By Melissa Bahle

The purpose of this research project is to determine whether students with Wednesday/Thursday Seminars have higher pass rates and lower attrition rates than students with Sunday/Monday Seminars. Using data collected from the past eight terms, it is determined that while students with Wednesday/Thursday Seminars have higher attrition rates, they also have lower failure rates. More research is needed to see if this trend continues.

Introduction

One question I have had since I started teaching at Purdue Global was whether composition students scheduled for Sunday/Monday Seminars had higher failing and attrition rates when compared to students scheduled for Wednesday/Thursday seminars. Because our units start on a Wednesday and end the following Tuesday at midnight, one can see how having Seminar later in the unit has the potential to impact student success negatively. While future blog posts will discuss strategies to help students registered in Sunday/Monday Seminar courses, this post focuses on the study I conducted with my own classes to determine whether or not failure and attrition rates were higher in classes with Seminars falling later in the unit.

Hypothesis

Students in Wednesday/Thursday Seminars tend to have lower failure and attrition rates than students in Sunday/Monday Seminars.

Methodology

As the chart below shows, I looked at classes starting with the 2301C term and ending with the 2403C term. I observed the following for each course: Seminar day, number of students who had dropped by the end of the term (with 35 as the starting number), number of students who failed by the end of the term, and the total number of students remaining in the class at the end of the term.

Term	Course	Sem. Day	# Dropped	#Failed	Total Students at End of Term
2301C	CM107-01	Wednesday	16	4	19
	CM107-29	Monday	16	4	19
	CM107-37	Thursday	14	7	21
2302C	CM107-16	Wednesday	13	8	22
	CM107-23	Wednesday	19	6	16
	CM107-27	Thursday	12	3	23
2303C	CM107-20	Monday	17	6	18
	CM107-40	Monday	13	5	22
2304C	CM107-20	Monday	8	11	27
	CM107-27	Thursday	12	7	23
	CM107-40	Monday	8	6	27
2305C	CM107-03	Sunday	15	8	20
	CM107-29	Monday	18	5	17
	CM107-37	Thursday	13	13	22
2401C	CM107-02LA	Wednesday	13	6	22
	CM107-03LA	Sunday	14	13	21
2402C	CM107-15LA	Thursday	18	6	17
	CM107-21LA	Monday	18	12	17
	CM107-36	Thursday	21	7	14
2403C	CM107-03	Sunday	14	6	21
	CM107-20	Monday	13	7	22

ChatGPT helped with the analysis of the data collected:

Calculate the Attrition Rate (Percentage of students who dropped):

Attrition Rate=(Number DroppedTotal Students at End of Term)×100\text{Attrition Rate} = \left(\frac{\text{Number Dropped}}{\text{Total Students at End of Term}}\right) \times 100Attrition Rate=(Total Students at End of TermNumber Dropped​)×100

Calculate the Failure Rate (Percentage of students who failed):

Failure Rate=(Number FailedTotal Students at End of Term)×100\text{Failure Rate} = \left(\frac{\text{Number Failed}}{\text{Total Students at End of Term}}\right) \times 100Failure Rate=(Total Students at End of TermNumber Failed​)×100

Compare Averages The average rates for each group are as follows:

• Wednesday/Thursday Seminars:
  • Attrition Rate: 80.64%
  • Failure Rate: 33.71%
• Sunday/Monday Seminars:
  • Attrition Rate: 70.21%
  • Failure Rate: 38.74%

Based on these averages:

• Wednesday/Thursday Seminars had a higher attrition rate but a lower failure rate compared to Sunday/Monday Seminars.
• Sunday/Monday Seminars had a slightly better (lower) attrition rate but a higher failure rate.

This suggests that Wednesday/Thursday Seminars had a slight advantage in terms of passing rates, while Sunday/Monday Seminars retained more students. ​

Conclusion

Surprisingly, students with Sunday/Monday Seminars had lower attrition rates than students in Wednesday/Thursday Seminars. Further study may be needed on whether the strategies I use to help my Sunday/Monday students are the reason for lower attrition rates.

Since all the information they need is provided earlier in the unit, students with Wednesday/Thursday Seminars have a higher passing rate.  This may give them more confidence in the work they are doing.

According to Constantine et.al. (2019), one of the best ways to support students’ self-efficacy is by providing them with “plenty of time to plan, implement, and complete learning tasks” (Table I). This may explain why students attending Wednesday/Thursday Seminars have higher passing rates. Their self-efficacy may be higher because they have more time to internalize the information. I tend to focus on providing my Sunday/Monday students with pre-seminar recordings on the first day of a new unit, and I do my best to provide positive reasons why having a Seminar later in the unit can be helpful. This may be one of the reasons why my Sunday/Monday Seminar students persist to the end of the term. Their persistence is high, but their performance is lower. It is possible that their overall self-efficacy is lower.

I plan to conduct this study again next academic year to see if these results continue.

Reference

Constantine, J., Fernald, J. Robinson, J., Courtney, M. B. (2019). Best Practices Guidebook: Supporting Students’ Self-Efficacy. Barbourville, KY. Bluegrass Center for Teacher Quality, Inc.