FIN Commons

There are many ways to capture Student Voices. We hope the list below offers some starting points for you and your team. We will add to this list as we begin to hear other ideas from FIN teams.

1. Faculty interviews student .
2. Student interviews student.
3. Student interviews herself—self-reflection.
4. Roundtable—group of students discuss issues put before them.
5. Think-alouds. Student is filmed as she works through a problem taken from her class, all the while talking about why she is making the choices she is making. With this strategy, the student’s meta-cognitive state is revealed.
6. Collaborative problem solving. Similar to Think-alouds, but with more than one student engaged in the task.
7. Students of course can be filmed in the class setting, working in groups, responding to the instructor, etc. With this strategy you may run into issues around getting good sound. One tip is to, whenever possible, get the camera in close to whomever is speaking.
8. Of course, any time you ask students in a class setting to generate content that you can later analyze as part of your Inquiry, you are uncovering  Student Voices. For example, having students do in-take self-assessments, or written self-reflections, or classroom assessments, etc.–all of these tools reveal Student Voices.

Types of interviews:

1. One-on-one.
2. Duo interviews, in which 2 students are on camera.
3. Group interviews.
4. “Man in the Street” –actually should be called “Student in the Street” interviews.  Students are esp. good at conducting these. These kinds of “quick hitting” interviews can actually serve as good starting points for Inquiry. They of course can tend to be anecdotal in nature, and may not deliver hard data, but they do sometimes uncover areas of interest that Inquirers may not have considered.