3 ms·
Research has been done on this. There is a sweet spot range. Too few or too many decreases results. This is looking at grade school classes. Not sure how this p
by mfer 7y ago
Research has been done on this. There is a sweet spot range. Too few or too many decreases results. This is looking at grade school classes. Not sure how this plays out at the university level where the expectations are different and teachers have office hours to discuss questions outside of class
- mr_gibbins 7y agoI can answer that one for you having recently taught a semester of postgraduate database systems to a cohort of just 6 students. It was a blast. I followed a pre-planned course of lectures, but due to the low class sizes it didn't work out that way a lot of the time. An example, following a question about relations, I ended up doing a chalk n' talk on set theory and explained how set theory could be represented as first-order logic. Filled the wall full of Greek letters and drilled down into the topic. Then started talking about axioms. The students joined in - you could see them taking an interest, as the conversation had turned. In the event we spent 90 minutes (it was a 60 minute session) working through axiomatic set theory on the board. I had to look things up as we went. It was great, the students learned a ton (and some of the content turned up in their assignments, too) - I learned a fair bit, as Feynman will attest, there's nothing like teaching a topic to make you understand it better yourself - and it was productive and interesting. I'm not sure I could repeat the same trick with a cohort of 20 or 30.