This study investigates the pedagogical factors that impact students' satisfaction with studio-style physics courses. Students enrolled in various sections of a SCALE-UP style course at EKU (N=184) responded to a reformed version of the Pedagogical Expectancy Violation Assessment (PEVA) and a course satisfaction questionnaire. Within the PEVA, students identified their satisfaction with particular activities based on how often they expected them to occur or how often they had experienced them. Based on experiences, the items in the PEVA clustered into five factors, one of which concerned the instructor support that the students received. We found that expected course grade and instructor were both correlated with course satisfaction, but even when those predictors were controlled, students' satisfaction with instructor support was a significant predictor for course satisfaction but not for their expected course grade. Further, the more support students reported receiving, the higher their satisfaction. We discuss implications of these findings, especially in terms of how to respond to students desire for instructors to spend more time demonstrating how to solve problems on the board.