Interviews are a creative and flexible active learning activity, offering a change in the course routine in both online and face-to-face courses. Interviews are useful for applying course concepts in real life, giving students a chance to engage with individuals outside the classroom community. They can be used for posing questions embedded in an assignment, for running a simple experiment, or as the basis for a longer project. Interviewees do not need to be specialists; interviews can be designed to allow students to interact with family or friends for convenience. Interviews are especially appropriate in social science courses, but they can be used in any course as a way to gauge community views and social behavior.

Structuring Interviews Effectively

Identify intriguing questions to explore.

For interviews to work well, students need to ask compelling questions that form the basis of a meaningful conversation. Make sure the questions you assign really are interesting to talk about!

Work through an exercise or replicate a short experiment.

Social science textbooks provide exercises that can serve as short experiments, and they discuss classic experiments that can be replicated by students. (For example, the false belief task is a classic test of theory of mind. If the relevant images are given in the textbook, students can carry out the experiment on their own.) Consider whether exercises or experiments in your course textbook can be administered by students with participant(s) of their choosing.

Analyze interviewee responses and compare them with the literature.

Students can compare their findings with the discussion of the issue in the research literature. This is an engaging way to test the validity of the conclusions in the literature and to identify areas for further inquiry.

Ask students to interview individuals in their social circle.

Although I assign final projects in some courses that may require students to interview someone they do not know personally, I normally structure interviews to allow students to speak with friends, family members, or co-workers. This makes interviews less stressful for students and enables me to incorporate them easily into courses.

Practical Considerations 

Describe background information to frame the interview.

Students need to understand the purpose of the interview and how it fits in with the course. In the introductory portion of the assignment, describe background information to situate the interview within a course theme.

Create a simple interview structure and state the procedure to be followed.

It is critical to create a simple structure for the interview that is easy for students to follow as they talk with the interviewee and try to keep track of responses. Describe the exact procedure to be followed with step-by-step directions.

Provide interview questions and explain how the analysis should be written.

It is helpful to provide all of the questions to be discussed during the interview and to explain what the analysis should look like. This ensures consistency in the way students carry out the interview, enables them to compare their observations with one another more easily, and makes the assignment easier for the instructor to grade.

Give tips to make the interview successful.

Interviewing is unfamiliar to most students. Keeping this in mind, anticipate the types of issues students may come across when they conduct the interview and provide tips to carry it out effectively.

Conclusion

Interviews are a great active learning activity to consider when analyzing individual views and behavior. Interviews can be customized to be brief or extensive depending on the nature of the assignment task. Use them to pose questions about course-related themes to the interviewee or to conduct a simple experiment with the interviewee as the participant. I prefer interviews that allow students to interact with family and friends, which makes the assignment more convenient for students to complete and reduces anxiety about interviewing.

Related Teaching Tips 

8 Secrets of Success for Students links to a short TED talk by author Richard St. John, who outlines the essential secrets of success he gleaned from 500 interviews.

Use Elements of Cognitive Constructivism to Design Effective Learning Activities discusses the four elements of effective learning activities. Interviews cover all four; they: 

• activate prior knowledge about the theme needed to conduct the interview
• create surprise since the student cannot anticipate exactly how the interviewee will respond
• apply and evaluate the new knowledge when the student compares observations with those in the literature
• close with a reflective assignment when the student writes a report about the interview or participates in a class discussion about it

Other Teaching Tips in Helena’s “Grizz Tips for Teaching Effectiveness” Series:

• Maximizing the Usefulness of the Beginning-of-Semester Student Questionnaire
• Minimize Low Grades, Withdrawals, and Incompletes with Proactive Strategies
• Moodle Response Templates Improve Student Responses and Speed Up Grading

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About the Author

Helena Riha, Ph.D. teaches Linguistics and International Studies. She has taught over 3,500 students in 17 different courses. Helena won the OU Online Teaching Excellence Award and the Excellence in Teaching Award. This is her nineteenth teaching tip. Outside of class, Helena powers through The New York Times Spelling Bee.

Helena Riha is the current guest editor for the Grizz Tips for Teaching Effectiveness series on the CETL Teaching Blog at Oakland University. Contribute to the Teaching Blog as a guest editor (OU community only).

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