Assignment 3: Emotion Design Probe

In this assignment, my partner and I each attended a lecture to observe and identify the dissatisfactions experienced by students in order to bring about suggestions to improve their learning experiences.

We conducted our studies using two methods:

- Ethnography, which we would sit in LTs to observe the way lecturers conduct their lessons as well as students' reactions during class. This method was chosen as we thought it would provide us an overview of problem students faced during lecture. In addition, only experiencing the environment ourselves, we would be able to understand what are the likely reasons leading to any form of behaviour in class. This method was chosen as we hope to gain a better idea of what are the problems faced by students as well as understanding their main concerns.

- Laddering, which would be conducted by inviting a few students from the class to a one-on-one interview and engaging them in a series questions that went of mainly with asinking why.

I personally attended a lecture class on Sociology of Family at LT9 (2pm - 4pm).

Ethnography

Here are my obervations while sitting through the 2-hour lesson...

The lecturer begun her lesson on dot as the topic for the say was said to be long. By 2.54pm, several students were observed to be walking in and out of the theatre in the middle of the class for short breaks as some came back holding drinks in their hands. The others in the theatre displayed signs of jadedness and distraction as they did arm stretchings; yawnings; chatting with friends and surfing the internet on their laptops. There was also mumblings going on in the class especially at the back of the theatre.

In terms of information provision, it was a one-way communication from lecturer to students. No verbal feedback was requested from the lecturer to find out if they understood what she was saying. During the lecture, the lecturer made several changes to her slides thus resulting in some missing new slides from the students’ copy. Numerous students flipped through their papers to look for the missing slides before the lecturer announced the changes (Click here for video). Grumblings were heard from some students among themselves and the mumblings could be heard from the entire theatre. Many were busy copying the missing details and weren’t paying much attention to what the lecturer was saying. Further, the presentation slides were also quite cramped. There was no enough space between each bullet point’s content, hence making it hard to read (picture below).

Nonetheless, the lecturer was humourous. Examples given during the lecture were mostly from life experiences and were of course relevant to the concepts and made easier for understanding. She did attempt to obtain students’ response by asking a “yes, no” question however the theatre remained quiet. But, her facial and physical actions were hilarious. The students were laughing and looking more attentive after each joke she made. Before the lesson officially ends, the lecturer provided an overview of the next lecture using a video from YouTube (picture below). However, not feedback was asked from the class.

Laddering

I conducted laddering on three students from the class. They are Ethel (below top), Bryant and QiXiang (below bottom) . The interview revealed the following:

Dissatisfactions
•Wordy slides
•Too many slides
•No clear sequence in topic flow
•Last minute changes to slides

Satisfactions
•Examples which students can relate to
•Funny delivery

Some Individual Thoughts After the Session

It was found that the students' concern for what they listed as dislikes are mainly associated to the conseuqence of not achieving good grades. Not only is information provided on their slides important to them for future references during revision, they are infact very concerned with how the lecturer deliver the lessons as the way the lecturer conducted the class affects their attentiveness and the amount of information they take during class. The laddering sessions provided me a more in-depth understanding on how students feel about the issues they identified as satisfactory as well as dissatisfactory. Thus identifying their core concerns or needs. This would help us in our research to come up with solutions that addresses directly at their core concerns.

On other hand, my ethnography observations gave be a broader spect of other problems faced by majority students in the class. In this case, I managed to identify addition problems that would build on from what my fellow respondents mentioned during the laddering process:

• In-between-class break
  As most lecturers let students off for short breaks during their classes, it has somehow a cultural thing to students as almost every students expect a break. Hence, when they are not given relevant breaks, they begun losing their attentions and engage in other activities such as chatting.
  
• Slides
  There are many students who prepare themselves with printed lecture slides before class, hence lecturers should not make too many changes to the slides as students may lose track or focused only on taking down the slide content.
  
• Interesting delivery
  This would help to get students' attention after a good laugh on a joke.
  
• Feedback
  It would be nice for lecturers to check with students if they have any question before wrapping up the lesson.

I feel that both our research methods complemented each other in terms of the information gotten as one identified more information (ethnography) with no much in-depth explanation while the other provided depth (laddering) to a few identified issue. On other hand, laddering had also helped me to confirm some of my observations from enthnography, however in that case, I was able to gain a better idea of the reasons why students are either satisfied or dissatisfied. Thus, helping me to generate recommendations that would really improve their learning experiences.

Combined Findings and Recommendations

After conducting separate observations and interviews with students from different lecture classes, me and my partner (Jennifer) came up with a few recommendations. But before that, here are the addtional problems she found from her trip to the lesson on Social Cognition:

• Time wasted on technical problems
• Too many slides (96 slides, but from my experience that was not the worst... hahah!)
• Insufficient “table” space
• No space around the seat to put drinks

And finally our recommendations:

• Technical
  –Workshops for lecturers to learn device activation
  –Should standardize technology used in all LT
  –Having a cup holder on each seat
  –There should be more power points installed in each LT
  
• Cultural
  –Lecturers should give breaks in between lectures
  
• Others
  –Lecturers should:
  -Upload only final slides
  -Try to inject humour into his/her lecture
  -Use examples that students can relate to
  -Leave more spaces between each point in slides
  -Leave blanks in the lecture notes
  -Always get feedbacks from students before ending the class