The good news is that an individual’s threshold for this kind of academic risk taking is not fixed. A new study concludes that how you organise your teaching affects student willingness to put forward their own ideas in class.

The study in question was recently published in the journal Learning and Instruction. 381 students at a German university with a strong focus on humanities and social science, answered an Academic-Risk-Taking (ART) questionnaire towards the end of seminars that they attended. For the purposes of the study, academic risk taking was defined as “visible behavioral engagement with a risk of making errors in front of others”. The teacher of the seminar also filled out a teaching orientation questionnaire to establish the type of educational approach that had been adopted.

The researchers were interested in whether there is a significant difference in students' ART between seminars, and whether any differences could be attributable to a sense of seminar belonging and/or the type of teaching employed.

Student and teacher responses were recorded on a 4-point Likert scale and the data were analysed statistically. For the students, their academic risk taking was measured using Hubner and Pfost’s Academic-Risk-Taking-Scale (2023). Here students answer a number of questions of the type: Assess how likely you are to engage in the following behavior in this specific seminar. Similarly, teachers filled out a questionnaire based on the SSCO model of Schaeper and Weiß (2016). This model attempts to assess the form of teaching used, where SSCO stands for: 

• Structure—deals with topics such as whether learning goals are clearly communicated to students and whether student are clear about what is expected of them.
• Support—how much help students are offered to achieve the learning goals.
• Challenge—the extent to which critical thinking is encouraged.
• Orientation—assesses whether teaching is focused on content delivery, or student construction of knowledge for themselves.

The researchers find that between 80 and 90 percent of a student’s academic risk taking depends on them as an individual. This is perhaps not surprising—some people are just more open to speaking in class than others. However, the work also finds that a sense of belonging is important for the likelihood of academic risk taking, with 16 percent of the variation in academic risk taking attributable to the group. Moreover, the data showed that seminars with a higher orientation towards knowledge reproduction led to less academic risk taking. The authors speculate that this may be because it is easier to spot errors when answers are either right or wrong.

Comment: Perhaps the most important role of the paper is to focus our attention on the fact that there is a risk that our students take when they offer up ideas in class that could potentially be incorrect. The interesting finding in this paper is that students’ academic risk taking can be affected by the teacher’s organisation of the course. 

Surface, deep or strategic?
The idea that students adopt different approaches to learning—surface and deep—was first put forward by Ference Marton and Roger Säljö in 1976. Surface learning is associated with rote memorization of material, whereas deep learning entails an endeavour to engage and understand. In 1979, Noel Entwistle and colleagues described a third approach—strategic learning. They found that students are not exclusively surface or deep learners, but rather they switch between surface and deep learning approaches depending on the situation. A good example of this effect has been documented in Andersson and Johansson (2016) where students on the same physics course were found to either “study to learn” or “study to pass” depending on how central they experienced the course content for their future occupation. If we assume that academic risk taking is associated with taking a deep approach to learning, then anything we can do as teachers to influence this process is important. So, what can we do to encourage academic risk taking in our courses?

A sense of belonging is important
Although students do appear to have a built-in propensity for, or aversion to academic risk taking, the finding that belonging to the group is important for encouraging or limiting ART is interesting. This suggests that spending time in ice-breaking activities at the beginning of a course might be even more important than we have previously thought.

Explanation rather than reproduction
In the study, a focus by the teacher on reproducing facts led to less engagement and less academic risk taking by the students. So, one approach suggested by these findings is to set exams that value explanation over rote regurgitation of facts, and consequently to pose questions in class that do not have one single correct answer.

Sharing the risk—buzz groups
If students find it difficult to speak in front of the whole class, one way of circumventing this problem is to ask them to discuss the answer to a question in so-called buzz groups or pairs. Not only does this increase the amount of engagement several-fold, it also means that when offering a tentative answer, it is the group together, rather than the individual that takes the academic risk. 

Predict, Observe, Explain 
One criticism of the paper could be that it only applies to seminars in humanities and social science. What might academic risk taking be in the sciences, and how could this be encouraged? One strategy that has been found to be useful in science is the Predict, Observe, Explain (POE) approach. This technique also leverages the benefits of discussion in buzz groups as described above. Students are asked to predict the outcome of a certain scenario, observe what actually happens and then theorise as to why this is the case.

Eliminating the risk 
Finally, if academic risk taking is problematic, why not use online voting systems such as Mentimeter to elicit anonymous answers to questions that then can be discussed? In such cases, academic risk does not enter the equation at all.

Text: John Airey, Department of Teaching and Learning

The study
Hübner, V., & Pfost, M. (2024). Academic risk taking and teaching quality in higher education. Learning and instruction, 90, 101877.

References
Andersson, S., & Johansson, A. (2016). Gender gap or program gap? Students’ negotiations of study practice in a course in electromagnetism. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 12(2), 020112. 
Entwistle, N., Hanley, M. & Hounsell, D. Identifying distinctive approaches to studying. High Educ 8, 365–380 (1979) 
Hübner, V., & Pfost, M. (2023). Operationalization of Academic Risk Taking in University Students. Journal for educational research online: JERO= Journal für Bildungsforschung online, 15(1).
Marton F., Säljö R. (1976). On qualitative differences in learning: I—Outcome and process. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 46(1), 4-11. 
Schaeper, H., & Weiß, T. (2016). The conceptualization, development, and validation of an instrument for measuring the formal learning environment in higher education. In Methodological issues of longitudinal surveys: The example of the National Educational Panel Study (pp. 267-290). Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden.

Keywords: Academic risk taking, active learning, seminars, teacher