By MARTY LEVINE
Every faculty member is required to hold office hours — yet training on how to handle them is not part of Ph.D. programs.
When Department of Biological Sciences faculty member Dan Wetzel surveyed 1,225 students in STEM courses in 2020 and 2021, he discovered they were uncertain about attending office hours for many reasons. Not only did they have conflicts with the dates and times, they thought office hours were only for specific questions about the course content.
They also needed more reminders that office hours were available and even needed more encouragement to go. They felt unworthy of attending, ill-prepared to meet with professors, or embarrassed in general to attend.
Knowing from a previous Pitt survey of graduates in 2016 that “alumni who report doing very well in their careers had some kind of positive relationship with faculty while here at Pitt,” Wetzel designed the project, “Help me help you: Enhancing student perception and usage of office hours,” which won funding from the latest round of Discipline-Based Science Education Research (dB-SERC) awards for innovative education programs.
“Until this survey, we didn’t know why students weren’t coming to office hours,” Wetzel said. “What can we do to alleviate some of the barriers to office hours and for them to see it as a valuable experience?”
He remembered his own early days as a faculty member a decade ago, when he held office hours for the first time in his life. “I didn’t know what to do here,” he said. “We have no training on it. There is no pedagogy on it.”
In his previous Biostatistics classes, he only had one or two students per week visit him during office hours, and usually with technical questions about what is a very technical course.
This fall, after trying four methods in class to improve office hours use (as proposed in the “Help me help you” project), a third to a half of the class attended office hours each week.
At the beginning of the semester, he gathered students’ weekly schedules so he could set office hours when it was most convenient for them, rather than for him.
Second, he began discussing in class on day one why office hours were important.
Third, at least once a week he repeated his invitation to attend.
Fourth, he created specific topics each week for office hours, from designing resumes to using students’ new programming skills for other tasks outside of class.
A post-class survey, which he is just now assessing, should “gauge what their new perceptions of office hours would be” and see which of the four interventions worked best.
The ultimate goal is to create graduates who report, as alumni did in 2016, that the increased use of office hours led to a greater sense of self-efficacy and motivation, both inside and outside the classroom.
“Something worked this semester, because students were showing up. Did it change any of these other things? I don’t know…” until the data are analyzed, Wetzel says. Once the best of the four interventions is pinpointed, he hopes to adapt it to be used for larger classrooms than his Biostatistics course, which usually has 30 to 36 students.
He plans to enlist other faculty to implement the most effective improvements, perhaps among those who are already participating in the SEISMIC Collaboration — 10 institutions, including Pitt, aiming (according to its website) to “explore and improve equity and inclusion in foundational STEM courses,” of which Wetzel is a part.
That’s because data show that first-year and low-income students are much less likely to attend office hours and are less likely to have resources that they can use in lieu of office hours to get help outside of class. He hopes this pilot intervention will be of particular help to those students.
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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