Getting students engaged in a large lecture hall can be a challenge, and it’s almost impossible to create an active learning space.

Previous research highlights a connection between where a student sits in the classroom and student attendance and outcomes. One professor’s experiment in his general education class tests how students’ seat selection and peer engagement commitments impact the overall learning environment.

In spring 2024, Raghuveer Parthasarathy, a physics professor at the University of Oregon, sectioned off his classroom into two “zones”: The active zone came with the expectation of interaction between students and peers and the instructor, while the inactive zone had no expectations.

Parthasarathy found, in general, students who were open to a splash of engagement were more likely to score higher on quizzes, tests and their overall grade, as well as have positive feedback about peer engagement.

The experiment: The class, held in a large lecture hall with a capacity of around 220, had an enrollment of 110. The room had three columns of seating, the middle one being the widest, with two narrower sections flanking it. Students who sat in the front of the middle section were in the active zone, and everyone else was inactive.

Parthasarathy, who was aware of previous randomized studies about seating impact on student outcomes, purposefully left front-row seats inactive for learners who opted for proximity to the screen or instructor but didn’t want activity.

He also made it clear to students that there was no advantage or penalty associated with sitting in either zone.

The impact: Around one-third of the class opted into the active section, and Parthasarathy said they were exceptionally interactive: talking among one another, asking questions and commenting on course material. The critical mass of engagement was like a domino effect or a chain reaction, encouraging each student to participate in their own ways.

“The net result wasn’t just having the same average level of interaction, just split into high and low, but to actually end up having more engagement,” he says.

Even as the professor, Parthasarathy explains, he had to be intentional about not getting sucked in and only focusing on the active zone, because a majority of questions or comments would come from one part of the class.

Parthasarathy tracked student outcomes and seating arrangements (asking students to self-identify on their exams where they typically sit) and found there was a two-letter-grade difference between each of the zones after the midterm exams.

Students’ overall score by seating zone saw a slightly less dramatic gap, but those in the active section had higher scores on average, the median falling in the high B range, whereas those in the inactive section or who varied their seating averaged low C’s.

Parthasarathy showed the class the data he collected and the correlation between the active zone participants versus their peers.

Truthfully, he says, he hoped showing learners the data would impact their behaviors, but only a handful of students moved from inactive to active to close the term. This could be in part a psychological inertia or people’s preferences for sitting in one part of the classroom, he says.

At the end of the term, Parthasarathy distributed a survey with the final exam to gauge student experiences. He found those who sat in the active zone had positive experiences, with 79 percent feeling talking to those around them was helpful in their learning. Anecdotal evidence showed students who collaborated with their peers felt more attentive in the splash zone.

Those in the inactive zone reported that while their seating choice meant they could be quiet or have less interaction with the professor, it was sometimes distracting because their peers were not engaged at all.

Lessons learned: In general, Parthasarathy thinks students are less engaged than maybe the generations before them, but this experiment showed him the wide variety of engagement levels.

“It’s not that every student is disengaged and would rather be staring at their phone,” Parthasarathy. “It’s that now, we have this large spread, and maybe the average is going down, but still, even now, there is a quite sizable number of students who really do want to engage and get a lot out of the experience.”

Parthasarathy hasn’t taught this course, or a similarly large general education course since, so he hasn’t been able to replicate his experiment, but colleagues in his discipline have trialed it and also found it successful.

In the future, Parthasarathy says, it would be interesting to have students sit in various parts of the classroom before deciding where they remain for the term, but as he witnessed, many prefer to stick with one spot.

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