Students Behaving Badly: The Jaystudent

Critical incident technique is a procedure that facilitates the collection of narratives about a specific experience. It is useful when researching a new phenomenon and has proven useful when solving practical problems. Within Higher Education there is a phenomenon that has emerged as a problem for some lecturing staff, whereby some students have a tendency to disrupt teaching and learning within the classroom context. A much under researched area is the influence of customers ’ behaviours on other customers ’ perceptions of service quality. Within the context of higher education it is this gap that this paper aims to address. The aim of this paper is to investigate what students perceive to be disruptive within the classroom setting in higher education and how it should be managed. Critical Incident Technique was used to gather primary data. An evaluation of the results was supported by a review of the very limited literature to determine the scope of the issue. Conclusions were then drawn regarding the various proposed methods of dealing with the situation. Of the 100 CIT questionnaires circulated to students a total of 62 were returned, most of which were usable. Other students can impact on the student experience with the overarching reason for disruption identified as noise, mainly from other students using their cell phones or talking to each other. In general the behaviour was not dealt with adequately by the tutor. The consensus amongst student respondents was that disruptive students should be asked to behave or leave the classroom. The research involved only one school in one university and as such may not reflect the rest of the higher education community, however there is anecdotal evidence to indicate that it may. This paper is one of few to investigate disruptive students within HE