Recently, the debate about class size resurfaced in academic circles as a contentious topic of discussion.
Is there a relationship between the number of students per class and an individual student's performance within that class? You bet your Bobcat Cash! After all, there are countless data and research studies highlighting the benefits of smaller classes. But, like everything else, class size is relative.
First, let's look at Jon's education commandment #1: cramming 100 to 400 students into a gymnasium-like classroom is not a proper college education; it is cattle herding.
At Ohio University, some defend this type of pedagogical overload because it supposedly serves as the best way to marshal resources while operating under the constraints of a stingy budget. Under the present circumstances, campus administrators are asking faculty members to pink slip as many students as possible into their respective classes. While this movement might seem helpful at first broach, it ignores a greater issue: students don't pay rocketing tuition fees and drop hundreds of dollars for books each quarter to be known as a social security number and placed in relatively less effective learning environments.
With a large class, an instructor takes on the challenge of managing the gross number of students, necessarily robbing time better used to meet the educational objectives, which should be the focus of the class. Consequently, there is less flexibility in curriculum and teaching style. Decisions about projects and exams are driven by the quest for methods that allow instructors to cope with the magnitude of paperwork showered on them as one assignment is returned 400-fold.
Conversely, by reducing classes to 40 or fewer, the university would take substantial strides toward implementing one idea that Provost Stephen Kopp endorsed shortly after his moving van backed up to Cutler Hall - incorporating the smaller classes into what he calls active learning. The provost (and senior administrators before him) champions active learning as a critical, and often missing, component of the undergraduate experience. Paradoxically, the large, beautiful new $14 million academic building that is nearing completion on Richland Avenue is dominated by large lecture halls.
In order to exploit the perks of an active learning environment, students must be in smaller group settings, which, administrators say, aids students' motivation and promotes greater involvement with the subject matter, all the while fostering higher levels of cognitive skill. Plain and simple: social-psychology states that students work best in smaller group environments, not packed into rooms with 400 of their closest friends.
Then again, students aren't the only ones to profit from a reduction in class size. Instructors gain greater feedback from the students along with a higher proportion of sustained interactions in smaller classes
wrote researcher Timothy Mason in a study called Class size and educational outcomes. The reduced numbers enable a more tailored learning style; if a student is struggling, an instructor will notice more quickly.
So what's my ultimate point? OU outlines the focus of Kopp's Organizing for Learning initiative as establishing areas conducive to informal interaction among students and between students and staff are seen as needful to encourage learning. Current classrooms are seen to be teaching-oriented; to shift to a learning focus better 'classrooms' are needed.
To be consistent with this proposal, university administrators must lift from faculty and students the burden of large classes so that the focus can shift to student involvement, interaction and critical thinking. This much needed move from mass to moderate sized classes will allow instructors to act as educators, and not as shepherds.
Send him an e-mail at jonathan.peters@ohiou.edu.
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