Teaching Large Classes in Higher Education

How to Maintain Quality with Reduced Resources

Graham Gibbs, Alan Jenkins, Gibbs, Graham, Jenkins, Alan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135350499
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This guide combines theory on teaching methodology with advice on good teaching practice in order to help teachers face the challenge of larger numbers of students in their classrooms. It includes a number of case studies which explore innovative teaching methods.

Chapter 1

An introduction: the context of changes in class size

Graham Gibbs and Alan Jenkins

Summary

Since the early 1960s class sizes in British higher education have rapidly increased and are now approaching what is common in mass education systems elsewhere. However, the methods of delivering courses and the assumptions underpinning these methods have not significantly changed.

Many fear that this increase in student numbers without related increases in numbers of staff will result in a decline in quality. After reviewing the research evidence on class size and quality we argue that without rapidly changing teaching and assessment methods there will be a dramatic decline in the quality of British higher education. Though radical changes in teaching methods do not guarantee holding on to quality, they do offer the possibility of maintaining or slowing down the decline in quality and achieving an effective mass higher education system.

After outlining the case studies of innovations described in subsequent chapters it is argued that this British experience is relevant to all mass education systems that are attempting to improve the quality of undergraduate education.

The focus is on classes in which the possibility of individual relationships between professor and student is precluded, in which not every student who wants to speak in class can be called on, and in which grading essay exams can take up every evening and weekend of the course.

Maryellen Weimer (1987), Teaching Large Classes Well, p.2

We stack ’em deep and teach ’em cheap.

Utah Education Association Tee-Shirt

This book seeks to give practical assistance to those responsible for teaching large classes. It is initially addressed to those teachers and administrators in higher education in the UK who because of government pressures to teach more students at lower unit costs, find themselves teaching larger lectures, seminars, laboratories … than their experience as a student or teacher has prepared them for. We also consider that the suggestions for good practice contained here have relevance for teachers in those countries long accustomed to large classes.

Internationally, large classes are not a new phenomenon in higher education. In France, Holland or Italy first-year classes are commonly between 300 and 1,000 and sometimes very much larger. In North America, and particularly in the USA, large classes are the norm for much undergraduate work. Students in these countries wouldn’t expect to see much of their professors on a personal basis until towards the end of their undergraduate careers, or even until their postgraduate work. Universities and Technical Institutes have developed ways of coping with such large numbers. These methods have their costs, particularly in terms of drop-out and failure, but people have got used to the methods used. It is almost taken for granted that courses operate in these ways. In marked contrast in the UK, classes have traditionally been very much smaller and contact between students and their tutors has been at the heart of the educational process. This has been comparatively expensive but as a result drop-out and failure have been very much lower. It is widely assumed (certainly by British academics) that the academic level students achieve, and the quality of work produced, is higher than in undergraduate courses in North America, and courses are generally shorter than in North America and the rest of Europe.

UK government policy and class size

Until recently UK higher education had certain central characteristics:

• Student entry was very selective, the assumption being that only the few could benefit from higher education.
• There was a strong emphasis on the teacher knowing the individual student so as to bring out the best of them academically.
• Written work, especially the essay, formed a principal way by which students were expected to both learn and be assessed.
• Class sizes were small.

The Robbins Report of 1963 (Report of the Committee on Higher Education, (1963) 105, Appendix 2a) which recommended an expansion of higher education, reported the following average number of students in a class:

	Lecture	Discussion Group	Practical
University	27.6	4.1	8.8
Technical College	14.2	8.4	7.9

The Hale Report similarly showed small class sizes were the norm, eg ‘The median size of a lecture audience is 19 … (and that) few universities favour a seminar group greater than 12 and several put the maximum as low as 10’ (Report of the Committee on University Teaching Methods, (UGC, 1964) 57, 62).

In the 1970s and 1980s, Labour and Conservative administrations sought to expand higher education at lower unit costs. The Thatcherite Conservative governments since 1979 have radically changed the spending mechanisms to force institutions to admit more students without relatedly increasing the number of staff. Thus staff–student ratios (SSRs) have decreased and class sizes have risen. Mergers of institutions (often accompanied by staff redundancies) have been part of this process of rationalisation.

One way these changes can be monitored is through the changes in staff– student ratios. Put simply, this is a ratio of full-time equivalent staff to fulltime equivalent students. Government bodies and the institutions themselves have used staff–student ratios to allocate resources to institutions and particular disciplines. The universities have operated at more favourable staff–student ratios than polytechnics and colleges of higher education on the grounds that their greater commitment to postgraduate students and research necessitates more favourable funding. Similarly, a discipline such as physics, with its more intensive laboratory teaching, has operated at more favourable staff–student ratios than say art history (note that sometimes the term student–staff ratios is used).

In the 1980s expansion of student numbers occurred throughout British higher education, but the rate of expansion was greater in polytechnics and colleges than in universities. The expansion in student numbers was not uniform – governments and institutions tried selectively to expand certain subjects such as business studies and hold back or even cut others. Semi-enforced staff redundancies and limited and selective new appointments made for significant changes in staff–student ratios.

An Association of University Teachers (1990, 13–14) report, significantly entitled ‘Goodwill Under Stress; Morale in UK Universities’, reported that in the period 1970/71 to 1988/89 there was a ‘steep rise in student–staff ratios’ from 8.5:1 to 11.5:1.

Her Majestys Inspectors report that in the polytechnics and colleges of higher education ratios are worse: ‘There are few institutions in which humanities and social science courses are taught with a staff–student ratio of less than 1:15 and many operate at ratios of nearer 1:20 or higher’ (DES., 1991, 6). Such less favourable ratios reflect the lower funding per student received by these subjects and institutions. They also reflect the fact that in the 1980s expansion has been much faster in the polytechnics and college sector than in the university sector.

It is reasonable to assume that such pressures will accelerate. Academics who have experienced the last two decades as a period of rapidly worsening staff–student ratios, are faced with the nigh certainty of that increase significantly accelerating and the main increase immediately occurring in the universities. In 1991, a government paper on planned changes to higher education indicated further changes in funding mechanisms which would further pressure institutions to lower costs per students. In the House of Commons, Kenneth Clarke, the Secretary of State for Education stated:

Our policies are designed to ensure that higher education continues to expand efficiently alongside improvements in quality. When we came into office [ie 1979] only one in eight of the relevant age group went into higher education. Now it is one in five. By the end of this decade, we expect one in three of all young people to benefit from higher education of our traditional high quality. [Our emphasis]

House of Commons, 20 May 1991.

Though the opposition parties attacked aspects of these proposals the basic principle of large scale expansion of higher education at lower unit costs was endorsed. In short, the British higher education system is moving to an American style mass higher education system, where one of the central characteristics will be much larger class sizes. In those circumstances, can quality be maintained?

Does class size matter?

Does class size affect the quality of education? Quality itself is an elusive concept though it is now central to much of the public discussion of British higher education. Here we only want to sketch in some of the issues surrounding this term. Do we have some absolute conception of a relatively fixed quality, eg of what is a first class degree? Or will we accept the idea from some commercial and industrial worlds that quality is tied to function and we then talk about ‘fitness for purpose? In which case, our concern might be more with what society needs of someone with a first class degree or even whether we need many students with a first class degree. Do we mean the ‘value added’ as a result of a degree programme? If so what is ‘value’ – does it mean the grades received at the end of the course or what the student makes of the course (perhaps as an employee or as a citizen) much later? Do we focus on what trained observers tell us of what they observe of the process of education and/or do we listen to what those involved, particularly students and teachers, tell us of their views of the quality of their experience? To what extent are our conceptions of quality rooted in the values and assumptions of particular cultures and a particular time?

If quality is an elusive concept so is hard evidence as to the impact of class size on the quality of education. Though this issue has been extensively researched most of this research has been conducted at primary and secondary school level and has often involved small scale rigorously controlled studies. A meta analysis of many such studies concluded that there was: ‘a substantial relationship between class size and teacher and pupil attitudes … [and that] smaller classes are associated with greater attempts to individualise instruction and better classroom climate’ (Smith and Glass, 1980, 419). However, if one considers the effect of class size on student performance in formal tests a different picture emerges: ‘Over the range of class sizes commonly found in schools (over the range of about 25–50 pupils) and for the kind of learning conducted in school classrooms, class size appears to play only a very minor role in determining eventual pupil performance on tests and examinations’(Andresen, 1991, 50).

Far fewer research studies have investigated the impact of size of class at college level. McKeachie (1986) summarising a number of studies done up until circa 1960 concluded that smaller classes were associated with critical thinking and were more popular with students. Feldman (1984) carried out a comprehensive study of the impact of class size and college students’ evaluation of their teachers. He concluded that as class size increases ratings of the course and the instructor declined slightly, and ratings of interactions and relationships between teachers and students declined dramatically. To be critical most of these college level studies don’t take us very far in understanding the impact of size or what policy conclusions to draw from them.

One study that managed to isolate clearly the impact of class size at college level was that by Lindsay and Paton-Saltzberg (1987). This is a study that is doubly important to this book, for it manages to isolate the impact of size of class. Additionally, the study was on the students on Oxford Polytechnic’s modular course, the setting for most of the case studies in this book. An extensive database concerning courses and students enabled Lindsay and Paton-Saltzberg to examine a variety of hypotheses. They considered the period 1981/2–1984/5, during which: ‘student–staff ratios have increased, money allocated to individual students has been decreased in real terms and there has been a slight shift in student numbers towards technological subjects’ (ibid, 213). Their central hypothesis was that: ‘modules [a module is a course which represents about a twelfth of a full time student’s work in an academic year] with larger numbers of enrolled students will have lower average marks than those with smaller numbers of students’ (ibid, 216). As this was a period where enrolment on many courses was increasing, should their hypothesis be proven it would be a clear indication of the negative impact of increased class size on ‘quality’.

Their results apparently confirmed this hypothesis:

The percentage of A and B+ grades awarded decreases steadily as module enrolment increases. There is a corresponding steady increase in B and C grades. Frequency of F grades appears to be constant and independent of enrolment. The absolute magnitude of these effects is surprising. The probability of a student gaining an A grade is less than half in a module containing 50–60 of what it is on a module enrolling less than 20 students (ibid, 217–8).

Evidently this is but one study; clearly though, it does suggest that if one’s concern for quality centres in part on some students producing high quality work increased class size had negative impacts. Moreover, this was during the early years of deteriorating staff–student ratios; average class sizes at Oxford Polytechnic and elsewhere in the UK have risen significantly since this study (see Chapter Two).

Our job as staff deve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Chapter One. An introduction: the context of changes in class size
• Theoretical Issues
• Case Studies
• Institutional Support for Change
• Improving Teaching and Learning in Large Classes
• Selective annotated bibliography
• Index