Recap: When and Why Students Participate in Class

On Wednesday, February 18, CETL was excited to host a workshop on “When and Why Students Participate in Class” with our colleague Dr. Liz Norell. Liz is CETL’s Associate Director of Instructional Support and the author of The Present Professor: Authenticity and Transformational Teaching. This workshop was based on her ongoing research into student participation and is a follow-up to last fall’s event “When and Why Do Students Read for Class?” Citing a deluge of articles that highlight a “crisis in student engagement,” Liz offered insights for instructors looking to harness their students’ attention.

She began by asking attendees to unpack what they mean by “student participation” in the first place. Do they assess it? How were they communicating those expectations to their students? She cautioned instructors to question their assumptions about what student participation should look like. “What looks like disengagement might actually be a sign of engagement,” she said, referencing images of students doodling or staring out a window. She also suggested that when we expect students to participate in only one way (such as speaking out loud), we might overload their cognitive capacity in a way that prevents the actual attention that learning requires.

Liz then identified three core barriers to student participation with some suggestions for overcoming them:

• Lack of trust or psychological safety. Humans are wired to crave social approval and acceptance. When we spend time creating positive learning environments, students are more trusting and more willing to make themselves vulnerable by participating in class.
• Low motivation or perceived relevance. Students often enroll in our courses to fulfill distribution requirements and not because they are interested in the subject matter. The more we can make our classroom activities relevant to our students’ lives and more like “learning in the wild” (i.e. with a sense of curiosity-driven inquiry), the more engaged they will be.
• Unclear expectations for participation. Research shows that students perform better when they know what is expected of them. The more transparent we are about the varieties of participation we hope to see, as well as our measures for assessment, the more self-motivated students will be to participate.

Attendees then heard from three of Liz’s former students who shared when and why they participated in class. Two of the students explained that they were primarily motivated by the personal relationships they developed with their professors and fellow classmates over the course of a semester. A third student offered that she engaged more when professors imbued their classes with their own personalities and made lively and engaging activities and lectures. 

Liz wrapped up by providing a few “modest suggestions” for encouraging student participation that are rooted in self-determination theory and cognitive science:

• Humans have a strong desire to be social. Encourage students to engage with each other, rather than always going through the instructor as a mediator.
• Harness students’ natural curiosity by “time chunking,” or organizing activities in fifteen-minute chunks, and “interleaving” key ideas, or jumping from topic to topic.
• Help students develop a sense of autonomy by allowing them to set their own participation goals for the semester.
• Activate motivation by demonstrating your own enthusiasm for a subject (in an authentic way, of course).
• Ensure that student work is relevant and purposeful.
• Build confidence in students, but especially in those who appear discouraged or disengaged.

You can explore the slides from this event, which include links to research and other resources in the presenter notes. As always, if you’d like to schedule a 1-on-1 consultation with a CETL expert, you can do that here.