Back in the ’70s, Diana Huey attended a large state university where some of her classes numbered 300 students.
“I was never able to complete any class I took in a large lecture hall,” Huey said. Whenever she felt she was in danger of failing, she withdrew from the class. Eventually, she dropped out of school.
When she decided to return to college, she looked for a smaller school. In January, she enrolled as a major in human services and psychology at National-Louis University’s downtown campus. Smaller classes, she said, have helped her maintain an A average for her 15-hour class load. “You feel more comfortable asking questions if you don’t understand something,” she said.
Ofra Peled, who teaches biology and microbiology at the downtown and Evanston campuses, said some of her classes have as many as 20 students, and a specialized class in medical microbiology has drawn as few as three. In small classes, she gets to know her students and can judge who needs extra help by seeing their faces.
“I can see if they look confused or if they understand,” Peled said, adding that “they get a chance to participate more.”
If a student needs extra help, she said, a peer-tutoring program offers supplemental instruction.
In some sessions, she divides students into groups of three or four as part of the “Writing Across the Curriculum” program, which is designed to sharpen writing skills in classes other than composition. “They write about a concept, discuss it with each other and share it in class,” she said.
For Huey, who feared that biology would be difficult, Peled’s class turned out to be an enjoyable experience. “She allows us the freedom to find out what we know,” Huey said.
Such methods of interactive teaching are recommended in a five-year study by Harvard University that recorded the results of 570 undergraduate interviews. In the assessment, released in two parts in 1990 and 1991, students were asked what specific activities enriched their college experience.
One of the study’s main findings is that those who chose at least one small course each semester experienced higher overall academic satisfaction than those who filled their schedules with required or introductory courses, which tend to have high enrollments.
In addition, the study found, engaging with others is crucial to academic success, whether it be a professor, teaching assistant, other students sharing the same interests or study-group partners.
“All the specific findings point to, and illustrate, one main idea,” wrote Richard J. Light, a professor of education at Harvard and director of the project, in the assessment. “It is that students who get the most out of college, who grow the most academically, and who are happiest, organize their time to include interpersonal activities with faculty members, or with fellow students, built around substantive, academic work.”
The interviews showed that isolation is the biggest threat to college success, Light wrote. “They also find that students who begin having trouble are likely to drift into even deeper trouble if they simply keep to themselves, working alone in their rooms hour after hour.”
Along this line, the report encouraged students-especially those majoring in the sciences-to work in small groups outside the classroom. Since the report was released, some professors meet with their students outside of class once or twice, to get a small study group going, Light said.
In addition, teachers are adopting what the report called “one-minute papers,” which give them immediate feedback as to whether their presentations are clear or not, Light said. The teacher stops the class one minute before its end and asks the students to write answers to two questions: What is the big idea or principle that you learned in class today? What is an unclear point or unanswered question you have as you leave today?”
Because the report found that large classes are impersonal, the paper is a way for students to give some feedback and feel less isolated. About 300 to 350 Harvard teachers now do this routinely, Light noted.
He also has shared his findings with the freshmen advisers, encouraging them to advise students to take at least one small class each semester.
Light has no specifics about other schools’ responses to the report. He did note, however, that when he speaks at other schools, teachers tell him they are trying some of the report’s suggestions.
Teacher and peer interaction played a large role in the college life of Mark Tameling, who received a bachelor’s degree in business administration in the spring from Governors State University, a two-year, upper-division college in University Park. This summer he is pursuing a master’s degree in business administration there.
In his first semester, Tameling was one of eight students placed in an honors seminar. The class studied and analyzed the business strategies of select companies, sharing information and discussing findings. The class was taught by Mary Howes, the division chair for Management, Marketing, Administrative Sciences and Public Administration.
From working together closely in class, group members became good friends, going out for pizza after class and talking to each other about school. “We bonded,” Tameling said.
The cohesion was a particularly valuable experience in a commuter school, he noted, where people hold jobs and have outside responsibilities that sometimes keep them from spending much time together outside of class.
“In every one of my (undergraduate) classes, I had someone from my honors group,” Tameling said. Having a friend in a new class can make the experience more comfortable and less intimidating, he added.
In her larger business-policy classes, Howes uses small groups to explore specific problems and strategies. “If you have a 90-minute discussion of a case and there are 30 people in a class, they each speak for 3 minutes,” Howes said. “In small groups, each person can have a significant discussion.” Giving students more speaking time lets them go beyond the shallow, she added.
“I believe that part of thinking through a problem and understanding something involves talking,” she said.
Columbia College Chicago’s Claire Shulman, who teaches fiction and non-fiction at the downtown school, agreed that students learn from talking to each other. In her “Dialects in Fiction Writing” class, she uses small groups to analyze how dialogue and dialect get written on the page.
For Dick Grunert, a sophomore majoring in film, the give-and-take of this small-group participation has made him more aware of how much he can learn from other students, “especially in a class like ours, where we’re all from different backgrounds,” he noted. “I’m from a small town in Wisconsin; I understand that point of view.”
Other students present different ways of thinking and speaking, he said. Language differences are more pointed in the closer interactions of a small group. “It is really obvious here how differently people talk, the words they use,” he said.
Small groups allow Shulman’s class to handle more material in a shorter time, give quieter students an opportunity to speak in a less formal setting, and can nudge students in new directions, she noted.
“They’re looking at their own writing and looking at published writing. Working in a group, you get a feel that there’s more than one way of representing speech,” she said.
For marginal students, the size of a class can have important consequences. For as much as 10 percent of a class, “it’s the difference between passing and failing,” said Amy England of National-Louis. “In a class of 25, those borderline students can fail very easily. In a class of 10 or less, they’ll usually make it.
“When people feel that nobody notices what they’re doing, they tend to slack off. If they think you’ll notice, they will work harder,” added England, who teaches English as a Second Language at the downtown campus.
