Evaluating students’ experience of tuition in S217

Project leader(s): Adam FreemanAnne-Katrin Klehe
Theme: Supporting students
Faculty: STEM
Status: Current
Dates: May 2023 to September 2025

Great effort and time is spent by Associate Lecturers (ALs) on delivering tutorials. Uptake of tutorials in all modules is low. This investigation will concentrate on the experience of students on S217, a second level physics module. This project will lay groundwork to inform the design of a forthcoming tuition intervention on S217.

In the past year, both investigators have lead pilot intervention studies affecting a small number of students on how they thought the current tuition strategy in S217 could be enhanced. Before examining how a module-wide intervention along the previous lines would affect the students, we suggest to survey current (and potentially past) students on S217 about their experiences of tutorials and other forms of tuition across modules. Students will bring to S217 their perceptions from other modules but also expectations of how they would like to be taught.

We plan to run a questionnaire survey open to S217 students in March 2024 - long enough in the module progression to have experienced the current tuition delivery, but far enough in advance of the exam not to be affected by the need for exam preparations. This survey would then be followed by focus groups with a selected group of students to gain more detailed insights into the responses received in the survey. Students will be offered the opportunity to participate in focus group discussions.

This will allow us to evaluate the current tuition strategy on this core Level 2 module and to inform intervention in 24J, as well as design of the updated replacement module due to start in 2025.