6 ms·

Why is small class size a good thing? Anecdotally, you get better class material and TA staff in larger lectures. Why aren't Universities able to innovate here

by lumost 4y ago

Why is small class size a good thing? Anecdotally, you get better class material and TA staff in larger lectures. Why aren't Universities able to innovate here?

bbor 4y ago
Many courses rely on discussion!
aquova 4y ago
Fewer students per teacher is widely seen as a positive thing. A greater percentage of the professor's time and attention can be given to any one student. I've definitely experienced this myself, it's easy to feel like just a number when you're in a large lecture hall of hundreds versus a small classroom of a few dozen.
- bachmeier 4y ago
  I already said this elsewhere, but I do want to reply to this comment, because it demonstrates a common mistake that may not be clear from my other comment. If you have a given teacher, in a given classroom, with a given amount of TA help, blah blah, so that all else is equal, and then you reduce the class size, the students will do better. The problem is that all else is far from equal in the data used in these rankings. Instructor quality drops off rapidly as you have more sections. TA help falls. The classroom may no longer be appropriate for the class, etc. The rankings are not able to capture the effect you're talking about.
ghaff 4y ago
For liberal arts? It's probably a pretty interactive format and smaller interactive classes are better than large classes that are more broadcast. (Often. I've also had great lecturers in the humanities.) But mostly don't look at many liberal arts classes (or case study, etc.) through the lens of an engineering lecture.
poulsbohemian 4y ago
>Anecdotally, you get better class material and TA staff in larger lectures. Where is this anecdote coming from? A billion years ago when I studied at a small liberal arts college with small class sizes, professors were keen to share with us exactly why they were teaching from particular texts or why they had selected certain materials to make it clear that while the class wasn't being taught by that famous guy from MIT, it was still his book and materials we were using. I knew all my professors by first name, knew where many of them lived, had access to them anytime it was needed, and that's directly counter to my partner's experience at a large university.
- verst 4y ago
  Exactly this. I went to a liberal arts college and had small class sizes (most around 9-15 in size, with the largest being 30) - I could see my professors 1:1 pretty much anytime I wanted, but there was also a preceptor (TA) for each class who didn't teach, but was available to answer questions related to assignments, projects etc. I went to the house of many of my professors for food or drinks too. Generally also was on a first name basis with professors. The downside is that liberal arts colleges aren't research institutions and they are generally undergraduate only. This means you don't have as many choices for advanced courses. However, the professors at liberal arts colleges really tend to be there for the teaching and tend to enjoy that. One of my math professors was the head of the mathematical association of America and also authored the books on Analysis (the mathematical subject - not a data science thing) we were using.
  - poulsbohemian 4y ago
    >The downside is that liberal arts colleges aren't research institutions and they are generally undergraduate only. What's ironic about this though is how many universities won't accept their own undergrads into their grad programs... IE: they know that their undergrad programs are sub-standard but they don't seem to take action to improve them because the money and the focus is on the grad programs.
    - seoaeu 4y ago
dan-robertson 4y ago
1) they aren’t rewarded for innovating 2) I guess they can actually by having massive classes in the spring and comparing to the fall.
deltree7 4y ago
It's a perfect example of reverse causation. Great Classes Implies Larger Classes (pure supply / demand); Larger Classes doesn't imply Great Classes
algoatecorn 4y ago
It's an interesting question, and that's probably why it ends up in so many econometrics and stats courses. You have the classic causality problem, along with ethical concerns of generating experimental data for such a study. Controlling for as many of the relevant variables as possible, there does seem to be a strong negative correlation between class size and test scores. Beyond that, who knows, but it makes sense that small classes would succeed more often (at least up to a certain point of course)
- bachmeier 4y ago
  But...none of those studies justify a discontinuity at a particular value. And if they control for things like TA help, they cease to provide useful information, because in the real world TA help increases with the class size.
bachmeier 4y ago
There are real issues with using class size as they do. If you have someone that's really good at teaching a particular class, it's better to have them teach one section of 60 students rather than have a second section taught by someone that does a mediocre job. You also have things like TA help for larger classes, and that doesn't factor in at all. There's also the discontinuity thing. 30 is way better than 31, but equally better vs 300 - which obviously makes no sense. Overall, the measures they use for class size in these rankings are garbage. The same is true for selectivity. It doesn't account for education at all, only the difficulty of getting in. But since it doesn't account for the applicant pool, it doesn't account for the difficulty of getting in either. You could use things like SAT scores as a measure of the difficulty of getting in and ditch the acceptance % completely. I work at an R1 that gets hit hard because we admit most applicants because, you know, we exist to educate folks, not to serve as a signalling device.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rglullis 4y ago
My uncle was a math teacher in Brazil - mostly test-prep course schools for university exams, later he opened some of his own private schools. He used to say two things: that he has estimated to have taught at least 100 thousand people in his life (seems just crazy boasting, but feasible when you are working in 5-8 different schools per semester and each class has 100-250 people) and that a teacher is always teaching for the worst student in the class, and that the only reason that top universities are better is because of their selection process. Forget class material, forget infrastructure and fancy facilities. What makes the best universities is the fact that the top students are there. If you can not (dramatically) change your students and make them smarter, you can make your classes smaller and segment by performance. This at least stops your top 20 percentile from being dragged down by your bottom 20.
- acchow 4y ago
  > that a teacher is always teaching for the worst student in the class It's been my experience in college that most teachers just let the bottom quartile of the class fail (and likely switch into another major).
  - rglullis 4y ago
    There is no "switching majors" in Brazil. You make the application for the major that you want, and you are competing against everyone that also applied to that course. If you decide to switch after starting a major, you almost certainly will be forced to drop out and re-apply. But in reality, even that doesn't matter. In the best universities, your worst students will be better than the average students at the second-rate institutions. If the teacher is simply giving the class to the top 75 percentile, the class will be even better still at the top uni.
- cm2012 4y ago
  This is 100% true. It's also why attempts to make things more fair by allowing lower testing kids into specialized schools fail. It just makes the specialized school a normal school.
- alanfranz 4y ago
kmlevitt 4y ago
Small class sizes are better precisely because the class can then become more than a lecture. I am a professor, and if you give me a hall full of students I’ll give a lecture, because that’s all that can really happen under those circumstances. If it’s a small group, I can actually learn everybody’s names, get to know them, personalize the material more and spend big chunks of the class just answering your questions and starting discussions based on them. The class becomes less of a mere information dump and more of a mentorship.
- echelon 4y ago
  In my three student organic chemistry III class, the professor had each of us reading ahead and taking turns teaching the material ourselves. We'd be corrected for mistakes, of course, but it was very much a fire drill. We moved a lot of electrons. That was quite the course.
- balls187 4y ago
  > If it’s a small group, I can actually learn everybody’s names, get to know them, personalize the material more and spend big chunks of the class just answering your questions and starting discussions based on them. I went to a relatively small private engineering school. It made a world of difference in my education knowing the professors, and having them know me, especially given that with small classes the professors offered office hours where I could come and discuss the material that was covered during class, as well as problems I encountered on midterms. I still remember nearly all of my professors, fondly, precisely because of the dynamic small class sizes allowed for.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    Same experience here. I wouldn’t trade small class sizes for anything.
- everdrive 4y ago
  I think it's wrong to think that lectures are always inferior. There have been many cases where a professor trying for a more interactive class has made the experience worse for me. This most often comes in the form of prolonged rhetorical questions. A teacher, fearing he is losing the class' interest might pause to ask "And, what is the benefit of the scientific method?" The point here is clearly to gauge whether the class understands and is following along in the train of thought. Usually, the rhetorical question has multiple interpretations and valid answers. And usually, the students are not so much wrong, as they simply fail to track what answer the teacher is hoping for. For example, the students might answer the rhetorical question above with "It helps us understand the world.", "It allows us to test theories.", etc. In fact, the teacher was looking for something like "It allows for the independent checking and confirmation of the findings of others." In a real world example, this sidebar of questions might have taken minutes, and more often than not, completely breaks my train of thought. Often, the teach has completely paused a valid train of thought to either measure or enhance class participation, and in doing so has made it harder for me to understand the lesson. Sometimes this goes even more poorly, and the teach just wants to witness a "class discussion," which can often entail spending much of the class polling the students for their thoughts. Depending on the subject, this can be a total waste of time. Most of the students in the class are poorly informed, and their thoughts are much less useful than a traditional lecture would have been. I certainly admit that interactive methods of teaching can be particularly effective, but they are not an unalloyed good. They can often be worse than a simple lecture.
Leary 4y ago
One thing is closer interaction with faculty. Crucial if you want to apply for grad school and need letters of recommendation.
kragen 4y ago
If what you need is lectures, you'd download them from MIT OCW or watch them on YouTube or Khan Academy. Or possibly just read the textbook, which may also be free online, or you can download it from Library Genesis (if that's legal in your country), or buy it used for US$35. Also, I can strongly recommend Wikipedia and... visualization videos that aren't exactly lectures, like 3Blue1Brown stuff. You wouldn't pay tens of thousands of dollars in tuition for lectures unless you were the kind of person that universities like Columbia try very hard to not admit. Classes, however, are very valuable. You can ask questions when you don't understand things, you can talk with the other students to build shared understanding, you can get your homework graded and confirm that the things you weren't sure about on it were actually correct, you can take exams and test your skills. And those things are much, much better when there are 16 of you in the class rather than 128 or 512.

by lumost 4y ago

Why is small class size a good thing? Anecdotally, you get better class material and TA staff in larger lectures. Why aren't Universities able to innovate here?

bbor 4y ago

Many courses rely on discussion!

aquova 4y ago

Fewer students per teacher is widely seen as a positive thing. A greater percentage of the professor's time and attention can be given to any one student. I've definitely experienced this myself, it's easy to feel like just a number when you're in a large lecture hall of hundreds versus a small classroom of a few dozen.

bachmeier 4y ago
I already said this elsewhere, but I do want to reply to this comment, because it demonstrates a common mistake that may not be clear from my other comment. If you have a given teacher, in a given classroom, with a given amount of TA help, blah blah, so that all else is equal, and then you reduce the class size, the students will do better. The problem is that all else is far from equal in the data used in these rankings. Instructor quality drops off rapidly as you have more sections. TA help falls. The classroom may no longer be appropriate for the class, etc. The rankings are not able to capture the effect you're talking about.

ghaff 4y ago

For liberal arts? It's probably a pretty interactive format and smaller interactive classes are better than large classes that are more broadcast. (Often. I've also had great lecturers in the humanities.) But mostly don't look at many liberal arts classes (or case study, etc.) through the lens of an engineering lecture.

poulsbohemian 4y ago

>Anecdotally, you get better class material and TA staff in larger lectures. Where is this anecdote coming from? A billion years ago when I studied at a small liberal arts college with small class sizes, professors were keen to share with us exactly why they were teaching from particular texts or why they had selected certain materials to make it clear that while the class wasn't being taught by that famous guy from MIT, it was still his book and materials we were using. I knew all my professors by first name, knew where many of them lived, had access to them anytime it was needed, and that's directly counter to my partner's experience at a large university.

verst 4y ago
Exactly this. I went to a liberal arts college and had small class sizes (most around 9-15 in size, with the largest being 30) - I could see my professors 1:1 pretty much anytime I wanted, but there was also a preceptor (TA) for each class who didn't teach, but was available to answer questions related to assignments, projects etc. I went to the house of many of my professors for food or drinks too. Generally also was on a first name basis with professors. The downside is that liberal arts colleges aren't research institutions and they are generally undergraduate only. This means you don't have as many choices for advanced courses. However, the professors at liberal arts colleges really tend to be there for the teaching and tend to enjoy that. One of my math professors was the head of the mathematical association of America and also authored the books on Analysis (the mathematical subject - not a data science thing) we were using.
- poulsbohemian 4y ago
  >The downside is that liberal arts colleges aren't research institutions and they are generally undergraduate only. What's ironic about this though is how many universities won't accept their own undergrads into their grad programs... IE: they know that their undergrad programs are sub-standard but they don't seem to take action to improve them because the money and the focus is on the grad programs.
  - seoaeu 4y ago

dan-robertson 4y ago

1) they aren’t rewarded for innovating 2) I guess they can actually by having massive classes in the spring and comparing to the fall.

deltree7 4y ago

It's a perfect example of reverse causation. Great Classes Implies Larger Classes (pure supply / demand); Larger Classes doesn't imply Great Classes

algoatecorn 4y ago

It's an interesting question, and that's probably why it ends up in so many econometrics and stats courses. You have the classic causality problem, along with ethical concerns of generating experimental data for such a study. Controlling for as many of the relevant variables as possible, there does seem to be a strong negative correlation between class size and test scores. Beyond that, who knows, but it makes sense that small classes would succeed more often (at least up to a certain point of course)

bachmeier 4y ago
But...none of those studies justify a discontinuity at a particular value. And if they control for things like TA help, they cease to provide useful information, because in the real world TA help increases with the class size.

bachmeier 4y ago

There are real issues with using class size as they do. If you have someone that's really good at teaching a particular class, it's better to have them teach one section of 60 students rather than have a second section taught by someone that does a mediocre job. You also have things like TA help for larger classes, and that doesn't factor in at all. There's also the discontinuity thing. 30 is way better than 31, but equally better vs 300 - which obviously makes no sense. Overall, the measures they use for class size in these rankings are garbage. The same is true for selectivity. It doesn't account for education at all, only the difficulty of getting in. But since it doesn't account for the applicant pool, it doesn't account for the difficulty of getting in either. You could use things like SAT scores as a measure of the difficulty of getting in and ditch the acceptance % completely. I work at an R1 that gets hit hard because we admit most applicants because, you know, we exist to educate folks, not to serve as a signalling device.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

rglullis 4y ago

My uncle was a math teacher in Brazil - mostly test-prep course schools for university exams, later he opened some of his own private schools. He used to say two things: that he has estimated to have taught at least 100 thousand people in his life (seems just crazy boasting, but feasible when you are working in 5-8 different schools per semester and each class has 100-250 people) and that a teacher is always teaching for the worst student in the class, and that the only reason that top universities are better is because of their selection process. Forget class material, forget infrastructure and fancy facilities. What makes the best universities is the fact that the top students are there. If you can not (dramatically) change your students and make them smarter, you can make your classes smaller and segment by performance. This at least stops your top 20 percentile from being dragged down by your bottom 20.

acchow 4y ago
> that a teacher is always teaching for the worst student in the class It's been my experience in college that most teachers just let the bottom quartile of the class fail (and likely switch into another major).
- rglullis 4y ago
  There is no "switching majors" in Brazil. You make the application for the major that you want, and you are competing against everyone that also applied to that course. If you decide to switch after starting a major, you almost certainly will be forced to drop out and re-apply. But in reality, even that doesn't matter. In the best universities, your worst students will be better than the average students at the second-rate institutions. If the teacher is simply giving the class to the top 75 percentile, the class will be even better still at the top uni.
cm2012 4y ago
This is 100% true. It's also why attempts to make things more fair by allowing lower testing kids into specialized schools fail. It just makes the specialized school a normal school.
alanfranz 4y ago

kmlevitt 4y ago

Small class sizes are better precisely because the class can then become more than a lecture. I am a professor, and if you give me a hall full of students I’ll give a lecture, because that’s all that can really happen under those circumstances. If it’s a small group, I can actually learn everybody’s names, get to know them, personalize the material more and spend big chunks of the class just answering your questions and starting discussions based on them. The class becomes less of a mere information dump and more of a mentorship.

echelon 4y ago
In my three student organic chemistry III class, the professor had each of us reading ahead and taking turns teaching the material ourselves. We'd be corrected for mistakes, of course, but it was very much a fire drill. We moved a lot of electrons. That was quite the course.
balls187 4y ago
> If it’s a small group, I can actually learn everybody’s names, get to know them, personalize the material more and spend big chunks of the class just answering your questions and starting discussions based on them. I went to a relatively small private engineering school. It made a world of difference in my education knowing the professors, and having them know me, especially given that with small classes the professors offered office hours where I could come and discuss the material that was covered during class, as well as problems I encountered on midterms. I still remember nearly all of my professors, fondly, precisely because of the dynamic small class sizes allowed for.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  Same experience here. I wouldn’t trade small class sizes for anything.
everdrive 4y ago
I think it's wrong to think that lectures are always inferior. There have been many cases where a professor trying for a more interactive class has made the experience worse for me. This most often comes in the form of prolonged rhetorical questions. A teacher, fearing he is losing the class' interest might pause to ask "And, what is the benefit of the scientific method?" The point here is clearly to gauge whether the class understands and is following along in the train of thought. Usually, the rhetorical question has multiple interpretations and valid answers. And usually, the students are not so much wrong, as they simply fail to track what answer the teacher is hoping for. For example, the students might answer the rhetorical question above with "It helps us understand the world.", "It allows us to test theories.", etc. In fact, the teacher was looking for something like "It allows for the independent checking and confirmation of the findings of others." In a real world example, this sidebar of questions might have taken minutes, and more often than not, completely breaks my train of thought. Often, the teach has completely paused a valid train of thought to either measure or enhance class participation, and in doing so has made it harder for me to understand the lesson. Sometimes this goes even more poorly, and the teach just wants to witness a "class discussion," which can often entail spending much of the class polling the students for their thoughts. Depending on the subject, this can be a total waste of time. Most of the students in the class are poorly informed, and their thoughts are much less useful than a traditional lecture would have been. I certainly admit that interactive methods of teaching can be particularly effective, but they are not an unalloyed good. They can often be worse than a simple lecture.

Leary 4y ago

One thing is closer interaction with faculty. Crucial if you want to apply for grad school and need letters of recommendation.

kragen 4y ago

If what you need is lectures, you'd download them from MIT OCW or watch them on YouTube or Khan Academy. Or possibly just read the textbook, which may also be free online, or you can download it from Library Genesis (if that's legal in your country), or buy it used for US$35. Also, I can strongly recommend Wikipedia and... visualization videos that aren't exactly lectures, like 3Blue1Brown stuff. You wouldn't pay tens of thousands of dollars in tuition for lectures unless you were the kind of person that universities like Columbia try very hard to not admit. Classes, however, are very valuable. You can ask questions when you don't understand things, you can talk with the other students to build shared understanding, you can get your homework graded and confirm that the things you weren't sure about on it were actually correct, you can take exams and test your skills. And those things are much, much better when there are 16 of you in the class rather than 128 or 512.