The Effectiveness of School-Type Classes Compared to the Traditional Lecture/Tutorial Method for Teaching Quantitative Methods to Business Students

This paper isolates and quantifies the effect of different teaching methods for teaching mathematics and statistics to large first year groups of business students with very diverse mathematical backgrounds. One set of students was split into medium sized groups, each of which was taught rather like a school class. The other set had a large formal lecture together with small tutorial sessions. The reactions of students and staff were sought, and the course work and examination marks of the students were studied to determine the influence a the teaching methods. Other factors such as age, sex, particular tutors, mathematical background and general academic ability were taken into account. Student and staff opinion came down overwhelmingly on the side of the school-type classes, and this method of teaching gave significantly higher examination results, but had no significant effect on the course work marks. Other important influences on the marks were identified Although this was an opportunistic study rather than a planned experiment, the results are sufficiently marked to be of interest and to provoke further study.