When participation becomes influence

This week, Dr Stuart Grey looks at the difference between students participating in teaching and feeling able to influence it.

The episode examines a study of 1,713 final-year students in Colombia, where expressive voice accounted for a modest part of the relationship between collaborative learning and academic achievement. It then considers research on care and engagement, Sheffield Hallam's move away from a university-wide module evaluation process, and the evidence standards universities still need when student voice becomes more local.

In This Episode

• Why participation and influence are different dimensions of student engagement.
• What the Colombian study can and cannot tell us about expressive voice and achievement.
• How care, clarity, interaction, and assessment design shape engagement.
• Why changing the unit of a survey may not resolve weak participation.
• What institutional governance is needed when Schools use different feedback methods.
• How open comments can distinguish participation, influence, response, care, and clarity.

Research

• Student voice improves outcomes when students can shape teaching
• Student engagement depends on visible care, not just teaching technique

Across the Sector

• Sheffield Hallam's module evaluation reset shows why local student voice still needs governance
• OfS NSS student characteristics data adds provider typologies, but key equity splits are missing

Practical Implication

If module evaluation becomes more local, retain a small shared evidence framework. Record what was asked, who could respond, how the evidence was interpreted, who owns the response, and what students were told afterwards.

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Student Voice Weekly. I'm Dr Stuart Grey, founder of Student Voice.

This week, I want to talk about a distinction that looks quite small at first, but matters in teaching: the difference between participation and influence.

A student can attend regularly. They can contribute to group work, complete the assessment, and fill in the module evaluation. Those are all forms of participation.

But they do not necessarily tell us whether the student felt able to ask for clarification, question an approach, express a preference, or suggest that something should change.

Today, I'd like to look at why that distinction matters for learning, and what it means for universities reconsidering their module evaluation systems.

The lead paper in this week's newsletter is a study by Uriel Eduardo Torres Castro and Clelia Pineda-Baez. They analysed data from one thousand, seven hundred and thirteen final-year students, at six accredited private universities in Colombia. The study examined several forms of student engagement, and their relationship with academic achievement.

Collaborative learning and student-faculty interaction were the two engagement measures that retained a clear association with grade point average in the full model. The paper then asked whether student agency helped to explain part of that relationship.

The most relevant measure was expressive voice: whether students felt able to share their preferences and opinions in class. Expressive voice accounted for a modest part of the relationship between collaborative learning and achievement: around six per cent of the total effect. It also mediated part of the relationship between student-faculty interaction and achievement.

That is an interesting result, but it needs careful interpretation.

The study is based on final-year students in six private Colombian universities. It uses statistical modelling, so it identifies relationships. It does not prove that speaking up causes a higher grade. And the indirect effect is small. We should not turn six per cent into a dramatic claim.

What the paper does provide is a more precise account of student voice within teaching. It suggests that engagement may be more educationally useful when students can do something with it. They can ask a question. They can indicate that an explanation has not landed. They can propose a different example, or express a view about how the class is working.

This is different from treating voice as something that happens after teaching, when a student receives a survey link. The paper places voice inside the learning process itself.

I still teach part-time at the University of Glasgow, and this distinction feels recognisable in practice. A class can be busy, and apparently engaged, while students remain cautious about saying that they are confused. Equally, a quieter class may still contain useful forms of agency, if students have another route to ask questions or influence what happens next.

For teaching teams, the useful question is not only whether students participated. It is whether the environment made it reasonable for them to express a preference, or raise a difficulty, including when they did not want to do that publicly, in the room.

The second paper in the newsletter helps to explain what that environment might involve.

Yan Song, Qingyu Xu, and Di Hu combined interviews with teachers and students, with survey data from three thousand, eight hundred and nineteen undergraduates across four Chinese universities. They examined the teaching strategies associated with student engagement.

The study identified familiar features of good teaching: relevant material, clear explanation, meaningful interaction, sensible distribution of assessment, and attention to students' learning needs.

Its central argument is that care helps those strategies work.

Here, care is not simply friendliness. It is the practice of noticing where students are struggling, responding to that information, and adjusting teaching where appropriate.

The national context is different, so this is not a benchmark that UK institutions can simply import. But it offers a useful way of reading engagement evidence. If participation is low, the explanation may involve unclear expectations, assessment bunching, weak interaction, or technology that creates extra effort. Describing the student as unmotivated may miss the conditions around the behaviour.

Taken together, the two studies suggest that student agency depends partly on the quality of the teaching relationship. Students need credible opportunities to speak, and some evidence that speaking will be met with attention, rather than defensiveness or silence.

That brings us to Sheffield Hallam's decision to move away from one university-wide Module Evaluation Questionnaire, from the academic year starting in twenty twenty-six.

From September, Schools and Institutes will be responsible for local student voice activity, aligned with their courses and students.

The decision follows fairly weak participation in the existing and proposed survey models. Sheffield Hallam reported an average response rate of nineteen per cent for module evaluations in the twenty twenty-four to twenty twenty-five academic year.

A course-level questionnaire was then piloted across three of its nine Schools and Institutes. It covered eight thousand, two hundred and eighty-seven students in the first trimester, and achieved a response rate of eleven per cent.

Those figures do not tell us that surveys have no value. They do show why the university concluded that changing from a module questionnaire to a course questionnaire was not enough. The unit of collection changed. The underlying engagement problem remained.

More local, in-class, and conversational methods may produce feedback while there is still time to use it. They can also fit the teaching context more closely. A laboratory course, a placement module, and a large first-year lecture may need different ways of hearing from students.

The difficult part is what happens at institutional level.

Once Schools use different questions, timings, and methods, the evidence becomes harder to compare. A conversation in class may be very useful to the teacher, but leave little record for a programme review. A short pulse survey may identify a pattern, but only if someone knows how many students responded, and what happened afterwards.

Sheffield Hallam's plans retain formal oversight through review meetings, institutional committees, and a new Student Voice Oversight Group. That is important. Local flexibility works best when the university remains clear about the minimum evidence it needs, how themes are escalated, and how action is recorded.

I think there are three parts to a workable approach.

First, there should be local listening, close enough to teaching for staff and students to use it.

Second, there should be a small common evidence framework, so the institution can still identify patterns across courses and Schools.

And third, there should be a visible route from feedback to response, including an explanation when a suggested change is not possible.

This does not require every course to ask an identical set of questions. It does require some shared definitions. Universities need to know what was asked, who had an opportunity to respond, how the evidence was interpreted, and where the resulting action sits.

Open comments are especially useful here, because they can preserve distinctions that a broad engagement score loses.

If I were analysing comments on this topic, I would want to distinguish between participation, influence, and response.

Participation comments describe whether students attended, contributed, or used the available channel.

Influence comments describe whether they could question, suggest, clarify, or shape an aspect of teaching.

And response comments describe what staff did next, and whether students could see that their contribution had been considered.

I would also look separately at care and clarity.

A student who says, "I stopped attending because I never understood what we were meant to prepare," is describing something different from a student who says the session felt irrelevant, or that raising concerns made no difference.

Those comments point towards different decisions about course design, communication, or the feedback process itself.

The Office for Students update to the N S S student characteristics data adds a related caution.

The new provider typologies give institutions more context for comparison. But some equity-related characteristics are missing from the July release, because of data issues.

That is a reminder that published evidence is always partial. Local listening needs to help fill known gaps, while committees remain clear about who is, and is not, represented in the data.

So, the practical conclusion this week is to review student voice as part of teaching, rather than only as an evaluation process.

Ask whether students can influence the learning environment while the course is running.

If module evaluation is becoming more local, agree the small amount of common evidence needed to retain institutional oversight.

And keep a record of what students raised, how it was interpreted, and what followed.

That is it for this week.

The full research summaries and sector links are in Student Voice Weekly. You can subscribe at studentvoice.ai, if you would like the newsletter each Friday.

And, if this episode was useful, please share it with a colleague working on teaching, quality, or student experience.