A team of researchers at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) has developed and applied a targeted intervention for repeating students to ascertain why a significant proportion fail again and to identify strategies to help reverse this trend. The project was carried out as part of a research project with almost a hundred students on the Fundamentals of Programming (CS1) course, which in addition to being among the most demanding has one of the highest failure rates on the Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering programme. The researchers observed a significant improvement in student engagement and perseverance, particularly in the first weeks of the semester. The study, which could be adapted to other courses and bachelor's degrees, has also shown that, rather than making do with a one-size-fits-all solution, repeating students have their own unique characteristics that must be understood if we are to help them avoid making the same mistakes.
The project, led by Maria-Jesús Marco-Galindo, Julià Minguillón Alfonso, David García-Solórzano and Professor Teresa Sancho-Vinuesa, researcher with the Learning Analytics for Innovation and Knowledge Application (LAIKA) group members of the UOC's Faculty of Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunications, is based on the evidence consistently observed by both teachers and repeating students: "If neither student engagement nor the teaching approach changes, the outcomes will remain the same. This is why we wanted to explore how to provide students with more tailored support."

The authors, who are attached to the UOC-FuturEd centre drew up an action plan for 86 students involving various targeted measures, such as a dedicated classroom for repeating students, simple starting resources, synchronous software installation sessions, personalized feedback for each activity, opportunities for reflection on previous failed attempts, and the option to keep the grades of courses passed in previous attempts.


Good outcomes but no increase in pass rates

The results, which have been published as open access in ACM Transactions on Computing Education, show a clear increase in student engagement, with many of them making significantly more progress than in their previous attempts. Furthermore, as a direct result of the intervention, dropout rates fell and students' confidence in their ability to pass the course improved.

Specifically, those who eventually passed the course had spent significantly more time (up to eight days) on the Virtual Campus than in previous attempts. Many students also did better in their practical exercises. However, there were no significant improvements to the overall pass rate: only 43.3% of those who had previously failed finally passed the course.


Moving towards tailored interventions

The authors believe that there is still room for improvement, as the intervention helped students persevere but not all students made enough progress to pass. They therefore concluded that further work towards more personalized interventions, with a particular focus on personal barriers, is required. The authors also recommended exploring the use of adaptive learning technologies, and monitoring repeating students over time.

As a result of the analysis, they were able to identify distinct types of repeating students based on their behaviour before starting the course. "We found variables such as age or sex to be less relevant than their previous experience with the same course. Repeating students have a history, and this must be understood in order to design an effective intervention plan and give them more effective help to prevent them from making the same mistakes all over again," they said.


Time is of the essence

As for the main causes of academic failure, the authors unequivocally asserted that "the main issue is time". While some students are unable to devote enough time to the course due to their own personal circumstances, others find that understanding and integrating coding concepts requires a certain amount of time – which in some cases can be more than one semester.

"Learning coding doesn't have to be hard. What's difficult is doing it quickly. Some students can achieve it in one semester, but others need two. The main aim is to ensure that they feel that they're closer to achieving their goal in each attempt and that they're supported along the way," said the authors.


Adapting the findings to other programmes

The findings of this study also pave the way to applying this methodology to other core courses with high rates of repeating students, continuing to move towards an educational model based on the idea that learning to code – and to learn in general – is not a matter of innate ability but one of time and support.

According to the team behind the project, applying similar methods to other courses with high rates of repeating students while tailoring the actions to be taken to each specific case would be particularly useful. Julià Minguillón said that "we need to know the history of students who have previously failed a course, understand why they failed the first time round and give them the necessary tools for reflection and support, regardless of the course – or programme – in question." In this regard, there is also a doctoral thesis underway at the UOC to design and assess a set of measures tailored to repeating students to help them understand and reflect on the reasons leading to their failed attempts.


This work has been carried out as part of the UOC's research mission, Lifelong education, and contributes to UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 4, Quality Education, and 10, Reduced Inequalities.


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