Class Configurations
The researchers had no control over the composition of the classes. The majors in groups 1 through 6 (English–Language & Culture) were assigned pseudo-randomly by the University administration. Groups 7 and 8 (English–International Relations) were assigned alphabetically.
For the non-majors, the students are grouped according to their desired second foreign language. For example, all Business Majors who desired to study French were formed into one or more classes. Since there are normally too many students for a single class, the students are further divided into multiple classes according to their total score on the university’s entrance examination. For this experiment, the instructors were assigned to six of the classes which contained the highest ranking students for certain combinations of major + second foreign language.
As can be seen from Table 1, the Non-major design has a neat 3 x 2 arrangement (treatments x instructors) while there are only two instances of “major” instructors teaching two sections for the entire period. In both of these cases, the instructor has classes of the same treatment.