Tonight’s ASMCUE 2022 poster session recording was entitled “A simple intervention to schedule unique weekly office hours increases student access.” Caitlin Lee Williams is a SPIRE postdoctoral fellow at UNC and taught at UNC-Pembroke. They spoke about barriers to office hours and little research on these barriers. Williams mentioned there is one large exploratory, survey-based study at a large R1 institution: Griffin 2014 and Chen 2017. The Griffin study was a quantitative analysis of Likert-scale questions, and Chen 2017 performed a qualitative analysis of open-ended questions. Williams noted that the main barriers these studies identified were:
- Convenience/access
- Misunderstanding of purpose
- Fear/Anxiety
Williams used a blend of the approaches used by Griffin and Chen. Williams also noted that UNC Pembroke is a rural, minority-serving institution with 700 biology majors. The project/study Williams designed was implemented in an upper-level biology class with six students. Williams developed a survey and had both weekly scheduled office hours and other times. The survey reached 45 students from all biology majors and six from the course. Most students reported using office hours only a few times per semester. Williams also identified that students reported even lower usage of biology office hours! Williams also asked: “Generally speaking, are office hours for biology courses held at a convenient time?” Students reported that office hours were sometimes convenient and varied. They then coded the qualitative open-ended responses. Over half noted “not worth the effort, 52%). This was a lot higher, Williams explained, than reported in previous studies. This aligns with the high percentage of UNCP students with jobs and other obligations. The other two categories of barriers to office hours in UNCP Biology were approachability (17.4%) and misunderstanding of the purpose (30.4%). Williams used When2Meet and told students to determine which hours would be most convenient for office hours. Upon analysis, Williams found that “scheduling unique weekly office hours improves access.” Some pros of this scheduling method is that student access to office hours increased and 100% positive feedback was received from students. The cons was that it took times for Williams to make time and schedule office hours. Williams noted they need more data to conclude if it helped students. This was an excellent example of a “Teaching as Research” (TAR) project at UNC, and I hope to learn more about this work.
