Introduction to Psychology is about to begin. A student in the front row of the studio audience cues her 23 classmates to give her professors a rousing cheer. Cameras are rolling as the rest of the class — all 910 of them — tune in from their dorm rooms, coffee shops, and study rooms at the University of Texas flagship campus.
Over the next 75 minutes, they’ll watch a “weather report” that maps personal stereotypes by regions of the country (red zones splashed across parts of the Northeast mark areas of high neuroticism), and listen to an expert flown in from Stanford University discuss what someone’s Facebook “likes” reveal about her personality.
They’ll participate in a lab exercise that matches students from the studio audience with their taste in music and groan when the burly guy who looks like a country music fan actually favors Lady Gaga. They’ll take a pop quiz and watch a video clip of their professor snooping around someone’s office for keys to his personality.
Welcome to a version of the giant intro class that’s almost guaranteed to keep students awake.
For generations, students have complained about feeling like nameless specks in a cavernous lecture hall. Faculty members often dread a sea of blank faces, or worse yet, those absorbed by online shopping or video games.
As budget cuts intensify pressure to pack more students into these classes, universities are experimenting with ways to liven them up. The approaches can be high-tech, like the webcast psychology class, or they can be more rudimentary, like breaking big classes into small brainstorming groups or interspersing lectures with snippets about students’ backgrounds gleaned from surveys. Regardless, the goals are similar: Make classes feel smaller and more personal.
How to make big classes feel small
Given economic pressures, “the large classroom is not going away,” says Kathryne McConnell, senior director for research and assessment at the Association of American Colleges & Universities. “You can look at it from a deficit perspective and say, Here’s everything that’s wrong with it. But what if we flip that and look at what the scope and scale of this class could allow us to do?”
Three years ago, two professors of psychology, James W. Pennebaker and Samuel D. Gosling team-taught what they termed the first “synchronous massive online course,” or SMOC, the precursor of the introductory psychology class Mr. Gosling now teaches with Paige Harden, an associate professor of psychology.
These intro classes, with their short, snappy segments, may be bigger, Mr. Pennebaker says, “but they’re psychologically smaller.”
Teaching a small class of students while simultaneously beaming in hundreds of others gives the classroom a more dynamic and personal feeling than students would get from a MOOC, or massive open online class, he says. More than 20 faculty members are now offering SMOCs.
“We want faculty to appreciate that our students are using online technologies most of the day,” he says. “That’s part of who they are.”
Mr. Pennebaker is leading a universitywide effort, Project 2021, to redesign undergraduate courses at UT-Austin.
Anyone who’s been to a good lecture knows how you can be carried along by a gifted lecturer as they unspool a story and interpret it for the class.
Part of the project’s goal is to get instructors to rethink the traditional large lecture course with its emphasis on a single wise professor holding court in front of hundreds of students. Lectures can be effective teaching tools, says Mr. Pennebaker, but their impact is sometimes overrated.
“Faculty members are often bamboozled into thinking that students are going to remember all these pearls of wisdom we’ve tossed at them,” he says.
Because the program just began in January, it’s too soon to measure success, but the factors administrators will look at include the number of departments redesigning their curricula, the changes that result in higher grades in subsequent courses, and increases or decreases in students’ satisfaction with the quality of their education.
Much of the experimentation taking place at Texas is coordinated through its Faculty Innovation Center.
“The problem with lectures of over 50 has been that it’s hard to know how students are doing and very difficult to have a discussion,” says Hillary Hart, a senior lecturer of civil, architectural, and environmental engineering who directs the center.
Sareena Contractor, a freshman who is enrolled in the psychology class, says the pop quizzes and interactive exercises keep her focused, even when she’s working from home and surrounded by distractions. “I thought it was going to be like watching a TV show and I’d be getting up and doing stuff,” she says. “They keep you engaged.”
The start-up costs of setting up a studio like the one at Texas could run between $750,000 and $1 million, according to university officials., Once in place, the classes cost about the same to run as other large classes, Mr. Pennebaker says. The psychology class is being rerun in the spring to another 1,000 students and to several hundred more in the summer. The same studio space broadcasts to some 8,000 to 12,000 students who are enrolled in about a dozen other courses throughout the semester.
Not all the solutions to the impersonal lecture are as tech-heavy as the psychology class. Cynthia LaBrake, a senior lecturer in chemistry at Texas, has her 400 students break into groups of two to four to work on problems while a dozen undergraduate and graduate teaching and learning assistants circulate through the room. Her 1970s-era classroom, which is scheduled for an overhaul next year, has small desks bolted into the floor, making group work a challenge. “We crawl over the space to reach them,” she says. “It’s not ideal, but we make it work.”
At the University of California at Berkeley, Martha L. Olney, an adjunct professor of economics, uses a similar approach in some of her courses. She breaks classes of 150 students into groups of three or four to discuss portions of her lecture — a technique she says takes getting used to. “If you’re going to have 50 conversations going on at the same time,” Ms. Olney says, “you have to be very comfortable with noise.”
For larger classes, like her principles of economics class that typically enrolls more than 700 students, she manages to incorporate active learning, even if it’s just using hand-held clickers to quiz students and be sure they understand the material.
That way, she says, students are getting feedback a half-dozen times a day, and not just when they get a D on the economics midterm. If she throws out a question and gets a lot of blank stares, she might ask students to brainstorm for a few minutes with someone in the same row.
She tries to set the right tone from the start. When students walk in, she gives them a set of three to five questions they should be able to answer by the end of the hour. “That encourages them to listen for those things during the class,” Ms. Olney says. “They have to show their TA that they tried to answer, and they grade their own quizzes the next day.”
One of the most popular trends in recent years has been the flipped classroom, which usually involves having students watch videos and read course materials outside the classroom so that class time is used for hands-on experiences and discussions.
But students don’t always do the work before class, says Peter E. Doolittle, assistant provost for teaching and learning at Virginia Tech. Quizzes and short writing assignments can help hold students accountable, he says.
During the summer, Mr. Doolittle helped lead a national conference on teaching large classes, where faculty members critiqued various strategies.
In addition to clickers, some faculty members use programs that allow them to create interactive lectures.
Conference participants also described plenty of low-tech ways of engaging students.
Poster presentations, the staples of faculty conferences, are becoming increasingly popular assignments in large undergraduate classes. Groups of four or five students present their research findings at a public exhibition, and peers evaluate one another.
Another increasingly popular way to make the class feel smaller is to bring in undergraduate teaching assistants to supplement the work of graduate TAs. Undergraduates who have done well in a course can lead small-group discussions in exchange for course credit or pay.
“Undergraduate TAs provide extra eyes and voices,” says Mr. Doolittle. “They’re sources of energy, working with groups and helping keep discussions on track.”
The layout of the classroom can also make a difference in student engagement. At Virginia Tech, as in many other universities, new classrooms are being built with interactive and technology-driven large classes in mind. Seats can be turned around and multiple screens project shared and student work.
Yet for some lecturers, these extra technological bells and whistles aren’t the key.
For Gabriel K. Harris, an associate professor of food science at North Carolina State University, creating a memorable experience in his 200-person class that he refers back to throughout the semester is what works.
Once, he fried mealworms and served them to willing students over rice with vegetables, then took the same insects, dry roasted them, and ground them into powder to add to oatmeal raisin cookie batter. What better way to make the point that insects can be a sustainable, high-quality form of protein that people will eat “if you don’t see six legs.” It’s the kind of experience they might go back and tell their roommate about.
“Humans are fundamentally hard-wired to remember stories,” he says, “and when they do, the scientific principles associated with them will be retained.”
Few people would disagree that getting students more engaged in their education is a worthy goal. But with so much focus today on active learning, some faculty members feel like they’re expected to jump through too many hoops to keep their students entertained. There’s something to be said, they argue, for getting multitasking, hyperconnected students to sustain attention on a full-length, well-crafted lecture.
Molly Worthen, an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says teaching centers are often biased against the traditional lecture.
Humans are fundamentally hard-wired to remember stories, and when they do, the scientific principles associated with them will be retained.
“There are loads of resources for flipping classrooms and experimenting with other forms of active learning, but if you just want to become a better speaker, that isn’t something that’s advertised,” she says. “It isn’t perceived of as trendy.”
Students sometimes tell her they feel shortchanged if the faculty members who are experts in their fields turn too much of the teaching over to peer discussions. There’s nothing passive, she says, about listening to a lecture, synthesizing the key points, and taking effective notes.
“Part of what I’m doing when I’m on stage is modeling the act of analytical thinking,” Ms. Worthen says. “Anyone who’s been to a good lecture knows how you can be carried along by a gifted lecturer as they unspool a story and interpret it for the class.”
Ms. Worthen believes that a good lecture lays the groundwork for a richer, more informed discussion session than she would get if students watched videos to prepare for the class. Her introductory history classes, which typically enroll about 100 students, meet three times a week. Two of the sessions are lectures and the third is a discussion session for groups of 15 to 18 students with a teaching assistant.
Advocates for revamping the traditional lecture concede that persuading some faculty members to change traditional lectures can be a challenge, in part because there isn’t a lot of data showing what works.
Faculty members who flip their classrooms or try other techniques to get students involved risk flopping in their end-of-semester assessments, say Mr. Pennebaker and Ms. Hart at UT-Austin. Students are sometimes most comfortable with a class that rewards them for memorizing facts for a few exams per semester. Daily quizzes and graded group work make it harder to skate through a class.
Even though they’re key to keeping students engaged, daily quizzes haven’t caught on with UT-Austin faculty, though, “because it’s too damn much work,” Mr. Pennebaker says.
Yet it can pay off in better attendance. In a typical course he teaches, about 60 percent of students were still showing up two-thirds of the way through the semester. After an overhaul that included daily quizzes, it was more like 95 percent, and students were scoring a full grade higher on their tests.
Moving some of his course work online also gave students greater flexibility and allowed him to expand his class sizes, especially for introductory courses. Big introductory courses allowed the university to offer smaller upper-division courses, he says.
Faculty members, Ms. Hart says, are given incentives to try new techniques and not have to worry that they’ll be punished if students don’t immediately warm to the changes. Those incentives include pay bonuses for professors to prepare new courses or for departments to experiment with new curricula.
But elsewhere, changes can also be as simple as making an extra effort to connect with students on a personal level. When that happens, students tend to be more engaged in a class, and less likely to skip, says Windi D. Turner, an assistant professor of family and consumer sciences education at Utah State University.
She has each of the 180 students in her “Dress and Humanity” class fill out an index card at the start of the semester with personal information, including something interesting about themselves.
When a student confided that she was an avid participant in “cosplay” — in which participants wear costumes to represent a specific character — Ms. Turner tracked down the student and asked if she’d mind explaining her hobby during a session devoted to how people play out different roles through dress.
“If the student feels like he’s just a number and doesn’t feel a connection or purpose,” Ms. Turner says, “he feels like he could slip away and the professor would never know.”
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
