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A Focus Group Study of Student Attitudes to Lectures
Hitchens, M. and Lister, R.
This paper reports on the findings from focus groups,
conducted at Macquarie University, on the attitudes of
computing students to lectures. Students felt that two
things were vital for a good lecture: (1) that the lecturer
goes beyond what is written in the lecture notes; (2) that
the lecture is interactive, by which students meant that the
lecturer asks if students understand concepts and adjusts
the delivery accordingly, and also the lecturer answers the
students' questions. The students in the focus groups also
discussed what makes for a bad lectures: (1) lecturers
reading straight from slides; (2) lecturers who 'blame the
students', by saying that students don't work hard enough
and are too lazy to turn up to lectures; and (3) lecturers
who cover the material too slowly or too quickly. The
most prominent reason given for not attending lectures
was the timetabling of lectures in such a way that students
had too few classes in one day to make the sojourn to
university worthwhile. Any university seeking to
improve attendance at lectures should perhaps look as
much to improving its timetabling practices as it does to
improving the practices of its individual lecturers. |
Cite as: Hitchens, M. and Lister, R. (2009). A Focus Group Study of Student Attitudes to Lectures. In Proc. Eleventh Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE 2009), Wellington, New Zealand. CRPIT, 95. Hamilton, M. and Clear, T., Eds. ACS. 93-100. |
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