According to recent research from the University of Bath School of Management, university students who participate in interactive seminars in person perform better on exams than those who do not, maybe to the tune of nearly a full grade.
During the course of two years, researchers evaluated a business economics course taken by about 200 students annually. The study ‘Seminar attendance, lecture capture, and disability adjustments: intuition and evidence’ examined the relationship between seminar attendance, lecture recordings, and student performance at the postgraduate level, and also shed some light on the effectiveness of strategies designed to level the playing field for students facing disabilities.
“We wanted to test the widespread belief in academia that in-person attendance leads to better exam performance than non-attendance, and/or reliance on recorded lectures. We also wanted to test our intuition on what other factors influence student performance,” said Dr. Rob Branston, Senior Lecturer at the School of Management.
“The study showed that those attending every seminar in the semester resulted in an 8 percent higher result than those who did not attend this amounts to almost a full grade difference in performance. We also found that moderate or complementary use of lecture recordings was beneficial for student performance, while large-scale use had no significant positive or negative impact,” Dr. Branston, who is also a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, said.
This is important and an area that sometimes causes anxiety amongst students, who might think, will I be at a disadvantage because I haven’t studied anything like this before? It was good to find this was not the case.
Dr. Marc Betton
While Dr. Branston acknowledged that the study was unable to assess the impact of students’ varying levels of motivation, she argued that it was reasonable to anticipate that the majority of postgraduate students who were paying for their education would be motivated to some extent.
“One potential explanation for the higher grades associated with seminar attendance could lie in the nature of the seminars themselves they are interactive, with lively discussion, and contributions from students. It depends what students bring to the seminar but that interactive nature could be key,” said co-author Dr. Marc Betton, who jointly taught the class with Dr. Branston.
The researchers argued that it was preferable to attend lectures and then go over any content that was covered afterwards, make up for any lectures that were occasionally missed, or both than to just watch recorded lectures without actually being present.
“It is hard to concentrate for an entire two hour lecture, even with a brief break in the middle, so it is reasonable to think most students may need to clarify at least some of the content delivered after the lecture and hence reinforce their knowledge,” Dr. Branston said.
“Essentially, they are benefiting from the combined learning experience offered by in-person attendance and the opportunity to discuss or ask questions with online review of recorded lectures. We think it is the exposure to these two environments that creates an advantage over students who might rely solely on attendance or reviewing video recordings of a lecture, as the latter is a passive, one-way experience,” he said.
A one-semester introduction to business economics was the subject of the data collection course, which was taken by about 200 postgraduate students annually enrolled in different MSc degree programs. The sample consisted of students who undertook the module during either the 2017/18 or the 2018/19 academic years.
Attendance at both lectures and seminars was voluntary. The lectures were given in-person and live, and they were also filmed so that students could revisit them at their own convenience.
Dr. Branston said the research suggested that academics should promote both attendance and the use of lecture recordings, while also highlighting that students would be ill-advised to replace live lectures completely with watching recordings.
According to him, academics should be given the time and instruction to research their own instruction, particularly when it comes to evaluating watching statistics and what they suggest about what is working and what students may be having trouble with.
“We also looked at the effect of disability and further found an absence of any statistically significant difference in the performance of students with disability access plans relative to other students. That suggests our university’s measures to enhance equity for students with disabilities are effective,” he added.
However, Dr. Branston pointed out that the sample size was rather constrained in this regard and that additional study in this area would be beneficial, particularly from the perspective of the experiences and perspectives of students with impairments.
Dr. Branston and Dr. Betton were also encouraged to find that students who came from non-English language speaking countries were not at a performance disadvantage, and that prior knowledge of a subject did not appear to influence exam performance, helped by the course being taught from first principles.
“This is important and an area that sometimes causes anxiety amongst students, who might think, will I be at a disadvantage because I haven’t studied anything like this before? It was good to find this was not the case,” Dr. Betton said.
