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...service delivery process assess what students expect from university class in general. We use a free elicitation approach to capture the salient expectations of 271 students. Our findings are counter to some recent forced choice expectations research and suggest that faculty and student expectations may, at least originally, be aligned.

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What do students expect from a university class? As faculty we know that if we fail to live up to student expectations we are likely to receive poor student evaluation of teaching (SET) ratings (e.g., Gaultney and Cann 2001; Millea and Grimes 2002). Making the situation more tenuous is that student expectations throughout a student's tenure may change over time (e.g. Boulding et al. 1993). Expectations may change as a student becomes accustomed to the norms of the school (Li and Kaye 1999). Thus, classroom expectations of freshman may be different from those of junior college transfer students which in turn may be different from students in different majors throughout the University, yet they all may be in the same classroom (Richardson, Kring and Davis 1997). Compounding the situation, in order to standardize assessment of faculty classroom performance across campus, most universities employ a common SET form that may or may not accurately reflect what students in a particular class expect from the classroom experience (Cerrito 2000). The consequences of not meting expectations can be profound in that they may have an effect on student's willingness to recommend the school to others, which in turn can influence future alumni giving behavior (Okunade and Berl 1997).

The need to understand student expectations, as well as to develop appropriate methods for managing and assessing expectations, is clearly important. Our research contributes to our understanding of what students expect from a university course and examines factors that may contribute to differences among students' expectations. In this paper, we discuss the findings of a free elicitation approach to gather information of what students expect from a university class. A free elicitation approach was chosen to reveal those expectations that students have at "top of mind." The free elicitation method is likely to reveal the more salient aspects of a phenomena as stored in memory (Olson and Muderrisoglu 1979). The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. First, we highlight relevant research regarding expectations in order to frame our research questions. Next, we present a study designed to test our research questions. We conclude with a discussion of our findings.

Literature Review

The treatment of the college classroom, and overall college life experience, as a service function has been investigated in the United States for almost a century. This ongoing...

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