Alex Walls is the Director of Studies for Windsor English Language School in Moscow, Russia. He has been teaching English since 2012, completing Delta in 2018. He was the winner of the IATEFL LAM SIG scholarship in 2020 and regularly presents at conferences and workshops in Russia. He has a website (www.alexwallselt.com) with ideas and resources for English teachers. Email: awallselt@gmail.com

 

Introduction

In the various schools that I have worked in, management have tended to throw around the word retention. However, in my view satisfaction is a more important metric for a school’s success. After all, I have had many students leave after achieving their desired IELTS result or because they have simply gotten what they needed.

Equally, I have seen some students stay despite being unhappy with their progress, believing that language learning is necessarily difficult and unfulfilling. In my opinion, a focus on retention incentivises teachers to foster learner dependency rather than autonomy.

Although satisfaction and retention don’t necessarily correlate, high levels of satisfaction are more likely to result in higher retention than low ones. Furthermore, high satisfaction results in word-of-mouth referrals, community and loyalty.

If we agree that satisfaction is a valuable metric, we need to understand how it operates within a language teaching context. While Oliver (2010) describes satisfaction in a general sense, the following is my attempt to interpret this process within a typical private language school.

 

How satisfaction operates

While we can think of satisfaction as a continuous state, we typically deal in satisfaction judgements. These are made either when students encounter something unexpected, or when they are asked to determine their satisfaction, for example on a post-course evaluation.

In arriving at a satisfaction judgement, students pass through a number of steps. Firstly, the student (or possibly their parent or employer) recognises a need or desire to better their English. They investigate who can help them and form expectations about the quality and results of teaching they will receive. Naturally, some students investigate more thoroughly than others leading to them forming greater expectations.

The student next interacts with their chosen school. Their course may not start for days or weeks, during which the student experiences dissonance. This can be in a positive direction of anticipation as the student is excited to be starting lessons, or in a negative direction of anticipointment as they worry their needs and expectations will not be met.

Eventually, however, the student attends their course. At this point, performance has occurred. The student is now in a position to evaluate performance against a comparison operator in the process of disconfirmation. Not all students measure performance against the same comparison operator, which may be any of the following:

Comparison operator	Resulting cognition	Example
Expectation	expectation disconfirmation	teacher will not use L1 in class
Needs	need fulfilment	to score 6.5 in IELTS
Excellence	quality	better than other schools
Sacrifice	value	time/money spent
Fairness	equity	progress of classmates
Events that might have been	regret	if went to another school
Nothing	unappraised

Some students may be measuring the school’s performance against the expectations they built. For example, some may have expected the school not to use L1 in the classroom. If L1 is not used as expected, a positive disconfirmation has occurred. On the other hand, if L1 is used, a negative disconfirmation occurs.

Expectations are not the only possible operator however. Some students may be comparing against their needs, such as the IELTS student who needs a certain score to get into university this September. They may be comparing against the quality they believe to be on offer at other schools (whether that is in fact from experience or what they have heard). They may consider if the time and money they invest in coming to your classes is worthwhile. Some may be concerned with their progress against their classmates’, or how much time the teacher gives them. Yet others will wonder what would have happened if they had attended a different school or course. And there will always be some who simply have no opinion.

In the next step, the student attributes the disconfirmation, whether positive or negative. This may be to themselves, the school, the teacher, other students, or an external factor (such as the pandemic). Naturally, we tend to attribute positive outcomes to ourselves and negative ones to others.

Ultimately, the student ends up in a satisfaction state. At least eight different satisfaction states may be possible.

Most students are likely to experience contentment. This is the absence of any dissatisfaction while apathy, its polar opposite, is the absence of any satisfaction.

A better state for students to be in is that of pleasure; the resulting state from positive disconfirmation such as a student’s expectations or needs being met. Negative disconfirmation, however, results in the opposing state of frustration.

A yet better state for students to experience is delight. This is achieved when students experiencing pleasure are provided with a positive surprise such as an unexpected reward. Meanwhile, negative surprises will push already frustrated students to anger.

Finally, some students may experience relief as they avoid a bad outcome, such as scoring poorly on an exam. Naturally, students who fail to avoid a bad outcome enter a state of disappointment.

 

Measuring satisfaction

In order to make meaningful decisions to increase satisfaction, we need to measure satisfaction effectively. As students may process satisfaction differently, it is important to have flexible systems to collect data. Nowadays, tools like Google forms and Survey Monkey allow the setting up of adaptive forms. This allows forms to be set up that first identify the comparison operators that students are using before diverting students to questions that collect more data about their experiences.

Oliver recommends using these scales for measuring performance against the comparison operators identified above:

Comparison operator	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
expectation	Worse than expected		About the same as expected			Better than expected
needs	Fell short of needs		Just met needs			Exceeded needs
excellence	One of the worst					One of the best
sacrifice	Poor value					Good value
fairness	Unfair					Fair
events that might have been	Regrettable decision					Excellent decision
nothing

 

Influencing satisfaction

Ultimately, the purpose of understanding satisfaction is not merely to understand why some students are not satisfied, but to influence students to be more satisfied. While I hope that creative school managers and owners will devise their own ideas from this article, I do have some suggestions.

Firstly, Oliver points out that higher levels of satisfaction result from higher expectations, even where these may go unmet. The maxim of “underpromise and overdeliver” is therefore not a great policy for a school to adopt. Nevertheless, I would argue that realistic and managed expectations that are frequently met are the key. Snake oil claims such as guaranteed, absurdly fast results damage not only the reputation of the school that makes them but also the ELT profession as a whole.

Secondly, negative dissonance can be turned into anticipation by giving students something to do while waiting for their course to start. This is something I have seen few schools do, though it is a very simple solution. Given that we live in a world where instant gratification is often expected, getting students to feel they are a member of the school as soon as possible is essential to their satisfaction.

Finally, pleasure and delight tend to result in more referrals than contentment. Aiming to meet high expectations and offering unexpected rewards are likely to push students into these states. Many companies offer points based loyalty schemes, but this ignores the need for a surprise element. In fact, I would suggest that the rewards from a points based loyalty scheme come to be viewed as an entitlement and can be the subject of a negative satisfaction judgement themselves. Instead, planning a schedule of seemingly random rewards (from the students’ perspective) would be a better approach.

 

Conclusion

Whether you’re a teacher, academic manager or school owner, satisfying students was probably something you initially set out to do. If we want to do that, we need to ensure that we understand how students process satisfaction and that we ask them meaningful questions.

 

References

Oliver, R. (2010). Satisfaction: A behavioral perspective on the consumer 2^nd edition. M.E. Sharpe.

 

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