Student Engagement and Success in the Large Astronomy 101 Classroom

The large auditorium classroom presents unique challenges to maintaining student engagement. During the fall 2012 semester, I adopted several.specific strategies for increasing student engagement and reducing anonymity with the goal of maximizing student success in the large class. I measured attendance and student success in two classes, one with 300 students and one with 42, but otherwise taught as similarly as possible. While the students in the large class probably did better than they would have in a traditional lecture setting, attendance was still significantly lower in the large class, resulting in lower student success than in the small control class by all measures. I will discuss these results and compare to classes in previous semesters, including other small classes and large Distance Education classes conducted live over remote television link.