Transforming the Lowest-Performing Students: An Intervention That Worked

We conducted a small-scale study to investigate if a brief timely intervention focusing on specific study strategies would improve student performance in university science courses. We targeted low-performing students after the first midterm exam in two courses (enrollments of 67 and 185) with different student populations, one with students in a very selective physics program and the other with a broad range of students in a general science elective course. In this intervention, instructors either met personally with students or sent them a personalized e-mail. Students who met with an instructor and discussed specific study strategies improved their performance from one exam to the next by up to 32 ± 7%, without increasing their study time. These students also reported changing their study strategies during the term more than other students. Students who received an e-mail also improved their performance but not more than would be expected without an intervention. These results show that a focused discussion advising a small number of specific study strategies can have a large impact on the lowest-performing students in contexts in which the new study strategies are aligned with course structure, expectations, and assessments. This is in sharp contrast to results obtained from most general study-skills interventions. M ost postsecondary science teachers are familiar with a depressing pattern: scores on early exams and assignments seem to establish how well nearly all the students will do in a course. Nothing the professor does in the many subsequent weeks of instruction seems to help students who start out poorly and countless unpublished examples illustrate optional educational interventions that were intended to improve the performance of low-performing , postsecondary science students but were unsuccessful. These interventions include providing extra review sessions, practice problems, additional office hours, help rooms, and more. The high-performing students typically avail themselves of these additional resources and improve , whereas the lower performing students do not low performers self-motivated to seek help can show substantial gains with course-specific coaching Purdie's (1996) comprehensive meta-analysis of general learning skills interventions with university students found that " the effects on study skills are minimal " (p. 126). A likely reason for this failure is that general study skills interventions are too broad in their scope and too distant from where they will be applied. General studies in psychology show that goals that are specific and reasonably achievable in the short run are effective at improving performance, …