Why do 60% of students find their lectures boring?*

Istudy boredom in a range of professions – from heavy goods vehicle drivers to teachers – and have found that one group for whom boredom appears to be a familiar bedfellow is the student. Our newly published study of student boredom (conducted with my co-researcher Andrew Robinson) suggests that almost 60% of students find at least half their lectures boring – with about 30% claiming to find most or all of their lectures boring. Although a range of factors may contribute to these findings, they do prompt the question of what it is about the learning experience that might be deemed “boring”.

The traditional lecture is still one of the most common teaching methods, since it has the advantage of being able to reach many students in one economical time slot. This approach, of course, rarely allows for the sort of interaction and active learning that more hands-on, practical sessions (such as lab work or tutorials) can facilitate.

One of the main contributors to student boredom is the use of PowerPoint. PowerPoint slides are a powerful aid to today’s lecturer, who can use it to easily prepare dozens of slides to accompany a lecture. And that is the problem – lecturers tend to prepare too many slides, pack them with too much information, and whizz through them in a manner that obliges students to spend most of the session attempting to copy copious amounts of text from the screen, while bypassing active processing of the material.

We might expect more hands-on practical sessions to be more engaging but, surprisingly, lab work and computer sessions achieved the highest boredom ratings in our study. One of the problems with lab studies is that the experiments the students conduct are often just controlled exercises where the results are already known.

Computer sessions, too, have the potential to be stimulating or tedious; this study suggests too many fall into the latter category. This could be due to the manner in which sessions are conducted (are the tasks relevant and interesting?), the resources available (is there a computer for each student?), the availability of support (are there enough teaching staff to help individual students?) and so on.

Does any of this really matter? Might students just accept that the world of learning, like the workplace, is always going to include some elements of boredom? To answer this question, we need to look at what the consequences of being bored are for the student.

We found that students adopt a variety of strategies to cope with boring lectures. The most popular are daydreaming (75% of students admitted doing this), doodling (66%), chatting to friends (50%), sending texts (45%), and passing notes to friends (38%). Over a quarter of students leave the lecture at the mid-session break. This “class cutting” is potentially the most serious consequence, since previous research has shown a link between attendance and grades.

So, what can an academic do to ensure the most engaging teaching possible? First, we should look carefully at our use of PowerPoint presentations and limit the number of slides and the quantity of information on them. Colour, animation and sound should be utilised to vary the pace – and an accompanying handout should always be provided.

Where more interactive, hands-on teaching methods are used, we must not make the mistake of assuming that simply “doing” is enough to engage; the “doing” must also be relevant, non-prescriptive, and should benefit from appropriate resources and utilise animated teaching styles. Finally, a “buddy” teacher observation system, like the one we operate at the University of Central Lancashire, can help ensure that teaching stays fresh and engaging.

Reducing student boredom does not require elaborate attempts to entertain. Lecturers probably don’t need to take up fire-eating and juggling just yet.

*This article was wrote by Dr Sandi Mann and published in https://www.theguardian.com/education/2009/may/12/university-teaching