Dr Doug Specht, Chartered Geographer, Senior Lecturer, and the Director of Teaching and Learning at Westminster School of Media and Communication, has written an article for Times Higher Education, titled Should We Be Aiming For Student Happiness Or Student Satisfaction?.
In the piece, Dr Specht discusses the crucial differences between student happiness and satisfaction, and which higher education should aim for.
During the pandemic, the idea of keeping students happy was widely promoted across national media and government platforms. In contrast, Dr Specht brings up the example of a student who thanked him for failing his essay.
Talking about the student, Dr Specht recalled: “He was happy to be getting through each assessment, but he wasn’t satisfied. He said failing that essay would give him a kick to perform better and work harder. It did. He went on to get a 2:2 rather than the third he was heading for. A much more satisfying outcome.”
According to Dr Specht, happiness constitutes short moments of joy and pleasure, while satisfaction is a more long-term and long-lasting emotion. He points out that higher education is currently leaning more towards happiness, which may cause its downfall.
However, he emphasises that this view is not a call for introducing tough measures but a reminder to universities to continue looking after the real needs of students and a recommendation for lecturers to reposition themselves in the big picture.
Dr Specht suggests three things to avoid the trap of pursuing happiness alone:
Help students to understand the fullness of their learning rather than allowing them to focus only on the now. Provide a good roadmap of the course and its options and pathways, with lecturers highlighting the links between parts of the course.
Implement “good friction”, a term used by Duolingo, the popular language-learning app. Duolingo requires learners to go through regular screens where they set targets and goals. They have found that with this extra friction, their learners become more motivated to stay on the app longer and learn more by focusing on the long term rather than easy wins.
Carefully plan assessments to be built around learning rather than testing, in combination with well-constructed feedback and clear marking criteria. The aim is to link the learning objectives of the course with the future careers of graduates.
Read the full article on Times Higher Education.
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