Incidence of Class Size on the Evaluation of University Teaching Quality

Abstract

The authors set out to test a series of hypotheses on the relationship between class size and the evaluation of university teaching quality through student opinions. The information obtained from a sample of 1,157 classes, using a shortened version of the Complutense University Teachers Evaluation Questionnaire, offers empirical support for the following affirmations: (a) class size does have some impact on teaching ratings; (b) this relationship differs somewhat as a function of the two dimensions operationalized by the questionnaire; and (c) the effect sizes are quite small. With regard to the controversy over the shape of the relationship, this seems to depend to a large extent on the range of class sizes, and thus some of the hypotheses proposed so far may, in fact, be less incompatible than has been supposed previously.

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