will their exams be papers and problem sets that take a long time to grade, or multiple choice because you canât do the former with too many students? (or a team of TAs).
Can you stop by the profâs office hours and speak to the prof? Or is therea long line and a need for an appointment way in advance?
âAgain dive a little deeper and you will find that smaller class size is ALWAYS beneficial to education.â
Definitely not, there are many students who prefer and learn better from the anonymity of a larger class in college, where they can blow it off, not be asked to participate, among other reasons. As Data10 points out, some of the best classes at Stanford, are the larger ones. It all depends on the teacher, in this case the professor. I saw a profile of a Yale professor who teaches a psychology course, doesnât cap it, and had 1200 students, they had to move it to an auditorium, thatâs how much the students loved the class.
âAll this whining to me sounds like people complaining about the Yankees or Red Sox always winning because they spend money on players. Nothing is stopping you from doing it too.â
At the risk of going off-topic, the revenue for small market teams do not allow them to spend, so money is stopping them from spending. The Yankees made $617M in 2017, the Oakland Aâs, $210M, now that doesnât mean the Aâs canât win, but theyâre not going to the payroll the Yankees do.
âAre students able to ask questions and discuss concepts and challenge each other in class? Or are they simply taking in a lecture?â
That doesnât happen in STEM classes, you donât discuss dividing by zero or Newtonâs laws, if you challenge them, good luck passing the class.
Math and harder sciences are either built on pure logic based on a set of assumptions, which are clearly spelled out, or on experimental verification (the results of a physical law have to be observable) repetitively from every angle to the nth degree by scientists all over the world, or a combination of both. To this day, thereâre still physicists testing Einsteinâs theory of general relativity. Any slightest discrepancy will put a theory in doubt. Because of the rigor, the only thing one can challenge is either to disapprove some of the assumptions on theoretical basis, or to have observed discrepancies on experimental basis. For undergraduates and even graduates, the barrier is comprehension and itâs extremely high. One has to comprehend before s/he can challenge a theory. Students could certainly challenge each other in class or lab, or even challenge a professorâs interpretation of certain aspects of a theory.
For softer sciences, thereâs less rigor involved. Thereâs more interpretation or explanation based on limited data. As a a result, thereâre usual multiple âtheoriesâ, or more precisely âconjecturesâ, proposed to explain some observed phenomenon. Those are certainly subject to challenge. But again, one has to comprehend all the âtheoriesâ or conjectures before s/he can challenge.
That would almost certainly have been Peter âEasy Aâ Saloveyâs Psychology and the Law. Started out in an auditorium in Hillhouse and finally settled in Battell Chapel before the end of shopping period; if there had been a bigger space, it would have moved again.
The discussion sections had ~15 students each, with grades based on participation and a couple research papers. It was not the class to take if you wanted an anonymous multiple-choice experience. It was an excellent class, though, as much for the discussions as for the lectures.
My kid was pleasantly surprised by the amount of discussion, rather than lecture, involved in the 17-person Intro Physics class she sat in on at Smith. She did say that the ~60 person Womenâs Studies class had a surprising amount of audience participation, though - the conclusion she drew was that Smith students have opinions and make them known.
in general STEM education is learning theory, doing labs, projects and solving lots of problems, you may challenge methods or suggest different approaches but that typically happens in industry or grad school after you have some experience. Phd students try and come up with new theories, but undergrad is pretty cut and dry. A professor may give a project or exam that has more than one solution, but the problems are still bound, solutions are known. And STEM education can be very stifling to people that want to challenge the status quo, thatâs why a lot of tech entrepreneurs drop out.
My b-school was more the model youâre describing, challenging others, discussion style (vs lecture), problem and solution needed to be determined, much less cut and dry.
This may be more the case for lower level courses than upper level courses. Junior and senior level engineering and CS courses where students design something could be places where students may choose different methods and approaches to solving a problem.
I would like to see papers that say large class sizes donât impact the quality? If you can ask for research on small class sizes are better (which is intuitive), show me research where larger is better?
Here is an example of how large class sizes rob the system. At a certain state flagship, which is ranked in the top 20 in CS, my son a then college sophomore was TAing in a 200 level class. It is a class he just took and did well in the semester before. Students would sit in a lecture of about 200 and my son would grade their work and hold office hours to answer any questions that they had on the homework or lectures. This is a required class for the CS major.
Here is what you get with small classes. My other son is at a certain top private research school He sits in classes with 15 +/- students and they and the professor have a discussion on the required reading from the previous week or work through problems together. When they have issues that they canât hammer out in class, the Professor sits down with them during office hours and they work through it together. Every student in the class in engaged and encouraged to participate.
Now, I have no research that tells me scenario B is better, but I can tell you that if I were picking an environment where Iâd want to learn, it would be the latter. Iâve been in 500 person lectures by world famous leaders in their field and can tell you there was no way Iâd be allowed or Iâd feel comfortable raising my hand in front of 500 peers to ask a question. I know for a fact that those professors have 2 hours a week in office, but they also taught 4 500 student sections of the class. The TA was from France in my smaller âlab and recitation,â but I knew more about chemistry than he knew English. I really struggled in that class. Iâve also had great experiences in small classes and got to know my teachers and still communicate with today. They reach out to me as much as I reach out to them.
This makes STEM students sound like passive empty vessels one just pours knowledge into that they spit back out.
I disagree.
Examples I can think of off the top of my head where interaction with a professor in class could be desirable -
-why are we coding this project this way, what if we did it that way (or set up the tables in the dbase this way and related them differently)
-questions about the theory of evolution or climate change
-thereâs more than one way to solve many math problems - why this way and not that way (goes all the way back to elementary school - differing ways of dividing and fractions and all that certainly continues into college)
âŠetc.
And then there are simply questions. When a prof is going over a new concept - asking for clarification or repetition is often helpful to the learning process.
Do STEM folks really just sit down and shut up and never have prof interaction? Not so back when I was in college, for sure.
This research, though designed to compare liberal arts colleges to universities and regional institutions, nonetheless seems to suggest that students benefit from smaller classes in general:
Pascarella, Wong, Trolian and Blaich. Higher Education. 2013.
I started this thread with a list of elite colleges & universities (11 National Universities & 14 LACs) which offer a high percentage (70% or more) of classes of less than 20 students.
My position is that small classes benefit students whether in a National University (research university) or in an LAC (liberal arts college) setting.
On February 11, 2019, I added a thread titled âWSJ / THE List of Top 100 US Colleges by Spending on Instruction & Student Servicesâ.
My thought is that both threads should enable readers to find schools offering an enhanced undergraduate educational experience. Of course, any university honors program or honors college should be considered whether or not on either list of schools.
A few thoughts. Some of my sons favorite CS classes have been huge. They are highly attended because of the topic they cover and the professor teaching them. These classes do, however, have smaller discussion groups typically led by PhD candidates or masters students that have been hand picked by the prof. Heâs had great experiences in that environment, but it might not be the best for some.
Most intro CS classes are constructed so that the answers to âwhy do we do it this wayâ are clearly discussed in the class because there are many ways to do things and the ârightâ way depends on the given application: are you optimizing for memory or performance? Can you use multiple threads or processors or GPUs? Good classes prepare the student to not only identify the best solution but to be able to prove and quantify âwhyâ it is the best solution.
In more advanced classes, projects and poster sessions are used to challenge the students to come up with their own innovative solutions in applying a technology (example- machine learning) to a problem of their choosing. This is where they have the opportunity to come up with something off the wallâŠas long as they can prove it works.