Large Class Size: Its Implications on Students and Teachers of Higher Institutions in Nigeria (Published)
Emergence of COVID-19 across the world is more than enough for us to start pondering on how to address the issue of large class size in Nigerian tertiary institutions. Large class size is a common phenomenon in our higher institutions especially for core courses which every student in the department or faculty must offers. Over 1,000 students usually converge in a small lecture hall with capacity of 300 students and this inadequacy has been giving lecturers tough time during their lectures. Lecturers who are not that audible find it very much difficult to pass messages effectively to the students and this has been contributing to falling standard of education in Nigeria. More so, students who are supposed to get the best out of brilliant lecturers are denied of this opportunity, why? Because the classroom size is not bigger enough to accommodate students, therefore, discouraging them from attending classes on a regular basis and also making lecturers inactive in the lectures’ halls. The researchers who have been working assiduously to ensure that the problems encountered by students as a result of class size have not done enough to provide lasting solutions to these problems, making the problems persist. Paradigm shift is one of the ways suggested by the researcher to tackle the problems of large class size in our tertiary institutions. The transnational ways of team teaching, group discussion are no longer effective for large class size as the population of Nigeria keeps increasing and the researcher believes it has become paramount importance to devise ways of overcoming difficulties encountered by the students and lecturers in a large class size. Division of large class size into half to encourage group work among the students and introduction of a blend of learning instructional methods are inevitable at this junction. Introduction of these two things in our tertiary institutions will go a very long way in addressing the issues of large class size. The researcher recommends that, government should employ more lecturers to increase performance of lecturers teaching core courses in our tertiary institutions after the division of large class size into small groups, government should build more lectures’ halls to encourage blend of learning methods for overcrowded classes.
Citation: Gbenga O.M., Surajo A. and Ibrahim Y. (2023) Large Class Size: Its Implications on Students and Teachers of Higher Institutions in Nigeria, European Journal of Educational and Development Psychology, Vol.11, No.1, pp.37-52
Keywords: Classroom, Implication, Management, large class-size