The University of Georgia, seeking to improve the classroom experience of its undergraduates, has begun a faculty hiring spree to reduce enrollments in hundreds of courses.
The university will hire 56 full-time, teaching-focused lecturers and professors over this academic year. It is one of several recent efforts at the research-focused institution to improve its educational environment. Others include the creation of a series of freshman seminars and the requirement that incoming students participate in a hands-on learning experience.
“It’s a piece in a larger puzzle,” said Rahul Shrivastav, vice president for instruction.
The addition of instructional faculty represents only a 3-percent increase to the university’s full-time teaching staff, but it is notable for its focus. Other institutions have announced large, multiyear hiring campaigns in recent years, but they typically aim to bolster research capacity.
In cutting down class sizes, Georgia took a strategic approach, Mr. Shrivastav said. Administrators examined data to find the courses that students most frequently dropped out of, withdrew from, and failed. Consulting with deans and department heads, the academic leaders further zeroed in on courses with the worst bottlenecks that stymied student progress.
A slate emerged of 319 courses across 81 majors, including introductory courses in business, chemistry, mathematics, and political science. “There could have been 100 more,” Mr. Shrivastav said.
Students this semester are enrolled in 120 new, smaller sections of nine courses. Some sections, like “Legal and Regulatory Environment of Business,” were halved, going from 140 to about 70. Others experienced comparatively modest trims, like “Calculus I for Science and Engineering,” from an average of 39 students to 29. Most of the new sections across departments now have between 23 and 30 students.
There was no ideal class-size target, just the governing principle that smaller is better. The goal, Mr. Shrivastav said, was, “Let’s try for really small courses where it will be a more personalized, more interactive experience.”
Size or Quality?
Evidence about the importance of class size to educational quality is ambiguous, and sometimes even contradictory.
Joseph B. Cuseo, a professor emeritus of psychology at Marymount California University, has argued that smaller is better. Students in classes of 46 or more tended to exhibit shallower levels of thought compared with those in smaller courses, especially classes with 15 or fewer, he wrote in a synthesis of previous research.
What was the ideal class size? Though Mr. Cuseo acknowledged that more research was still needed, he speculated that 15 students might be the “magic number” at which a small class size’s benefits are magnified.
Others see any magic number as illusory. In research now underway, Corbin M. Campbell, an assistant professor of higher education at Teachers College at Columbia University, found some benefits among students in classes of 25 or fewer. But the educational value of courses of this size seemed limited; it indicated that students often did their assigned reading and participated in class. “Class size breeds this ability to interact,” Ms. Campbell said in an interview.
While time on task is valuable, it’s not the same thing as academic rigor, or a guarantee that students are performing cognitively complex tasks, she said. And class size, she added, had little effect on rigor.
Learning is more often a byproduct of good teaching than it is of class sizes or its mode of delivery, said Matthew J. Mayhew, an associate professor of higher education at New York University and co-author of the forthcoming revision of How College Affects Students.
And a common trait of high-quality teaching, he said, is feedback. Does an instructor substantively evaluate students’ work — not just leave checkmarks in the margin or a “good job” at the end — and prod them to revise their thinking and continue grappling with the subject on their own?
Colleges often advertise their faculty-to-student ratios, Mr. Mayhew said, but the numbers can be misleading, especially at large institutions like Georgia, where the 18-to-1 ratio reflects an average that masks a broad spectrum of class sizes. Besides, he said, if a professor has little idea what he is doing as a teacher, the number of students in the room doesn’t matter.
At Georgia, most of the new hires will be off the tenure track. Of the 56 new instructors, 16 will be on the tenure track; the rest will be full-time and focused on teaching, Mr. Shrivastav said. Each will be expected to teach four courses each semester.
The $4.4 million that will pay for the effort will cover faculty salaries and benefits, he said. The source is recent tuition increases: In-state tuition and fees have risen nearly 18 percent over the past four years.
Though students dislike the tuition increases, few see their connection to the class-size reduction effort, said Johnelle Simpson, president of the student-government association. And even if they did, he added, they would support that use of funds. “It’s a direct impact on them,” said Mr. Simpson, a senior majoring in risk management and insurance, and political science.
Joshua T. Putnam, a newly hired lecturer in the political-science department, has perceived his students to be less intimidated in the smaller courses. “I’m able to have more of a conversation,” he said, adding that he is better equipped to help his students with their research projects. “The troubleshooting I wished I could do before I can realize more fully now.”
Dan Berrett writes about teaching, learning, the curriculum, and educational quality. Follow him on Twitter @danberrett, or write to him at dan.berrett@chronicle.com.
