Rethinking Feedback and Guidance Hours: A Group

Feedback and Guidance Hours at universities are often underused, with many tutors passing the time waiting for student who never turn up. A key question is how do politics lecturers convince more students to turn up to these contact hours? Often students, when asked have said that they feel awkward going to see their lecturers and tutors one-on-one. However, this term when presenting office hours as a group activity, attendance has increased. This paper will explore the hypothesis that feedback and guidance hours gain more attendance when presented as a group activity. Feedback and Guidance hours and listed as contact hours for students. However, despite this, most hours are not used or only end up having people turn up during exams or essay deadlines. Given that the point of feedback and guidance hours is not just remedial but also to encourage participation and engagement in the curriculum they are not being used well. Furthermore, students seem to associate a stigma with attending these hours or feel nervous attending one-on-one. Furthermore, the students who do attend for advice on essays tend to be the strongest performing students who need the help the least. Given that these hours are viewed as important and are often statutory and yet are being underused, methods to change up the way feedback and guidance hours are used are interesting and can yield interesting results. This paper will explore how presenting office hours as a group activity has increased attendance. It will explore how the attendance improved when presenting the idea of office hours as a group activity as opposed to control groups that did not similarly present office hours. It will also explore student feedback to these hours and how they engaged with these newly presented hours and what they enjoyed about them. It will conclude that this system is a better way to boost turnout to feedback and guidance hours and build a strong learning community within a politics department. It is based on live data gathered during two terms at the university of York taking all the seminar leaders on one module (Introduction to Democratic Politics), who agreed to log the number of students who attended their feedback and guidance hours each week in order to serve as a control group. It will use these logs to show that presenting feedback and guidance hours as a group activity increases turnout and creates a regular attendance at these hours. The paper will also include the results of end-of-term anonymous surveys where feedback has been asked for, and also look at the effects of the implementation of the feedback from the first term to the second term. It will then conclude that presenting feedback and guidance hours as a group activity increases the turnout overall, is beneficial for the students, and is a strong opportunity to encourage students not only to academically excel but to help them feel more involved in their learning community.