As I type these words, I’m sitting in my office, because I have to be: It’s my office hours. The reason I can write this column is because my students — like your students, I would guess — don’t make much use of my office hours.
There’s always a line of students outside my door right before an assignment is due, and I am sure to see some unhappy students in the days after I hand out grades. But otherwise, my office hours are a lonely time. I’m not really complaining; I can certainly use the extra hours for writing (see this column), but I wonder if I should be making more of an effort to sell the benefits of office hours to my students.
In a recent issue of College Teaching, Lydia Eckstein Jackson and Aimee Knupsky wrote about research that suggested many benefits accrue to students who take advantage of office hours. The advantages include:
Better relationships with professors, with the latter more likely to take on active mentoring roles for students who attend office hours.
Higher likelihood of completing a degree, especially for students from underrepresented groups.
Development of important skills for college and the workplace, such as planning, long-term thinking, and self-efficacy.
What’s more, in a 2013 study published in the Journal of Political Science Education, Mario Guerrero and Alisa Beth Rod found that the number of office-hour visits a student makes during a semester is positively correlated to his or her academic performance in the course. Even when controlling for such variables as GPA, family income, and gender, Guerrero and Rod still found that each office-hour visit increases the probability that a student will get a higher grade. In the study, which tracked 406 undergraduates over a four-year period, students who never made use of office hours could expect to finish with a final grade of 82 percent, a low B. By contrast, students who visited office hours more than five times during the term finished, on average, with an A.
Maybe attending office hours made a difference, or maybe students who tend to get good grades are more conscientious than others (it’s also possible that instructors unknowingly give conscientious students more generous grades). The distinction is not really important. What is important: Meeting with students one-on-one allows us to be better teachers — to reach students more effectively, regardless of whether the meetings lead to higher grades. In private meetings, students may feel more comfortable asking questions they cannot ask in class. You can take time to explain a concept to a confused student, or to encourage a slacker to be more responsible about coursework. Most important, I think, students can feel that there’s someone in a position of authority who actually cares about their academic progress.