Office Hours Attendance Patterns: 4 Years at a Mid-Size Research University
A professor tracked office hours attendance across 4 years of teaching. The patterns by week, course type, and student demographic. What encourages attendance and what does not.
Every faculty member holds office hours. As with so many things in the US university, that fact alone makes this feature of university life a “standard” part of university life. The rest is history. Earlier this year, a mid-size research university studied attendance at office hours over four years among a total of 1,600 students. Why such a very valuable resource is used by so few students is outlined below.
The Overall Pattern
One result that jumped out from this data is that the median student attended office hours twice in their undergraduate career, spread out over four years. About a third of students attended office hours at least once during their time at the university, but only about 18% of students attended four or more times, and 49% of students attended office hours not at all.
The First-Visit Pattern
First-Visit Pattern. The frequent attenders had their first visit to the professor’s office hours very early in their freshman year. They typically attended within the first three weeks of the beginning of the semester. These students then attended office hours in subsequent semesters, but rarely in a subsequent semester if they did not attend in the first semester.
The Demographic Pattern
There were significant differences in attendance by student demographic characteristics. For instance, students whose parents had a college degree attended office hours at significantly higher rates than did first generation students, controlling for GPA. Likewise, students from higher income backgrounds attended at significantly higher rates than their lower income peers, again controlling for GPA. This reflects the fact that there is knowledge about how to negotiate the university and its resources that is formal and available to some but not others. Skip that.
The Academic Difficulty Pattern
It was surprising to see that students who were really struggling with a particular class attended less often than those who were performing well. The students that would most benefit from discussing the class with the teacher of that class were the least likely to seek it out. (A) further reason why academic difficulty is typically something that students are hesitant to discuss in formal settings outside of class, including office hours.
I’ve been sitting on this for a week now so it’s going up today.
What Frequent Attenders Did Differently
Most frequent attenders at office hours go for reasons other than academic crisis, such as asking about opportunities to do research with faculty, asking about career paths, or asking for feedback on papers written for other contexts. These students establish a relationship with the faculty member and as a result of this relationship, find it less awkward to visit the faculty member’s office for academic reasons later on.
The Faculty Loneliness
There is also much that can be gleaned from faculty’s perspectives about the scheduling of office hours. For the majority of hours scheduled, no students showed up. Faculty told me of how they spent the time of office hours doing other work. As a result, the huge underutilized resource of higher education (the faculty member’s time outside of class) remained just that – a huge underutilized resource.
The Faculty Variation
For a long time we thought that the main problem with office hours was that faculty did not hold enough of them. But then we looked at the data for the number of students who attended each faculty member’s office hours, and we saw that there was a huge amount of variation from faculty member to faculty member. Some faculty members had many more students attend their office hours than others. We found that three things distinguished the faculty members who had many more students attend their office hours from those who had fewer: the location where they held their office hours, how they began their conversations with students, and how they treated students in those conversations.
What Students Should Do
In terms of strategy, there are several approaches that can be taken by individual students to make use of faculty office hours in order to develop stronger relations with faculty. First, and most importantly, students should go to faculty office hours in the first three weeks of a semester, prior to having any specific question for the instructor. Use the early visits to introduce yourself and to ask about general aspects of the course or field, such as recommended readings for those outside of the course, extra resources for students who are having difficulty with material in the course, ways in which the material in the course can be applied in other contexts, etc. These early visits establish a relationship that will make it easier to go to the instructor’s office hours for specific reasons in the latter part of the semester, and the benefits of such relations can often be compounded over the years in which a student is enrolled as a student at a university.
What Universities Could Do
A second set of observations concern the structure of office hours and how universities might make better use of them. As currently configured, the structure of office hours produces results that depend on student knowledge about how to use them. In fact, universities can “normalize” use of office hours, particularly for first generation college students, and modestly improve attendance and even better student/faculty relations over time.
I usually go with the second option, over the first.
The Broader Picture
Implicit knowledge about how to utilize resources on campus—like writing centers, advisors, and various university offices—and make the most of them affects how students from different backgrounds perform in school. Students can reap great rewards from university resources when universities make students aware of these resources and help them understand how best to use them. Until then, these resources will continue to widen achievement gaps between demographically-impoverished students and their more affluent peers.
The Faculty Side
There are clearly mixed feelings here. On the one hand, there is the faculty member’s time that is being reserved for these office hours and it is being used for other purposes when no students show up. On the other hand, faculty members want students to come to their office hours, not only to establish a good relationship with them, but also for the faculty member to receive feedback about the course from the students who are taking it.
The Universities That Have Improved Attendance
There are a few universities that have developed programs to increase attendance of office hours. To increase attendance of office hours students in first-year seminars are required to go to a certain number of hours of office hours. Some universities even have “office hour orientation” where new students can go to meetings with faculty members during welcome week to introduce themselves. In addition, many universities have faculty hold informal “drop-in hours” where students can attend to talk with faculty members in an informal setting.
The Specific Practices That Help
For students interested in getting into the habit of going to office hours, a number of practices can be very helpful. Schedule your first visit as a hard calendar appointment rather than leave it as an open intention to go sometime. Go prepared with one or two topics you want to cover instead of going in with a bunch of vague questions. Treat your time in the professor’s office as professional development rather than as a place where you can get the professor to help you with your academic problems. (This is not to say that the professor won’t help you with your academic problems, only that framing your time in this way changes the nature of your experience and increases the value of subsequent meetings.)
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