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This essay describes the process and findings of a class size research project at an access institution.
With increasing pressure from state legislatures and campus or system governing bodies to maximize "efficiency" through such measures as increasing class sizes and demanding higher teaching loads, such situations are becoming more common and the need for specific disciplinary recommendations more urgent.
-"Statement on Working Conditions for Non-Tenure-Track Writing Faculty"
We would like to tell a story about class size research. It is an important story in that it illuminates the research environment of an access institution-in our case a statewide, two-year liberal arts transfer institution that consists of thirteen campuses and an online program. This environment is characterized by limited funding; dispersed geographical locations, instructors, and students; heavy teaching loads; and research agendas often driven by exigent circumstances.
Our journey into class size research was not by choice. As English department assessment coordinators who were responsible for assessment both at the institutional and department level, we derived assessment projects from department interest, as we saw assessment as "a way to ask and answer questions about our students, their writing, our teaching, our curricula, and the other factors that constitute effective writing instruction" (O'Neil et al.).1 While planning our next project, we learned that, like many large public university systems (see Medina; Thebold), the University ofWisconsin Colleges (UWC), would manage declining state support by increasing the enrollment cap on all courses, which included raising our first-year writing caps from 22 to 24.2 The situation in Wisconsin mirrors much of what Tony Scott and Nancy Welch discuss in Composition in the Age of Austerity: increasing class sizes is one of the most common measures that colleges and universities have implemented in the face of reduced state funding, ostensibly, at least in part, to make higher education more accessible to students. Further, they argue, "emergency" responses to fiscal crises often become permanent changes that potentially negatively affect students and instructors.
This class size increase concerned our department so we appealed to our administration, citing the CCCC's "Principles for the Postsecondary Teaching of Writing" recommending no more than 20 students per writing class, no more than 15 students per developmental class, and no more than 60 total students per term. CCCC's...