Using office hour appointment data to illustrate a decline in student-faculty interaction during and after COVID-19

Student-faculty interaction (SFI) is an important indicator of student engagement that positively associates with academic achievement and retention. Quantitative information regarding the impact of emergency remote teaching (ERT) during COVID-19 on SFI is limited. This retrospective, observational cohort study tests the hypothesis that COVID-19 ERT negatively affected SFI in a gender-dependent manner. Electronic records of office hour (OH) appointments, used to measure SFI, for first-year medical students across three time periods, before, during and after COVID, were obtained and analyzed. A concerning, marked decline in SFI during and after the COVID-19 pandemic is noted. Before COVID, significantly more women (75.20%) made at least one OH appointment compared with men (40.54%). During COVID, the proportion of women making an OH appointment (69.71%) was statistically indistinguishable from women before COVID-19. In contrast, significantly fewer men during COVID (10.34%) than before COVID made an OH appointment. On return to face-to-face teaching, no rebound effect was observed. Compared with before COVID gender-matched peers, fewer men and women after COVID made OH appointments. Discipline-based analyses show that for all three time periods physiology emerged as the content area in which students made most OH appointments. The reduction in SFI observed, combined with the consistency with which the participants in our study indicated a need for assistance with the physiology discipline, emphasizes the importance of active promotion of faculty support and deliberate efforts to reconnect with students in the post-COVID context.