Increasing student numbers: diminishing tutor insight?

Abstract

This paper was an interim summary of 12 years research, largely action research, into the students’ perspective on their teaching and learning. It started as a presentation to the Welsh Branch of the British Psychological Society, developed through a UWIC learning and teaching conference into this paper (and the three subsequent versions that it spawned). The research began with colleagues in the Open University, grew into a similar project with non-distance learners in three UK universities (collaborating with colleagues in Loughborough and Leicester Universities) and pursued further in extensive collaborative research with a colleague here in UWIC which resulted in the development of a psychometric scale to gain insights into students’ perceived levels of academic confidence. In essence, the paper argues that if we are to teach students effectively we have to know something about them and in today’s HE climate teachers might have to resort to psychometrically derived knowledge.