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Student Engagement in Lecture Theatres

Whether you’re delivering a lecture or listening to one, we have all experienced the silence that follows a question from the speaker. This silence can be due to lots of different reasons, including simply a personal preference, but often related to a fear of speaking out. What if you say the wrong answer? What if the lecturer can’t hear you? This fear often prevents students from actively engaging in lectures and seminars, with lots of evidence showing this can negatively affect learning.

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To look into this and try and find a solution, we (Dr Anna Harte, lecturer in Biomedical Sciences, and Ana-Maria Thorpe, final-year undergraduate) decided to design a study investigating student engagement in lecture theatres. The purpose of this study was to ask why: why do some students struggle to engage, and how can we adjust teaching practices to support them? This study was run as a final-year research project in the 2025-26 academic year.

Ana-Maria

Design

My project design implemented surveys and interviews. The first steps for my project were to decide on the survey questions and which cohort of students to target. I am particularly interested in students with Specific Learning Differences (SpLD) because they are an increasingly recognised group within higher education, yet no two individuals share the same experiences. I therefore chose to ask students to self-identify if they had an SpLD. Anna’s main research interest is in student confidence, so we also asked students about how confident they felt in general versus how confident they felt speaking up in lectures.

For the cohort, we decided on second- and third-year biomedical sciences students, as I am part of that cohort, and I know how quiet our lectures can be! I went into lectures and spoke about the project, encouraging students to complete the survey and be entered into the prize draw. We released the survey in early October 2025 and closed it in mid-November, and ran the interviews in late November.

Data analysis and findings

The next step was to analyse the survey and interview data. I used various statistical programs to analyse data and create graphs from the surveys, and specialised software called Taguette to analyse the qualitative data from the interviews. The analysis was a bit of a challenge as I had never used Taguette nor conducted thematic analysis before, so it initially felt outside of my comfort zone.

The survey data required careful consideration although prior experience in my degree with data handling made the process more manageable. I compared several groups within the dataset to explore potential differences in experiences between key demographic and educational groups that may influence student experiences.

The most important finding from this study was that while most students (over 75%) wanted to verbally engage in lecture theatres, at least to a moderate extent, around 80% of students did not actually engage when given the chance. This suggests that it is not simply a preference to stay quiet, but a lack of confidence in speaking up. The survey data suggested this may be caused by low self-confidence and fear of negative judgement. This was further supported by the interview findings, where students frequently described feeling “embarrassed” or worried about getting answers wrong, particularly in large lecture settings.

Next steps

The results of this study were really interesting and demonstrated that students felt a lack of psychological safety when speaking in large lecture environments. This could be an option for improving engagement in the future by creating more supportive and inclusive spaces, for example through smaller group discussions or broadening the use of anonymous response systems.

The next step for this project is to expand it out to other programmes to see whether we observe similar responses, and to explore whether psychological barriers differ across disciplines, and later to explore whether the implementation of different strategies improves students’ confidence in lectures.

Anna

I have been interested in student confidence and engagement for several years, but this is the first formal study I have supervised as a final-year research project. Working with Ana-Maria provided an essential student perspective, and ensured that the questions being asked were genuinely relevant to the student experience. The findings highlight the importance of psychological safety in learning environments and suggest that relatively small changes to teaching practice could have a big impact on student engagement. As the project continues, we hope to identify practical approaches that help more students feel confident contributing in lectures. Supporting this type of scholarship is a priority within SBBS, and it is great to see undergraduate students playing a central role in research that has the potential to enhance the educational experience of their peers.

Biomedical Sciences

 

 

 

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