The Arithmetic of Engagement: The Problem With Small Classes

• In Event: 556 - Regular Session. Innovation and Change in Higher Education

Abstract

Small classes have been repeatedly shown to provide educational benefits to college students across institutional settings, and the proportion of small classes an institution offers is widely used as a measure of an institution's educational quality. This paper problematizes the use of this measure through a case-study analysis of the inflation of the number of small classes at a small liberal-arts college. Increasing the proportion of small classes in an institution, without also increasing teaching course load, leads students to experience larger classes, due simply to the fact that small classes are small--few students can enroll in them, and are thus required to enroll elsewhere. The paper then argues that while small classes can provide great educational benefits to students who manage to get into them, many institutions would do well to avoid inflating the number of small classes. Education researchers interested in the benefits of small classes should, similarly, consider the educational benefit (or detriment) to students who are excluded from small classes due to size limits placed on such classes. Put simply, small classes are small because not many students are in them. The unit of analysis for educational outcomes in both college administration, and research on colleges, should be students themselves, including those who are offloaded into other classes due to class size limits.

Authors

• Christopher George Takacs, University of Chicago

• Daniel F. Chambliss, Hamilton College