Proactive peer tutoring to boost student persistence

Asynchronous learning gives students the freedom to work whenever is best for them, but it can also make it harder to get real-time help when they run into difficulties. Peer tutoring is a common way colleges and universities address this challenge, but the on-demand nature of these services can put the onus on students to identify when they need support and then reach out. ideas42 and UC Irvine partnered with Calbright College, California’s first online community college, to reimagine how these kinds of services could work for students enrolled in a competency-based certificate program.

Our approach

In close collaboration with faculty, support teams, and data administrators, we developed a model of peer-assisted study sessions (PASS) to help students establish a strong start in the first few weeks of Calbright’s IT Support program. To select the focus of PASS, we first identified assignments in the program with higher rates of drop-off, then worked with instructional faculty to train peer tutors to lead students through activities designed to help them master the relevant content and complete the assignments.

Rather than relying on students to seek out support through the kind of on-demand model that characterizes tutoring services at many colleges, we instead used learning management system data to proactively send personalized invitations encouraging students to attend upcoming workshops as they approached the target assignments.

The results

Evidence from a ten-week pilot test suggests the model can help students complete assignments and advance through their programs. To begin, we found that large majorities of students who chose to attend PASS workshops successfully completed the target assignments.

Compared to a control group of students not offered PASS, the broader group of students who were eligible to attend PASS during the pilot—not just those who opted into attending a workshop—completed the target assignments at higher rates on average.

Even more encouragingly, students in the PASS eligible group were not only more likely to complete both lesson 1, the focus of the workshops—they also completed other lessons further downstream at higher rates compared to the control group.

These results are all the more impressive given the modest share of eligible students who attended PASS, in part due to the limited marketing and recruitment that was possible during our pilot test. As we work to bring PASS attendance rates even higher at scale, we expect the overall impact could grow even larger.

In addition to these quantitative results, feedback from student interviews suggests the workshops help boost student confidence, motivation, and engagement. All in all, the model has revealed a promising approach to offering learners opportunities for synchronous, peer-led support that can boost persistence in an asynchronous online learning environment.

What students say…

“It was nice to build self confidence ... it was enjoyable, knowledgeable, no wasting time, loved the energy of it.”

“I wanted to see where everyone else was ... the social interaction re-lit the fire.”