Let students shape the question

This week, Dr Stuart Grey asks who gets to decide what universities ask students in the first place.

Drawing on papers he read this week, his own teaching, and Student Voice's national NSS comment analysis, Stuart explores what changes when students help frame the question, produce the evidence, and interpret what it means.

In This Episode

Why student-led consultation can change the quality of wellbeing evidence.
What Bangor University's student consultants added by working across the whole evidence pipeline.
What Student Voice's Feedback and Student Support categories reveal beyond the headline average.
What a study of more than 1,200 students reveals about self-doubt and feedback-seeking.
How CAH codes support like-for-like subject comparisons without becoming a league table.
Why a category is only a starting point when one comment can cover several experiences.
How earlier student involvement can carry through into curriculum review and routine practice.

Research

Across the Sector

Student Voice Evidence

Practical Implication

Bring students into the evidence process before the questions and proposed solutions are fixed. Use categories and CAH comparisons to locate patterns, then read the comments in context and turn the shared interpretation into routine practice.

About This Recording

This episode was recorded by Dr Stuart Grey. The transcript was prepared from the edited recording and lightly corrected for names, terminology, and readability.

Subscribe to The Student Voice Weekly.

Transcript

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

This week I've been thinking about a fairly simple question. Who gets to decide what we ask students in the first place?

So today I'd like to talk about what changes when students actually help shape the questions they are asked.

I still teach part-time at the University of Glasgow, and I see this in quite ordinary conversations with students. You can ask a perfectly sensible question and get a useful answer, but sometimes a really valuable moment is when a student says, actually, that is not the issue. Here's what the real issue is.

That's happened to me enough times that I try and pay attention to it. And if we define the problem too tightly before the conversation starts, we can collect very neat data about the wrong thing.

The paper I read this week was really interesting. It was from the Barometer Project at Bangor University.

So in this study, undergraduate and postgraduate students were trained as consultants for the university's mental health and wellbeing strategy. They helped design the consultation activities, spoke to other students, gathered qualitative evidence, and helped interpret what came back.

What interested me was not simply that students took part. Universities involve students in lots of projects. The important bit for me was that they had a role in producing the evidence itself.

So the work itself pointed towards clearer communication about services, more responsive resources, and wider peer-led support. The student consultants also described growing in confidence, leadership, and their understanding of how the university worked, which I thought was really interesting.

Now, this is just one case study, and I will not take it and say every university should copy this model exactly. Students doing this work need training, safeguarding, referral routes, and they should not be asked to carry responsibility that belongs to wellbeing professionals.

But that said, I thought it was really interesting. As well as that, it also showed that having students there for the entire pipeline can make a real difference to the outcomes of these projects.

So a student may talk about isolation, uncertainty, or difficulty asking for help, and a student consultant may notice an assumption in the consultation that staff have simply stopped seeing.

So for me, the value of the project is not just more student participation. It's better evidence because students helped decide how that evidence was created and had a role in creating it.

That made me go back into our own Student Support category and our own Student Voice AI dataset.

So across more than 20,000 NSS comments about student support, seven in ten were positive. That is a strong result, and it's worth saying that. Students very often recognise quick, human help and staff who actually resolve a problem.

But as always, it pays to dive a little deeper. The sentiment index, so that's positive sentiment minus negative sentiment, for disabled students was about seven points lower than it was for students who were not disabled.

So the overall story is positive, but the experience is not equally positive. That gap gives you a reason to go back and ask about access and response times, et cetera, reading the actual comments as well.

There were also subject differences. So in subjects allied to medicine, the support sentiment index was around 40, whereas in law it was in the mid-20s.

We get those comparisons through CAH codes, so the Common Aggregation Hierarchy, which is used across the sector here in the UK.

So a law course and a course in a health subject can have very different timetables, placement patterns, student profiles, and routes into support. And the CAH comparison we do helps us ask whether a pattern is local, shaped by discipline, or part of something wider.

It still does not tell me the cause, right? We've got to look at the actual comments for that. But again, it's a really good first start.

So another paper I read this week made me think about the students we don't hear from directly.

Qiang Guo and Yueting Xu studied just over 1,200 undergraduates. They separated two kinds of feedback-seeking. One is monitoring, where students watch closely for feedback and try to pick up on signals from the lecturer. There is inquiry, where they actually ask somebody for more clarification or help.

So students with stronger self-esteem are more likely to do both, while self-doubt worked very differently. These students still monitored their feedback, but they were much less likely to ask a question.

I think that is a really useful distinction for everyone teaching. It's because if a student does not come to a feedback session or ask for clarification, it's easy to assume they're not engaged. But they may be very engaged, but just afraid of pushing over that hump to actually ask the question.

So I also looked at the Feedback category in our own sector data. So that's about 25,000 NSS comments about feedback, and the sentiment index was about minus 10 overall. Young and full-time students were around minus 16. Mature students were positive.

So perhaps some of this difference is due to the confidence that comes with the age of the students. Again, the data does not give the whole explanation. But if we dive in and read the comments, we can better understand what the students' issues are.

So this is also why I'm careful about broad labels when analysing comments. So a student may use the word wellbeing, but the action could sit somewhere else. It might be an impossible timetable coupled with paid work. It might be assessment bunching, an inaccessible system, who knows, but it might simply be not knowing who to contact.

So the category is just a starting point. And then we go from there. Reading that comment, understanding those comments in context, really helps.

So one comment can move between several different things. A student can be positive about a lecturer, frustrated by late feedback, and worried about the workload in the same paragraph. That's why you work at sentence level, and we want to extract all that really rich information we can from the comments.

So the categories we use also give a structure to that data, allowing us to see patterns, et cetera. But we don't want to decide a structure in advance of what students are allowed to tell us.

So I saw the same idea in two sector pieces this week.

Oluwatomisin Osinubi, writing for Advance HE, argues that student partnership should begin before consultation. That rings true for me. If students first see a proposal when the main decisions have already been made, they can comment on that proposal, but you've lost something there by not having them help frame that problem in the first place and decide which direction and which questions you should be asking, basically.

So students experience housing, money, wellbeing, identity, and learning all at once, and universities often divide those things between different teams. But bringing students in earlier is one way of spotting the connections before your institution produces five different action plans that are unconnected, when in fact we should be trying to treat it as one more joined-up experience.

So also this week at Northampton, I read about student listening rooms and feedback activities helping to shape an Inclusive Curriculum Toolkit, which has about 50 resources in it, which is great.

What I liked about this Northampton example was where the evidence ended up, in that it was built into curriculum development, periodic review, academic induction, and staff development. So it really fed through into lots of different areas in the institution.

So that is the movement, fundamentally, I want to see: from a comment, or set of comments, or a few thousand comments, to a shared interpretation, to some changes being made to routine practice to help improve the student experience.

So that's it for this week. The papers I've mentioned, the sector examples, all the data, and the written summaries are all in Student Voice Weekly.

If you'd like those in one place each Friday, you can subscribe to the newsletter at studentvoice.ai. And if this was useful, please share the episode with a colleague or leave a review in your podcast app.

Thanks.