Where you sit in lecture says something about you, or at least so goes the conventional wisdom on college campuses: Slackers in the back, eager hand-raisers in the front.
It turns out, those stereotypes are just that. There is little relationship between where in the room a student sits and her grades, according to research published this month in FEBS openBio, peer-reviewed scientific journal.
The study, which is based on a combination of survey data from students and staff as well as data on how students performed on certain tasks, could have implications for the way lecturers approach their students. The results have already pushed the researchers to make changes in their own lectures, they say.
Students who sit in the back aren’t necessarily disengaged; instead, they may just be uncomfortable engaging in a format that requires them to interact verbally with the instructor in front of 200 people, said Melissa Lacey, a senior lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University in the U.K., and one of the co-authors of the study.
“I was one of the students that used to sit at the back and I was really engaged and I didn’t like it when people asked me questions,” she said. “From personal experience and from the study, I wouldn’t do that.”
Now, instead of trying to move students up to fill a gap near the front of the lecture hall, Lacey said she takes the microphone with her around the room to try to be near different students. She also offers more opportunities for students to ask questions anonymously.
“I’m just not going to help them learn, am I? by messing with where they sit,” she said.
The reasons why students sit where they do are complex, the researchers found, but one of the most common motivations was to be near friends. Those friend groups wound up with similar grades, regardless of where in the room they were located. The researchers haven’t determined yet whether students are getting similar grades because they sit together or whether they’re sitting together because they get similar grades.
But the study did provide the researchers with a better sense of how to approach these groups, said David Smith, a senior lecturer in biochemistry at Sheffield Hallam University and the other author of the study. “Breaking up these groups for the long term can be a bad thing, but in the short term it can be a good thing,” he said.
Now, when he poses a question to the class and asks students to talk it over in pairs, Smith said he instructs students to talk with someone sitting in front of or behind them so they can get a different perspective. If he was assigning a group project, on the other hand, he’d let students work in their peer clusters.
“They’re comfortable in those groups, so you need to be able to allow them to be comfortable — and mix it up a bit,” he said.
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