Yosef Bhatti & Caroline Grøn, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen

What students want. An analysis of student perceptions of good teaching

Our project examines students’ expectations to teachers and teaching at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. We are interested in average student preferences as well as heterogeneity in the preferences. In terms of research design, the study takes departure in a survey of about 200 students at the undergraduate and graduate level. Even though our object of study is a department with ambitious students, who achieved exceptionally high GPAs from high school, we find stronger preferences for lecture-style instruction and teaching confined to explaining the texts in the syllabus compared to more engaging teaching techniques that focuses on perspectives related to the syllabus. With respect to heterogeneity in the stated preferences we examine the influence of demographical, structural and subjective characteristics. Based on the existing literature one would expect women, older students, students from higher social classes, students who perceive themselves as talented and hard-working as well as students with limited paid work to be more positive of more engaging teaching forms. However, we find that student preferences related to teaching and teachers only to a limited extent can be explained by the factors investigated.