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academic work, and to boys and girls of high intelligence with a practical turn of mind.

For some years after the passing of compulsory attendance laws for pupils of highschool age, boys and girls in large numbers flocked into the classical high school, or classical course. It was better established; It was better established; generally it had better teachers. The situation may be compared to immigrants swarming into New York or Massachusetts. They did not look for the course best suited to their needs; all courses looked alike to them. Of course there was no room for many of them. In less than a year fully half of them had either left or become most undesirable citizens. They could not "do Latin" even when they tried; they knew they would never use it; and they hated the school and the teacher who made them take it-like castor oil.

There was just one thing for the teachers to do under such circumstances. Since they must of course teach Latin and the binomial theorem to their students who would go on to college, they must get rid of the disturbing element which could not, or as they often thought "would not," do Latin and algebra. Resort was had to the time-honored custom of "flunking-out," as fast as they could, all undesirables. When these undesirables got tired of flunking, and incidentally got old enough to leave, they left to go to work or to enter one of the other high schools.

The school was right. The system was wrong. Since the avowed purpose of the classical course was to prepare for college and the professions, it had no right to keep pupils unfitted for that end-although that was before colleges began to "limit enrollment." The system was wrong. Pupils unable to do classical work, or uninterested, should never have entered a classical school.

Ten years ago we could not tell what

students were adapted to classical work, except in cases where they had shown ability by superior scholarship in elementary school. Today we can prophesy, with a reliability as high as 80 per cent, ability or nonability to succeed with "academic" work. While it has been noted that many of the most superior pupils are found in other schools, practically all those who succeed in the classical course are above normal in mental ability.

Figures show an average superiority of over a year in mental age upon entrance, even though nearly half the freshman class have I. Q.'s below 110.

In one school,' at the end of the first ten weeks, five out of six freshmen having I. Q.'s below 90 had been eliminated. Twentyone of sixty-nine having I. Q.'s below 110 had failed in at least half their work, and only one of these pupils had made A's and B's. On the other hand of thirty-six pupils with I. Q.'s above 120, eighteen had made all A's and B's and none of them had failed.

It is evident, then, that a pupil having an I. Q. below 110 has little chance of doing well in a classical course. He may, of course, and if his past records are good, he should not be advised too strongly against trying, but should be watched carefully.

Advice to pupils when they select their courses will eliminate as it has eliminated, many failures. It will reinstate the classical school as a specialized course adapted to students of high intelligence who have also mental traits insuring good scholarship and interest in learning for learning's sake. It will save and make good citizens of those other pupils, some of them of higher intelligence, who are unfitted to be lawyers or ministers but who would make excellent business men or engineers.

1Figures quoted here are for The Classical High School, Providence, R. I. 1921-22.

The control of educational processes is very low. Our boasted knowledge is mostly traditional ignorance masquerading.

-S. A. COURTIS, Journal of Ed. Research, June, 1926, page 40.

CLASS SIZE IN UNIVERSITIES

EARL HUDELSON

[The British Admiralty after cruising up and down the Thames in a barge equipped with John Ericsson's screw propeller declined to supplant paddle wheels with it on the ground that large vessels screw-driven could not be steered. The American naval board refused to allow the Monitor's guns to be loaded with Ericsson's specified charge. "It is too great." Afterwards twice the charge was regularly used. The Pratt Institute high-school building was constructed with classrooms holding only twenty-four seats. "Experience has always shown that a larger class cannot be properly taught." Oh, these measurers! With statistics and graphs they are uprooting all that we hold dear. Along comes Professor Hudelson, of the University of Minnesota. We wouldn't mind so much a Foundation agent or a surveyor from the School of Finance. But Hudelson is one of ours-he fills the chair of Education. Even he applies the measuring stick to one of our cherished declarations.]

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HE greatest single determinant of educational expense is the cost of instruction. This is true even in elementary schools, is still more true in secondary education, while at the university level the relation between class size and educational cost approaches a reciprocal relation. The major factors involved in instructional costs are salary schedule and teaching load. Teaching load includes hours of teaching and number of students. As these factors are ordinarily administered to-day, class size is the greatest single determinant of educational cost. Increasing the size of classes, then, offers such an obvious and tempting means of lowering the cost of education that the whole question of the relation of class size to educational economy or efficiency warrants a wide but thorough and impartial investigation.

There is another reason why the question of class size at the university level should be seriously considered. At the University of Minnesota, for example, approximately eighty-five per cent. of the teaching in the arts college is being done in junior-college courses. This means that less than one fifth of the resources of this college are available for instruction at a distinctly university level or at a graduate level. The facilities of the physical plant and the energy of the faculty are being usurped by students before

they reach the senior college level. As long as the unprecedented number of freshmen who surge over university campuses each fall continue to be assigned to classes of thirty or less there seems to be no relief from this condition. The faculty is beginning to wonder if larger classes offer a solution.

A number of studies of more or less significance on one or another phase of the question of class size have been made during the last thirty years. Most of these studies employed the best investigative techniques available at the time. They range all the way from the mere comparison of teachers' subjective marks through improvised local achievement tests up to standardized outcome tests administered to carefully paired pupils in small and large classes under controlled conditions. They also range from a few pupils up to Stevenson's recent investigations in the school systems of Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Akron, and Toledo.

All but five of the studies on class size have been confined to the elementary school and of these five, only two have been related to education on the university level. The Universities of Michigan and Minnesota seem thus far to be the only ones audacious enough to raise the question of class size, and at Michigan the investigation seems to have spent its force on a single experiment in a single course. Whatever curiosity may

have germinated in other universities was probably nipped in the bud by such reactions as I had from the head of a department in an eastern university. "I should say not!" he replied. "It has taken me twenty years to get classes in my department down to the right size. Do you suppose I am going to allow all of my work to be undone?" I wrote to an administrator in another institution, asking him to send me the names of any of his instructors who have had experience in teaching large classes. I explained that I wanted to ask them whether they had found any particular techniques of teaching especially adapted to large classes. He replied, "Fortunately I have no such teachers; but if I had you would not need to bother to write to them. I can answer your question. Large classes will not work." When I asked a professor in another middlewest university whether they had ever seriously considered the possibility of larger classes, he replied, "No, we don't have the courage!"

At the University of Minnesota the investigations on class size, planned to continue indefinitely and already in their second year, were instituted under particularly favorable auspices. The president, two years ago, appointed a committee on university research, composed of the deans of the various colleges and a few other faculty members interested and trained in research, whose purpose was to investigate whatever it might conceive to be outstanding educational problems of the University of Minnesota. At least three instructors had already carried on independent experiments on class size in their courses and had found some rather disconcerting indications. These isolated studies and Edmonson's report of his experiment at Michigan had come to the attention and aroused the interest of the committee on research. It decided to encourage further investigations along this line. A subcommittee was appointed to draw up suggestive experimental techniques for attacking the problem, to make these techniques available to any instructor who might be interested, and to offer its technical services in

the administration of experiments and in the interpretation of results.

No pressure has been exerted at Minnesota to induce any instructor to coöperate. The members of the sub-committee on class size were chosen because of their known interest in the problem. Though their private opinions differed as to the optimum size of classes, all were eager to find out the facts. The temptation, therefore, was to go gunning-to take the offensive. If such a policy had been pursued I am confident that I could have limited this paper to three words -Nothing to report!

The sub-committee's conception of its functions is indicated in a report which it made to the general committee on research over a year ago:

The sub-committee on class size believes that its proper duty is to stand ready to advise and assist in the technical aspects of any experiment which an instructor may wish to conduct. It is felt particularly that the sub-committee may be of service (1) where intelligence tests need to be selected and administered; (2) in pairing students; (3) where instructors desire to supplement their regular examinations by objective tests; and (4) in the statistical study and interpretation of the results of the experiments.

The success of the investigations thus far has been due, in my opinion, mainly to these two facts: (1) that the sub-committee was sired by a representative faculty committee capable of seeing both the administrative and the research aspects of the problem, and (2) that the sub-committee had the right conception of its functions. I dwell upon these points because I consider them more important to us at Minnesota and to any other university that may wish to study the problem, than any facts about class size that we have yet ascertained.

Controlled experiments have thus far been conducted by seven instructors in six different courses in three different colleges. In the arts college two instructors have carried on separate experiments through five successive quarters in elementary psychology. Both plan to continue the experiment indef

initely. Classes in each experiment contain thirty and sixty students carefully paired on the bases of intelligence and past scholarship records. This course offers a rich field for controlled experiments because of the reservoir of nearly a thousand students from which carefully paired students may be drawn.

In the college of law, experiments have been conducted in the courses on contracts and criminal law. These two courses were taught by different instructors but included the same students. The instructors are now waiting for the results to be analyzed and until more objective tests have been devised for their courses.

In the college of education experiments on class size have been carried on for five quarters in educational psychology and in two other required teacher-training courses called "The High School" and "General Methods of High School Instruction." Each has been conducted by a different instructor, or by him and his assistant. The relative size of classes has ranged from three to one to

seven to one.

In addition to those of the above experiments which are being continued, an experiment is being planned for the spring quarter in the course of anatomy in the college of medicine, and the feasibility of investigations in several other departments is not being considered. One department, for instance, has just received appropriations for a new building. It has approached the research committee for help in determining experimentally the size of classrooms and laboratories that the new building should contain.

The question constantly recurs: How small is a small class and how large is a large one? The sub-committee has taken the attitude that the difference in size between the two classes should be so much bigger than any other variable in the experiment that any differences in results are more apt to be due to class size than to any other factor. Anything below thirty has been called a small class. The large classes have ranged from sixty to two hundred and fifty, with the ratio ranging from two to one to seven to one.

The only stipulation as to methods of instruction and classroom management is that the same procedure shall be followed in both sections. A log or diary of his procedure is kept by each instructor. Unusually frequent and thorough tests are administered to both classes. These tests are usually of the objective type but are sometimes supplemented by subjective quizzes. Each student in one section is paired with a student in the other section on the basis of intelligence and, in some experiments, on other bases also. This method of pairing insures that the two groups are comparable, both as to central tendency and variability, to the degree that the standards of selection are reliable.

In most of the courses where the experiment has been repeated, the same teaching procedure has been followed each term. This is not, however, a stipulation. One instructor of a teacher-training course who has conducted the experiment through five successive quarters, has used a distinctly different method of teaching each time. Once he employed the lecture method exclusively; next time he used only the question-andanswer method; next he confined the class work to topical discussions; next he organized the content of the course into problems; and, finally, he had his class observe demonstration teaching frequently and based the recitation work wholly upon questions which his students raised as a result of their observations. The hope of the sub-committee on class size is to have the problem studied from as many different angles, under as many typical conditions, by as many teachers and teaching methods, in as many colleges, departments, and courses, and with as many educational aims in view as possible.

A detailed study of the results of such complex experiments is a slow process. It involves such questions as the effect of pupil homogeneity upon class size; the relation of class size to the median intelligence level of the classes; the magnitude of difference in

Wholly apart from the effect of class size, it may be of interest to some of you to know that it made no apparent difference which of the five methods of teaching the instructor used-on the same tests and examinations the median scores of all five classes were practically identical.

size between the two sections; the nature of the course; the relative showing of the two groups on subjective tests, on objective tests, on the final examination, on oral recitations, and on written reports; the attitude of the students toward class size; the physical and emotional effects of large and small classes upon the teacher; the possibility of instructional or clerical assistance in large classes; the relation of teaching methods and class organization to class size; and the physical and other practical limitations of class size. An analysis of the results in the light of these and other considerations is now being made for each experiment that has been completed. It will be some time before detailed results are known.

Certain general tendencies, however, seem to be emerging. It appears that, on the whole, the size of classes in the courses thus far investigated has little or no effect upon results measured in terms of student achievement. What slight differences exist seem to be favorable to the large classes, and the method of teaching employed does not seem to affect this difference.

It may be that there are important educational outcomes accruing, or at least accruable, only from small classes which have

not been detected in these experiments because no one knew how to measure them reliably. All that can be claimed is that when measured in terms that are commonly employed in university classes, these students seemed to be unaffected by class size.

Neither the general research committee at Minnesota nor the sub-committee on class size is ready to propose a general increase in the size of university classes. They are not ready to make recommendations either way. They hope, instead, that experiments will be pursued in many other departments under various instructors in various courses under various conditions and methods of teaching. It is to be hoped, also, that other universities will find it feasible to study the problem on their campuses so that results at Minnesota may be checked.

If further investigations confirm the Michigan and Minnesota evidence that differences in efficiency between small and large classes are so slight under present methods of instruction and classroom management, the question arises: Can classroom technique be refined or modified so as to produce results distinctly favorable to larger university classes?

WHEN THE CONVENTION IS ONLY HALF DONE

CARL G. MIller

[Here is sound sense and timely. The young man who writes it teaches journalism in the Lewis and Clark High School, Spokane.]

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YEWSPAPER publicity for an educational convention, which is certainly one consideration in this vast subject of "interpreting the schools to the public," is not always what it might be. Newspapers always tell the people what is the next convention city and who is the next president of the association. They do this for every kind of convention. Business men are always interested to know that next year a large number of out-of-town customers will be

in their city, and the public at large has a certain amount of curiosity over who is the person honored as president, nominal as this office so many times is. But it is not fair to class an educational convention with other conventions in this matter of publicity because education is so much the affair of the public; much more so than lumbering, lodge work, medicine, and all the other kinds of occupations and organizations the protagonists of which are in the habit of assem

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