Class Size Experiment

This experiment has a few problems of control in this situation. To begin with, the main problem is that this experiment lacks validity. What this means is that the experiment that is being conducted is not is not really testing what it is supposed to test (Shuttleworth, M., 2008). The reason is that although the goal is to measure the effects of class size on attendance, the grades measured after one semester is not a good indicator of how many people attended class. This test can be thrown off because some students will attend class but will still get bad grades. On the other hand, there are always students who do not attend but study a lot at home and get better grades. In other words, this experiment lacks internal validity (Slack & Draugalis, 2001) because using student grades to figure out the effect of class size on attendance does not make sense. It does not make sense because semester grades do not always correlate with attendance.
In addition to lacking internal validity, this experiment is not a true experiment. This experiment is a quasi-experiment because it lacks random assignment (Trochim, W.M., 2006). In this experiment, the students were not randomly assigned to colleges which …show more content…
This is a problem because different teachers have different teaching styles. These varying styles of teaching by different professors can greatly influence the results. Some teachers will make attendance mandatory, which in turn, will force attendance rates to go up. On the other hand, some professors will make attendance optional, and some students might take advantage of this policy and not attend class. A professor could also be a very interactive and engaging teacher who will attract most of the students to the class, while a professor with a monotonous style of teaching will make students not want to come to class. These are some of the problems that arise because the professors are not randomly