Students' Experience of University Class Sizes

The John Henry Brookes lecture theatre at Oxford Brookes University SOURCE: Oxford Brookes website

The recent Higher Education Policy Institute/ Higher Education Academy report on student academic experience raises many issues but of particular interest to me were points made about students' experience of class sizes and student absenteeism.

Class size, student attendance and teaching contact time are usually investigated in relation to student performance. Much has been researched and written about student views on their experience of class size and how much teaching time they get and both class size and contact time are seen as proxy indicators of teaching quality. Student absenteeism in higher education has become a consistent problem for universities and their teaching staff. However, whilst it is common to hear of lecturers bemoaning lack of student attendance there little written on the views of students who do attend teaching sessions and whether there is any impact on them as a result of their missing fellow students. Instead the focus tends to be on asking students why they miss classes.

Class Size

Figure 11 below, taken from the HEPI/HEA report, shows a strong relationship between the decline in perceived academic benefits as class size increases . Basically students are positive about the benefits of class sizes between one to 15 students but then there is a:

"...striking decline in the proportion of students perceiving educational benefits as the size of class increases, especially when they reach lecture sized groups. Even medium sized seminar classes see notably fewer students receiving benefits compared with tutorial sized groups."

For tutorial/small seminar sized groups of 6-15 students 42% of students felt they gained 'a lot' educationally. This figure falls to only 20% for groups of 16-50 students.

(SOURCE: HEPI/HEA, 2014 page 24)

The main question for me here is why does the perceived benefit decrease so quickly at a relatively low class size? The majority of students' contact time is spent in classes larger than 15 students. The implication from the report seems to be that the reasons is that interaction between staff and students is more feasible in small classes but is this the whole story? From my own, admittedly small-scale, interviews with students for my doctorate research, it seems there may be other interrelated factors involved. Students, especially those coming from a private education, are used to a secondary education system involving these small interactive classes. This is what has served them well (if they have got into the university and onto the course of their choice). It is also a stark contrast to the standard university first year teaching model of very large lectures and sets of identical seminars. So students believe they learn best in small classes, whether or not they have them at university. They are also used to having a closer relationship with their teachers compared to their lecturers, who may not even know their name, especially in the first year. But in addition, students often don't know each other within larger cohorts. This means they also cannot gauge the extent to which other students are understanding what's being taught in a session. This lack of relationships in a larger class size inhibits the asking of questions and therefore reinforces the feeling of not being known. This generates a feeling of anonymity, which is again reinforced as a class size increases. Lecturers often say to students at the beginning of a lecture,

"Feel free to interrupt if you have any questions or there's anything you don't understand."

But students come to know that questions risk not only making them look bad in front of many other students but also that they risk taking the lecturer away from set of PowerPoint slides that needs to be completed within the hour and thus incurring the wrath of their fellow students. Students reported in my research interviews that they had very mixed feelings about other students asking questions in a lecture, and would not themselves ask a question in case the other students had the same views as them. Instead, students saved questions to ask in seminars, where they said they could better assess whether the understanding and feeling of other students and would not look bad in front of others.

Student Attendance

Research on student attendance at classes usually investigates the correlation is between attendance and student achievement. Attendance has been shown to decrease over the duration of a module showing significant decreases when coursework submission is due on other modules (Van Blerkom, 1992). Much less attention has been paid to the relationship between class size and attendance with the accepted view that the larger the class the higher the absenteeism because students feel more anonymous and that their lack of attendance will not be noticed. The HEPI/HEA report states that students miss less than 10% of their scheduled teaching contact time.

The main reasons given for absenteeism is that students did not find the lectures very useful and that the notes were available online. This begs the question what is the additional benefit to students of physically attending lectures? 

From my own research students did not give overly reassuring answers to this question but did mention that the lecturer would always give additional information to what was in the notes and 'may' give advice about the assignments which would otherwise be missed. However, one other key issue seemed to be the extent to which the quality of teaching environment influenced students' experience and decisions about attending. For example, students mentioned being influenced by the space, seating and temperature of a room but also whether other students attended or not. The absenteeism by other students affected those who choose to attend in both positive and negative ways:

• a less than full attendance at a session can create an environment more conducive to a ‘good’ learning experience simply because there is more space, a better choice of seats (including the advantageous seats near the front of the class) and less distraction from students talking etc.
• some students actively seek out seminar sessions that they know will be poorly attended. For example, those timetabled furthest away from the lecture to which they relate, in order to have a session and where they can feel more confident in asking questions and where the lecturer might get to know who they are.
• the main negative impact of non-attendees on the learning experience of those students who do attend appears to be the impact on the creation of a community cohort.

The 'positive slant taken by students on other students' non attendance has not been explored fully as most of what is written tends to focus oh why students do not attend. In addition, a lecturer facing a depleted audience generally feels negatively about the lack of attendance and may ruminate on the impact on the learning experience and potential attainment of the non-attendees. Rarely would they conclude that those students who have attended may consider the situation to be an advantageous.
 

The focus is on feedback rather than class size

Finally, a last point from the HEPI/HEA report, see Figure 8 below. The surveys focusing on student experience, especially the NSS,  invariable mention feedback on assessment in terms of the time taken for marked work to come back to students or the quality or usefulness of that feedback to the students' learning. 'The feedback was poor' scored 26% in the HEPI/HEA 2014 survey, yet not too far behind it with 19% was 'The teaching groups were too large'. Perhaps there should be more of a focus on class size.

HEPI//HEA 2014 Student Academic Experience Survey published May 2014
http://www.hepi.ac.uk/2014/05/21/hepi-hea-2014-student-academic-experience-survey
Van Blerkom, M. L. (1992) Class attendance in undergraduate courses. The Journal of Psychology, 126 (5), 487-494.

Is the Lecture Really Dead?

It all started with a Facebook page called The Lecture is Dead. About a year ago I 'liked' it but now I'm not so sure. The page states 'In schools and universities the non-interactive lecture is an outdated method of teaching. Engaging pedagogy produces better academic outcomes and a richer, more pleasant learning environment'. What's not to agree with there? However, I've come full circle on lectures and no longer think the lecture is dying or even all that ill. Part of the reason why is that whenever I read something about how poor a teaching method lectures are, there's often something contradicting this within the article itself. Here are two examples of what I mean:

(Reproduced from http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Lecture-is-Dead/271794668781)

Enough with the Lecture Bashing

As a teaching method the lecture has long, long been criticised (for example see Bane, 1925; Bligh, 1972; Gibbs, 1981). The criticism probably goes back further than this and most of it centres around the lecture being a passive teaching method and its lack of effectiveness compared with more active learning modes. Academics such as Eric Mazur have promoted a more interactive style of lecturing, involving students discussing points and feeding answers back to the class. More recently, the concept of 'flipping' has become popular, whereby students cover lecture material away from class and the teaching time is then given over to more interactive modes of teaching.

Recently, I read this interesting blog post by journalist Anne Murphy Paul which mentions some amazing research by MIT Professor Rosalind Picard and others where students were fitted with wristbands that measured skin conductance as an index of the “arousal associated with emotion, cognition and attention.” The sensors in the wristbands recorded regular, strong spikes during periods of study, laboratory work and homework, but the readout flatlined during two activities: attending lectures and watching TV. The graph (below) of the students response is very telling with noticeable flatlining during the lectures but not, interestingly, always during sleeping.

Poh N-Z, Swenson, NC and Picard, RW (2010)*

However, whiles the research findings are clear, what I found really significant were the comments to Murphy's blog about this research, which seem to show that lack of arousal in lectures may not be an indication of lack of learning and contradict the flatlining in the graph above. Here are some of the comments:

Very interesting, though from my own experience I feel that I learned very well from lectures (and I also remember the content of books and TV programmes well too)… I agree that they are essentially passive but it is possible to be mentally engaged nevertheless. I genuinely can’t remember a single thing that I learned during homework activities. Perhaps the effectiveness of these forms of learning depends a lot on the individual. Jonathan Firth

...While I don’t think that lecture should be the only teaching strategy incorporated, I do believe that there is a place for lectures within educational institutions, especially at the collegiate level. I agree with John. Being auditory, I love a good lecture and often find myself listening to lectures on iTunes U to expand my depth of knowledge. I think what the professor does with the lecture is essential, as well as what the learner views as the purpose of the lecture is. Lectures don’t have to be passive... Stephanie Franks

Maybe they need to assess their lecturing technique at MIT. I studied psychology at NUIG Galway, Ireland, and found most if not all the lectures very engaging and worthwhile. Kevin Doyle

The authors of the comments above recall their own experiences of learning in lectures almost fondly. In a previous blog, 'What's Still Good about Lectures?' I wrote about similar positive comments in an online discussion by academics about lectures and lecturers. The idea that passive learning works well concurs with Murphy Paul's earlier article called 'Couch Potatoes, Rejoice! Learning can be passive' which espouses the effectiveness of passive learning through observation, especially if students are likely to practice or repeat what they are observing and/or have prior experience of what's being observed.

Another, very different, example of contradiction in lecture bashing is within a Guardian Education article by Anna Fazackerley which details Dale Stephens Uncollege initiative and his ethos behind it, described in his book 'Hacking Your education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More Than Your Peers Ever Will'. Whilst I don't have any issues with Stephens basic idea of debunking the belief that going to university is the only route to success, he contradicts his own book title by suggesting that non-students should try and "attend lectures" (without enrolling) because "the academics were more than willing to host someone who genuinely wanted to share their knowledge and learn". He seems to be suggesting here that, if you don't ditch the lectures, you might learn something.

So, perhaps the case against the lecture is not so open and shut. The lecture may not be popular but I'm off the bashing bandwagon for now.


*A Wearable Sensor for Unobtrusive, Long-Term Assessment of Electrodermal Activity
Ming-Zher Poh, Nicholas C. Swenson and Rosalind W. Picard. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING, VOL. 57, NO. 5, MAY 2010 1243

University's Quality Assurance Agency against PowerPoint Lectures (Apparently)!

Whist looking for something else I came across this article in the higher education section of The Australian, a daily broadsheet owned by News Corporation.

The title of the article, from 24 April 2012, is UK watchdog is against "power point" tuition. It made me think I must have missed something about the Quality Assurance Agency in the UK press earlier this year. Being interested in the role of the lecture in higher education and the impact of PowerPoint, I felt sure I should have seen this earlier. The original article from which The Australian version was adapted was published on 20 April 2012 in The Times and was written by Greg Hurst, who is their education editor. 

Interestingly the title of the article in The Times is Students must get more for their money, says watchdog, which is not quite as sensational as the anti PowerPoint title of The Australian.

Hurst's article actually reports the response of the QAA's Chief Executive, Anthony McClaran, to the results of research carried out by The Times, which looked at the experience of current first year students in a sample of UK universities. The research covered issues such as contact time, the type of teaching experience during that contact time and the length of time taken to return marked assignments.

The reference to PowerPoint comes in the first line of the article "Students should not tolerate “PowerPoint lectures”, the head of the universities standards body has warned". However, McClaran goes on to explain that what this means is where the lecturer simply reads from the presentation slides in class. He states what students want most is to be able to interact with staff and with other students. This then is quite a long way from stating that the QAA is against PowerPoint tuition per se.

What seems to be the main issue is the largely passive learning experience of a poorly delivered presentation. The challenge to the traditional lecture is to overcome its information-transmission-only heritage that arguably PowerPoint has helped perpetuate.

Universities need to take heed of the extra emphasis of the QAA on the effectiveness and quality of the bread and butter teaching tool in higher education and support staff in their development of different effective teaching techniques.

Donald Bligh's What the Use of Lectures? needs revisiting in the 21st century.

What's Still Good About Lectures?

Have you ever noticed that once you focus on something, you start seeing noticing it more? In the past few weeks I've come across two online discussions about what's good about lectures or what makes a good lecturer. These have been interesting to me as a counterpoint to all the literature which generally focuses on what's not good about lectures.

The first of these sources I found very illuminating. It's an abridged transcript of an online discussion from March 2012 amongst academics on the theme What's Still Good About Lectures. It didn't set out to be a discussion on the importance of stories, storytelling or narrative as an ingredient for a successful lecture but it surprised me how much the discussion kept coming back to it. Here are some quotes from the discussion to illustrate this point:

"Lecturing is all about telling a good story".

"My history teacher was great. He didn't 'lecture', he told stories". 

"The best lecturers I have learned from are good story tellers. They knew how to factor in their personal experiences into the content material".

"Good lectures take you on a narrative journey through the material with the message/lesson the lecturer has crafted".

"I enjoy lectures that I relate to in some way... interesting story or illustration that makes the point".

The lecturers here are clearly reflecting back on their own experiences of good lectures and lecturers which shows what a powerful impact narrative and storytelling has and how stories resonate with listeners because they personally relate to them in some way. The discussion could easily just have promoted what contributors themselves do in lectures that makes them 'good'. 

This is sort of what seems to have happened in some of the second discussion on What Makes a Good Lecturer that I came across (and I think I actually participated in at one point) The comments are at The Guardian Higher Education Network May 2012. Here the discussion was less focused (probably because with so many contributors it was difficult to follow the thread) but still one point caught my eye because it came up again and again. This was the role of performance in face-to-face lecturing. I mentioned this in a previous post as I believe the performance element of lecturing has been somewhat lost with the rise in the use of PowerPoint. Here are some quotes that relate to this point:

"Yes there is something very particular and special about the embodied aspect of lecturing. about the nature of speech, and its performance. in a world of increasingly disembodied information, I think this is all the more important, and indeed, all the more attractive for students - if they can drag themselves there".

"A good teacher can take a lecture and use it to encourage reflection, debate and participation. Your post really resonates with my own interest in teacher as performer. If you love lecturing I am sure this must be the best starting point for a great lecture for your students".

But not everyone agrees with the idea of performance and lecturing, seeing it as less important than other factors:

"I would have to respectfully disagree with any equation of good teaching in HE with "theatrical skills". Far more important are rapport with students, congruence (genuineness), caring for students, intrinsic interest in your subject, in-depth subject knowledge. Theatrical skills are not essential, but are very common characteristics of good teachers. During my research one interviewee described "showmanship is like fast-food". This interviewee also recounted stories of a very calm, yet wonderfully inspiring teacher who used subtle humour to great effect, but could not really be described as an "entertaining" lecturer".

I've seen - predominantly American - lecturers engage with their students and throw them regular questions during the lecture, creating a much more interactive environment than the standard British rhetorical performance - beloved as that might be... I think lecturers who went through the British system are often uncomfortable with the idea as it seems too "school" like (and they don't like to have their performance interrupted)".

So what to conclude from this? Well, much, but I'd like to end with another point that came up in the discussions - TED! "Aren't TED talks really lectures?" TED talks certainly employ storytelling and definitely involve performance - are they lectures? 

The following Vimeo clip illustrates the power of stories I think for a business marketing view but the point applies just as much to HE.

The Traditional Lecture and Fumbling with PowerPoint

In his recent article for The Guardian Higher Education Network on the early adopter universities that are leading the way with educational technology, Steven Schwartz describes how, in the near future, technology will be tailored to students' needs and that online offerings will not be "merely... images from a camera plonked in front of a traditional class with a traditional lecturer fumbling with a traditional PowerPoint presentation".

This got me thinking as to how ubiquitous PowerPoint (PP) has become in the standard university lecture. What percentage of lectures are delivered through the medium of PowerPoint, Keynote or other presentational technology? Of course it may depend on the discipline but, from my own experience, I would hazard a guess that well over 50 per cent of all lectures are being communicated using PP. This means, as Schwarz states, that 'fumbling' with PP for a lecture is now tradition, it's now the norm.

The research on the use of PP for lectures is polarising. There's research on how students much prefer lectures with PP and the notes that can be generated to accompany the lecture (for example see Nicholson, 2002; and Amare 2006) and yet there is also evidence on how much students dislike PP. This heartfelt quote is from a series of comments on a blog giving tips for lecturing medical students;

"I could simplify all the advice to lecturers by saying only: Don't use PowerPoint! Anything else you do will be brilliant compared to even the best PP lecture. I promise".

Leah Apr 1, 2011 02:44 PM

The issue I want to raise here is that the advent of presentational technology in the lecture hall may well be an example of technology making things worse rather than better. Most disruptive technological innovations result in changing the market by replacing one technology with a newer one that creates a value network. Before presentational technologies, lecturers used acetate overheads, a carousel of photographed slides, photocopied handouts, whiteboards or blackboards. The growth of the use of PP for lecture presentations has been immense and yet it's not at all clear that this technological disruption has added any value. In fact, there are some clear arguments that it has had adverse effects on teaching and learning.

Most notable of these is Tufte (2003), who derided PP's “preoccupation with format not content”. Lowenthal (2009) suggests that presentational software encourages a lecturer-centred, screen-centred and technology-centred lecture. James et al. (2006) gives an account of the research into the impact of PP based lectures on cognitive recall. Overall here and elsewhere, the results seemed mixed as to whether recall is helped or hindered.

Rather than rehashing whether PP is good or 'evil' (Tufte again), there are several other points I want to make specifically about the use of it for delivering lectures.

 

First, irrespective of whether individual lectures using PP are any good or not, there has been little thought given to the students' experience over several of these lectures during a busily timetabled day. Contrast this with the 'Death by PowerPoint' feeling that any lecturer at conference knows only too well.  Do we ever think about our students' experience across a set of PP lectures? Do we ever ask about this in evaluations?

Second, in most of the formats that PP has largely replaced, there is an ability to annotate or adapt content in real time that is almost completely missing from PP.  Instead PP lectures are presented as complete and fixed, which means that opportunities for digression are difficult because there will be no slides to support those asides and, indeed no accompanying notes. This may mean that students regard any departures 'off script' as less important, when in fact they may be the exact opposite. In addition, the complete linear format of PP lectures mean that a lecturer must make it through all of their slides within the alloted time or else leave the students hanging in some kind of unsatisfactory PP interruptus, robbed of the full experience. All in all it's difficult to see how this lack of flexibility can be a step forward.

Finally and related to the previous point, earlier methods afforded the student audience the opportunity to see the 'crafting' of lecture as the lecturer built up the points through scribbling on an overhead projector with different coloured pens or executed teasingly slow reveals of covered up points on acetates. There was also the performance art that was, first the erasing of a previous lecturer's work from the black/white board and then the filling up of every centimetre of space with an equally transient set of points, to stand somewhat exhausted in front of their finished artefact at the end of an hour. This evidence of effort and of the enthusiasm of the lecturer is crucial, according to Aarabi (2007) who explains how this performance element demonstrates to students the effort that has gone into the lecture. It creates both an authenticity for the students and also an appreciation because the lecture has been bespoke for them. This contrasts strongly with the PP lecture, where this effort is hidden from the student and the ease with which the lecturer moves from one slide to another belies the work that has gone into its construction beforehand.

Of course there are brilliant PP lectures with content, images and video that far surpasses anything that earlier technologies could achieve, but I think these are rare amongst the bread and butter PP university lectures. Perhaps PP has contrained rather than enabled the lecture

What's the Use of Lectures?

After a lot of thinking, discussing and soul searching I decided last year that there was a topic I was so interested in that I wanted to spend a goodly amount of time researching it seriously. Fast forward six months and I have submitted a doctorate application to a university and am awaiting a decision. I am pleased and excited for several reasons. First, because I actually managed to find the head space and time to do some reading and thinking about my topic. Second, because I went beyond my usual procrastinating to actually writing down my thoughts and creating what I think is a reasonable proposal. Third, because I was organised enough to marshall my qualification transcripts, examples of other written work, references and my CV for uploading into my online application before the deadline. In fact, I think I should get a qualification just for getting the application in. Most of all I am excited because in doing all of the above I realised how much I want to do this research. For the first time in a long time I am  interested in something for its own sake and it feels great.

My research topic is the result of being influenced by two books - yes real books! The first one is a classic research text, first published in 1972. It's by Donald Bligh and is called 'What's the Use of Lectures?'. The second book was published much later in 2010, it's by Nancy Duarte and is called 'Resonate - present visual stories that transform audiences'. These two books are the ingredients behind what I want to look at which is whether the university lecture has a narrative or story structure.

Two books that have influenced me

Bligh's book, which has been republished many times in the forty years since 1972, details the plethora of research that has been carried over many years to show that (in a nutshell) the lecture as a teaching method is only effective at the transmission of factual information, and even at this it is no better than other teaching methods. In essence, this book and many other sources describe how unfit for educational purpose the standard university lecture is.

My starting point in thinking about the lecture was a growing dismay at the poor use of presentational technologies, such as PowerPoint, by lecturers during their teaching sessions. I include my own lectures in this.  Imagine the experience of the average fresher sitting in the darkened lecture theatre on week one of their degree waiting expectantly for their lecturer to deliver the very first lecture. The average student will experience between 250-300 lectures, probably most using PowerPoint, before they emerge after three years with their qualification.

When Bligh wrote his book, PowerPoint and Keynote were a long way off. So imagine that not only are lectures not an effective method of teaching, they may have actually been made worse by the use of new technology. That's not progress.

Stories, storytelling and narrative have long had a role in education, including higher education. Stories and narrative help with meaning making of experiences. Duarte's book describes how story structures are found in many great speeches, presentations and artistic performances and how they are fundamental to communication. So if a company wants to inspire change in its employees or if a politician wants to elicit loyalty in their followers, they use narrative to connect with their audiences, create support for their vision and effect change in people.

Here she is talking about her 'Resonate' approach.

My starting point on this was wondering if Duarte's ideas could be applied in a higher educational context to the humble lecture? Surely the goal of education is to inspire, move and change people. Perhaps narrative and stories offers a way forward for the much maligned (probably PowerPoint-based) lecture.

I hope we shall see.