Understanding Student Interest:
A Survey

Robert Cassanello and Daniel S. Murphree

In the 1996-1997 academic year we conducted our first survey of about 200 students in our classes. At the same time, the department of history at FSU was trying to tackle serious questions of declining enrollment and course selection. Seeing an opportunity to help shed light on their specific needs, the department's faculty asked us to conduct our survey on a much larger scale with departmental funding and support. We were glad to comply. In our survey, we asked students to rate lecture topics which interested them, and to report general demographic information which would be helpful in analyzing their responses. This second, larger survey took place in the 1997-1998 academic year and had 976 respondents. An estimated 1,200 students were enrolled in survey classes that semester. The students who participated in the survey were enrolled in the introductory-level American, World, Asian, and Latin American Civilization classes. Over 90% of the participants were between the ages of 17 and 21, while almost 90% were either freshmen or sophomores. Over 60% of the respondents were of European descent, over 12% were of African descent, almost 10% were Latino/Chicano, and 3% were of Asian descent. By gender, over 46% were male, while over 52% were female (2% chose to leave the category unanswered).

At the outset, some of the FSU teaching assistants argued that lectures should emphasize military, political and diplomatic history, since a majority of students were interested in such subject matter. They further postulated that students dramatically lost interest when a class is "burdened" with issues of race, class and gender. Others, including the two of us, countered the opposite.

The results of the survey were too complex to validate either view completely. Of the students who responded to the survey, 37% expressed an interest in military topics and 28% expressed an interest in political and/or diplomatic topics. This supports the idea that a large percentage of any class has an interest in such traditional topics and approaches. In the same survey, however, 58% expressed interest in lectures containing social topics (described as the lives of everyday people in history), 48% expressed interest in ethnic topics, and 42% expressed interest in women's topics. In other words, large numbers of students expressed interest in issues related to race, class and gender. Although this confirmed our original hypothesis, we became more critical of our assumptions and we probed deeper than originally planned. What we were able to discern from the study was that a large number of students had interest in many topics, and if an instructor chose to design a class around either purely traditional or purely social topics, s/he might fail to tap the interest of a significant percentage of the students. To put this into a culinary analogy, one was not likely to become a great chef by using only one or two ingredients in one's cooking.

While our survey shed light on the larger questions we asked, it also contained implications for other assumptions that most of us held to be true or had never questioned. For example, at the outset none of us particularly championed science and technology. Yet, in spite of the fact that many introductory texts and instructors either neglect or gloss over these topics, 46% of the students expressed an interest in these areas (1). Another neglected topic was religion--yet over 40% of the respondents expressed an interest in religious topics as well, almost 60% of whom were women.

Many of the survey's results led us to question our beginning assumptions concerning interest and gender. We assumed that there would be an equal distribution by gender for those interested in general topics such as social history. To the contrary, 70% of all women expressed an interest in social history, while only 45% of the men expressed an interest. This data would suggest that social history is generally more attractive to women than men. As with "women's" topics, the gender gap was also pronounced with respect to gay and lesbian history topics. While 22% of all women expressed an interest in gay and lesbian topics, only 9% of all men expressed any interest in the topic. This disparity indicates that while a large number of women might find interest in traditionally male-dominated topics, few men make a similar leap in the area of women's history or gay and lesbian history.

The survey also produced some interesting insights when we cross-tabulated an interest in topics with the ethnicity of the respondents. Of the respondents of European descent, almost 42% and 30% expressed an interest in military and political/diplomatic history respectively, which closely resembled the interest of the respondents of Latino and Asian descent. Yet, the students of African descent did not express interest in those topics at the same rate; 17% expressed an interest in military topics and 21% expressed an interest in political/diplomatic. Interest in women's history topics crossed ethnic lines: 69% of female students of European descent expressed an interest as compared to 79% of female students of African descent, 77% of Latino/Chicano students, 62% of Asian students, and 80% of those who described themselves as "other" (2). While 7% of male students of European descent expressed an interest in women's history as compared to 20% of male students of African descent, 9% of Latino/Chicano students, 7% of Asian students, and 17% of those who described themselves as "other." Women of non-European descent expressed an interest in social topics and gay and lesbian topics almost two to one compared to their male counterparts. Men in all ethnic categories made little more than 10% of the respondents within their ethnic group who expressed any interest in women's history topics.

This survey was not meant to be conclusive or to silence any faction or subdiscipline within the profession. In fact it was purely a means of questioning our own assumptions about teaching. But, the survey had two direct consequences. One was that the history department at FSU began to offer courses that it had not offered in the recent past, such as race/ethnicity and North American Indian history. These courses quickly became so popular that they served to increase the overall enrollment in history classes. Secondly, the survey led us as teachers to question the assumptions we had about our students. Specifically, we realized that we might have been asking the wrong questions in the first place. What we should have been asking as teachers and scholars of history was, "what kind of assumptions, biases and prejudices do I have concerning my own students"? As historians with professional training, we are expected to evaluate biases in historical scholarship, as well as any in our own scholarly work. Yet how many of us use that yardstick of objectivity when it comes to what we think we know about the interests of our students? Moreover, how many of us actually care?