A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement interviews students after 64 wellbeing-pod bookings and finds the Living Dashboard's engagement tile keeps climbing regardless of what students say they actually did inside.
An interview study of 64 pod bookings finds coursework, phone calls, and napping outnumber the "reflection" a booking must be filed under before it counts as engagement
“Reflection or mindfulness” is the first thing the booking form asks you to call it, and the last thing most students who booked one actually did.
— Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
Forty single-occupant reflection pods have gone up across campus over the past year, each completed booking counted toward a wellbeing-engagement tile on the School of Continuous Improvement’s Living Dashboard. A new paper from the School sets that tile against what 64 students, interviewed shortly after a booking, said they actually did once the door closed.
Dr Mirela Hanke and Dr Dagny Okafor coded the interviews into six categories. Coursework, not reflection, was the largest single category; a private phone call and a nap between them outnumbered it again. Midway through the term, Student Wellbeing revised the booking form to drop its “reason for booking” field entirely, an unrelated administrative change the pair treated as a natural test of what the field had been doing. Neither the mix of activities students reported nor how long a booking ran moved when the field disappeared.
“The tile can’t tell the difference between ten minutes of mindfulness and ten minutes on hold with a phone provider, and on this evidence, neither could the form,” said Dr Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of Evaluation of Evaluation.
The University reads the finding less as a verdict on the pods than as a reminder of how quickly a count can stop describing what it was built to track — a habit of noticing the School of Continuous Improvement keeps turning on instruments other units built to look reassuring.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.2yybzl.