Student performance relates to mentoring session attendance, math level, and student motivation in large-lecture introductory biology course

Background/Question/Methods

Students in a large-lecture first semester introductory biology course were not enrolled in a math course, enrolled in a developmental math course, or enrolled in a math course as part of the NSF-funded Science Talent Expansion Program (STEP).  Students in STEP were offered special mentoring sessions by two undergraduate students skilled in facilitating mentoring sessions.  Four mentoring sessions were held each week of the semester.  We hypothesize that students attending more sessions will perform better in the course. We will investigate how STEP students compare to the larger group of students in the course who are not enrolled in a math course and to a subset of students in the course who were enrolled in a developmental math course. We were interested in learning how students found out about STEP and made the decision to join the program.  We thought that this information might tell us something about their motivation to do well in the biology course and might help us to understand variation among grades for students in the program.  Data were analyzed to determine the effect of mentoring sessions and math level and to see if we could match some measure of motivation to do well in the course with performance in the course. 

Results/Conclusions

Student attendance at mentoring sessions was a major predictor of student success in the course.  An ANCVOA using a pre-course test as a covariate indicates student math level (P = 0.0228) is a significant factor in predicting course grades.  Another ANCOVA of STEP students only indicates that the number of sessions attended (P = 0.0018) is a significant factor in predicting course grades.  A post hoc Tukey’s test indicates grades in the course for students enrolled in STEP calculus were significantly higher than students enrolled in STEP college algebra, students enrolled in a developmental math course, and for students not enrolled in a math course.  However, the course grade for STEP college algebra students was not significantly different than course grade for the larger group of non-STEP students in the course who are not enrolled in a math course.  We also believe that sessions are very helpful to college algebra students who, as a group, are generally less prepared for college-level work than are students in the other two STEP math classes or the general student population in the course.