Larger class sizes prompt shift from discussion to lecture

| Staff Reporter

This year’s increased freshman class size has forced students, faculty and advisors alike to accommodate higher enrollment across the board.

As the fall semester nears its end, students gearing up for spring registration have expressed worries about the increased difficulty of getting into desired courses.

The additional sections of large lecture classes and the growth of some smaller discussion-based classes is one of the shifts Washington University will need to make as it goes forward with its plan to increase overall undergraduate enrollment to 7,000 undergraduates.

Professors, for one, are feeling the pressure of increased enrollment. Roshan Abraham, who teaches this semester’s “Thinking About Religion” class, said that enrollment in his introductory religious studies class far exceeded his expectations.

“I had planned the class for less than 30 students,” Abraham said “When I taught it for the first time two years ago, the first time we offered the course, there were 20-some. I assumed there would be less than 30 students.”

Yet throughout registration week, Abraham found himself continually increasing the cap on the course as it filled up multiple times before freshmen were even able to register. The first time Abraham taught the class, 18 students were enrolled, nine of whom were freshmen. Now, two years later, 59 students are enrolled, 21 of whom are freshmen.

To accommodate for this increase, Abraham decided to transform his small discussion-based class into a larger one.

“As a program, we benefit from people taking our courses and intro courses,” Abraham said. “Since freshmen are the last to enroll, I wanted to have that extra space to give freshmen those opportunities.”

But Abraham admitted the shift was somewhat of a trade-off.

“When we had [nearly] 60 students, I realized it would be harder to do a lot of discussion, and I didn’t have discussion sections because the class wasn’t planned for those,” he said. “I did my best this semester to keep up as much discussion as possible because particularly this material [religion], the last thing you want to be when talking about [it] is dogmatic.”

Jennifer Smith, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, acknowledged that this observed shift from discussion to lecture may become more apparent in other departments as well in the coming semesters.

“What I would hate to see happen is class sizes just getting bigger and things shifting from discussion-based to lecture-based,” Smith said. “That’s the thing I think we need to work really hard to avoid, and it’s just going to be hard to predict.”

There are, however, ways for courses to be reconfigured in order to prevent the more discussion-based classes from becoming too impersonal.

“There’s really two options to keep courses engaging,” Smith said. “One is to simply say ‘OK, we’re going to keep the caps low, but we’re going to add more classes, more different classes,’ and the other is to let enrollments go up but then add discussion components.”

According to Smith, larger lecture classes such as calculus, biology and chemistry won’t see significant changes as they’re already held in the biggest lecture halls. These courses will require only additional lab and recitation sections to accommodate more students.

Abraham, however, sees the future of his originally smaller class using this solution as well.

“Next year, I think I’m just going to have to plan for discussion sections. It’s a trade-off. The other two class periods end up being more of a lecture—even if you try to encourage more student discussion and participation, that ends up being limited to some extent,” he said.

While data analysis and prediction played a significant role in setting the number of classes and sections this fall, according to Smith, there is one important statistic that’s missing from the equation.

“For whatever reason when the technology was set up, we don’t have an archive of waitlists, so when you hit add/drop, the waitlists are purged, and they’re really purged,” Smith said. “They go away and we have no record of them. So I haven’t had the data that will allow me to ask the question ‘are waitlists longer this year than they were last year?’ because we have no historic data.”

Although Smith has been interested in archiving waitlist data for more than a year, she said that the process of updating the technology to allow for it has not even begun. When the University does start tracking waitlists, it will still take three to four semesters’ worth of data to be meaningful for the registration process.

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