How instructors can respond to undergraduates’ confusion: Examining students’ experiences prior to and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic

Confusion–a metacognitive evaluation and affective feeling that the learning process is halted due to insufficient understanding or information–is frequently experienced in the learning process. Combining both cognitive and emotional evaluations, students draw on many pieces of information to determine how they feel about and what to do as a result of confusion. Whereas prior research indicates that experiencing and resolving confusion can be beneficial for students’ learning, students’ perceptions of how their instructors’ practices influence their experiences of and ability to move through confusion have been relatively understudied. This may limit researchers’ and instructors’ understanding of how instructors can best support students’ learning. Drawing on interviews and focus groups with 52 undergraduate students at one public university in the United States, we sought to understand students’ experiences with confusion and how they believed their instructors’ decisions influenced those experiences. We conducted secondary data analysis on transcripts of focus groups and interviews conducted between January and December 2020, representing both in-person course experiences prior to the onset of Covid-19 lockdowns and online course experiences after the subsequent shift to remote instruction. Findings suggest that students were able to move through confusion more productively when instructors created opportunities for students to interact with their peers, provided broad access to course materials, created a classroom environment where students felt safe to ask questions, and considered the emotions students experienced as they worked through confusion. These findings offer implications for how instructors might create more student-centered classrooms that better support students’ learning.