INCIDENCE OF CLASS SIZE ON THE EVALUATION OF UNIVERSITY TEACHING QUALITY

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 T eachers Evaluation Questionnaire, offers empirical support for the fol lowing affirmations: (a) class size does have some impact on teaching ratings; (b) this relationship differs somewhat as a function of the t wo 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 ran ge of class sizes, and thus some of the hypotheses proposed so far may , in fact, be less incompatible than has been supposed previously.