Academic Underachievement and Recovery: Student Perspectives on Effective Career Interventions

Kárász

et al. 2021

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

Attrition is an important issue in higher education, especially in the field of computer science (CS). Here, we investigate to what extent an education reform affects the attrition of students by analyzing the pattern of grades of CS students’ academic achievement from 2010 to 2018 by IRT, based on Rasch-model analysis. We analyze data from 3673 undergraduate students of a large public university. In 2016 an education reform—as an intervention—was added to our BSc program: all theoretical lectures became compulsory to attend and we introduced a learning methodology course for all first-year students. According to our results, after the education reform most subjects became accomplishable, and students with lower levels of ability also tried to take exams. We succeeded in retaining 28% of our students. Analyzing students’ results could help administrators develop new programs in order to increase retention.

mentioning

confidence: 77%

Applying the Rasch model to analyze the effectiveness of education reform in order to decrease computer science students’ dropout

Kárász

et al. 2021

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

“…On the other hand, all of these results also demonstrate that underachievement is clearly not an irreversible "condition", as many students get back on track later on (see also Uno, Mortimer, Kim & Vuolo, 2010). Support from family and peers, as well as persistence in setting ambitious goals despite the difficulties, appear to be crucial factors for this to happen (Peterson, 2000;Hwang et al, 2014;McCall, 1994), making it all the more important to recognize underachievement as such and not mistake it for an unalterable lack of ability. This is not a trivial task: Rost and Hanses (1997) found that teachers in their study could not identify underachieving students in their classes very well; in a more recent study, teachers had only a moderately accurate impression of their students' attitudes towards school-in particular, they often underestimated their students' goal valuation (Siegle et al, 2020).…”

Section: Empirical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Motivational and personality variables distinguish academic underachievers from high achievers, low achievers, and overachievers

Dings

Spinath

2021

Soc Psychol Educ

Previous studies have associated several variables concerning motivation and other domains with underachievement, i. e. a student's academic achievement falling short of what their cognitive abilities, as the best predictor of academic performance, would indicate. The present study extends these findings using a more rigorous approach in defining underachievers and suitable control groups. Using discriminant analysis, underachievers identified in a German twin family study were compared not only to achievers with comparable IQ scores, but also with students of lower aptitude, but comparably low grades, as well as overachieving students. Results confirm previous findings that compared to successful students, underachievers report lower levels of motivation and parental support; beyond this comparison, underachievers also differed from other low achievers, mostly in terms of their personality. In total, 40% of the variance between the groups were explained. Additionally, the data shed doubt on the common assumption that underachievers are an unusually heterogenous group of students.

“…A number of studies have suggested that, besides the intelligence factor, learning strategies play an important role in distinguishing the learning outcomes of different students. Although students with poor learning effectiveness tend to adopt fewer learning strategies, improving their learning strategies could promote better learning outcomes [ 20 , 21 , 22 ]. Tang et al [ 23 ] show that the combined model of online teaching with the flipped learning improved students’ learning, attention, and evaluation of courses.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Influences of Flipped Teaching in Electronics Courses on Students’ Learning Effectiveness and Strategies

Hsieh

Lin

et al. 2021

IJERPH

The potential influence of the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the status of school education and further accelerated the revolution of regular teaching method. This study compared the learning effectiveness and learning strategies of vocational high school students in flipped teaching and traditional teaching modes. By adopting flipped teaching on an electronics course throughout the entire academic year, this study aimed to explore the effect of learning strategies of the students under flipped teaching. The subjects of this study were 85 sophomore students majoring in Electrical Engineering. This study randomly selected one class as the control group (n = 43), and adopted the regular teaching method while another class was selected as the experimental group (n = 42), and employed the flipped teaching method. This study used the “Learning strategy scale of students in vocational high schools” as the instrument. The students’ scores of the Testing Center for Technological and Vocational Education Test were used to evaluate their learning effectiveness. The results of this study indicate that students under the flipped teaching model made remarkable progress in the electronics course and the learning outcomes remained significant after a long period of time. Moreover, they made notable changes in their learning strategies, including “learning motivation”, “reading and exams”, “self-testing”, and “problem solving strategies”.