One reason? Students and professors see the purpose and potential uses of office hours differently, according to a new paper published in the American Society for Cell Biology’s CBE-Life Sciences Education.
The paper, “Student Motivations and Barriers toward Online and In-Person Office Hours in STEM Courses,” is based on surveys of life-sciences students and their professors at Chapman University. They were conducted in the spring of 2021, just as the university was moving to optional in-person instruction. More than 500 students responded, capturing most life-sciences majors at the university. Almost two-thirds of full-time science instructors in the College of Science and Technology who were teaching undergraduates that semester responded.
“I expected some kind of difference between instructors and students,” says Jeremy L. Hsu, an assistant professor of biology-education research at Chapman and lead author of the paper. “I was still surprised at some of the results,” he adds, like how many professors had a “negative connotation” for why students did not attend office hours and that students did not perceive some of the benefits that professors identified.
More than a quarter of professors identified lack of effort as a reason why students did not attend office hours, a reason just six percent of students gave. Meanwhile, 40 percent of students cited a scheduling conflict, while just 16 percent of instructors did. Another common reason students gave was that they didn’t have a question, suggesting an understanding that it didn’t make sense to go to office hours without one. Students cited several other reasons for not going to office hours that instructors did not list at all: their overall busyness and logistical challenges, like not being able to find the location where the office hours were held.
While content clarification was the most common purpose both students and professors gave for office hours, there were differences on this point, too. For instance, about 11 percent of instructors described one benefit of office hours as discussing with students their career goals and opportunities that could support them, like internships and conducting research. None of the students provided that reason. And while about 20 percent of professors indicated one-on-one time or getting to know one another as a purpose of office hours, only about six percent of students did.
Based on the findings, the paper offers some suggestions for instructors:
- Explicitly discuss the norms of office hours, including the possible benefits of office hours.
- Explore ways to remove structural barriers for office hours.
- Provide structured opportunities for practice and feedback.
- Promote an inclusive environment in office hours.
Hsu and his co-authors are now investigating students’ early impressions and experiences of office hours.
I’m going to dig into this topic a bit more, and I’d love to hear from you. Does your course or department use office hours in a way you’re proud of? Have you found ways to encourage students to attend and make the most of this time, or do you struggle to get students to show up? Tell me what’s working well — and what isn’t — using this form, and I may follow up with you to hear more.
Goal Setting
There’s been no shortage of responses to the New York Times story about the organic-chemistry professor at New York University that Beth mentioned in last week’s newsletter.
After I wrote my story, which you can read here, I got a thoughtful email from Douglas Duncan, an emeritus professor of astrophysical and planetary sciences at the University of Colorado, who agreed to let me share his comments with you:
“Something not explicitly discussed is what the goal of a class is. I was taught in the 1960s science-teaching revolution. The goal of PSSC physics classes was to identify and inspire the best students to succeed in physics so that we could compete with the Russians. The classes succeeded at their goal. The goal of our football coach is to identify the best players and to get them to perform at a high level. To do that, he works the students very hard and number fail and drop out. This must be stressful. No one complains because it is agreed that the goal is to have the best team.
When the goals of a science class are not discussed (or perhaps even thought about carefully by the professor) they are hidden, or unclear, and the class-teaching approach may not be well-matched to the goals. Our society is much more technical than it was in the 1960s. We need more people trained in science, so a goal of getting more students to succeed seems appropriate to me. But unless we discuss and agree what the goals of teaching a particular science class are, we won’t be as good at meeting the goals as we could be.”
I wonder: Has your department agreed on goals for various courses? Do you think you’ve done a good job articulating the goals of your courses to students? I’d love to hear about models for doing this well. If you’ve got one, let me know: beckie.supiano@chronicle.com
Dear Students
Recently, I wrote about how one professor used a GroupMe of former students to gather advice for her class as they began a long-term group project. A number of readers wrote in to share various ways in which they’ve used former students as a resource for current ones. Several have them write letters:
- Merrie K. Winfrey, an instructional designer and learning architect at Radford University, created an assignment called “Letter to Future Freshmen” that’s modeled on one used in a study of social-belonging interventions. “Students will have the opportunity to hear from students who have been where they are and made it through, and then have the opportunity to give back to the next class,” Winfrey writes. “At the end of the fall semester, each student writes a letter to the next class of freshmen, giving their best advice for success given their experiences. Then the students decide as a class on the top pieces of advice for next year’s freshmen.”
- Karen Ishler gives her master’s of social work students extra credit on their final exam for writing a similar letter to future students. “I use these ‘letters’ in the next term in different ways,” writes Ishler, who is an adjunct instructor at Case Western University and the University of Akron. “In some classes, I ask students during an introductory exercise on the first day (done in pairs) to read a letter from a former student. In others, I extract what I believe are helpful tidbits from the letters and put them in an introductory slide or a posting on the LMS. I might later extract specific information about an upcoming assignment and share those pieces of advice with current students.”
- In a capstone course, Gayle Miller, department chair of legal studies at the College of Lake County, in Illinois, offers extra credit to students who write advice letters for introductory students. The letters have multiple benefits: “I collect the letters and I do post them for our Intro class students, but I also share them with the rest of the faculty in our department,” Miller says. “ These letters very often contain high praise and respect for our faculty, providing us all with great satisfaction that our efforts are valued and remembered.”
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
— Beckie
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