Can a tutoring program improve the academic performance of university students?

The UDES tutoring program, Bucaramanga, Colombia

Abstract

Introduction: Students entering the higher education system face an adaptation process due to changes in the academic level and in the university's own social environment; these factors are magnified due to a poor basic training in numerical and reading comprehension, negatively affecting their academic performance and their permanence in the higher education system. At the University of Santander, an academic tutoring program has been created in an attempt to correct this weaknesses. The importance of the tutoring program is analyzed, in addition to evaluating its impact on the students' academic success. Materials and Methods: The highest proportion of dropouts occurs during the first semesters, so this work focuses on analyzing the first semester courses offered by the College of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences. As a special case, the differential calculus course is analyzed. The averages of the three midterms (P1, P2, and P3) and final grades are compared, for the three selected semesters (B2015, A2016 and B2016). To evaluate the effect of the tutoring program, in addition to the descriptive study, logistic regression analysis and quantile regression of the final grades were fitted considering attendance or not to the tutorial program, and the kind of students (new or repeating); the P1 grade was taken as a proxy variable of the student initial situation, and the P3 grade collects the program total impact. Results and Discussion: For the three semesters considered, in both P1 and P3, the average  grade of students enrolled in the tutoring program (treatment group) is higher than the average grade of students who do not attend the program (control group); in all cases, the differences between grades of the treatment and control group are statistically significant. Based on binary logistic regression, both the mentoring program and the new student status have a positive influence on the probability of passing the course: a student who attends tutorials has between 1.88 and 2.75 times more possibilities to pass the course than a student who is not in the program; a new student has between
2.10 and 2.94 more chances to pass compared to a repeating student. Attending tutorials and being
a non-repeating student are factors that positively and significantly influence academic performance. The conditional distribution of the dependent variable was estimated using quantile regression, based on the model Aprobar(t)=f(Tutoría)+e, with the quantile vector t=(0.10, 0.25, 0.50, 0.75, 0.90);
the results indicate that the tutoring program is more effective for students who need help, located in the lower quantiles of the distribution of the dependent variable. The upper quantiles of the distribution correspond to students who do not require help and on whose grades the program has no significant effect, Conclusions: The tutoring program at UDES has shown its importance and usefulness as support for students that require accompaniment and whose background allowsthem to take advantage of the benefits of the program. The descriptive analysis shows the sustained growth of the students who have joined the program during these years. The direct association between the participation in the tutoring program and the academic performance was verified, and 70% of the users approved the courses for which they requested the tutoring service. A student who attends the tutoring program is more than twice as likely to
pass the course for which he requests academic support than a student who is not in the program; additionally, compared with a repeating student, his passing possibilities increase. Quantile regression analysis shows that the difference between the two groups is more important for the lower quartiles of the distribution. The final conclusion is that students enrolled in the tutoring program perform better than students who do not attend tutoring, particularly for those students located at the lower quartiles of the final grades distribution.