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Office Hours, Demographic Groups, and COVID

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Conference

2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Baltimore , Maryland

Publication Date

June 25, 2023

Start Date

June 25, 2023

End Date

June 28, 2023

Conference Session

COED: Spotlight on Diverse Learners

Tagged Division

Computers in Education Division (COED)

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

11

DOI

10.18260/1-2--43755

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/43755

Download Count

108

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Paper Authors

biography

Heidi Huang University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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Heidi Huang is a fourth-year undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Mathematics. Currently, she is working with Professor Andrew Deorio and graduate student Kevin Yan to investigate office hours data from her own department.

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biography

Kevin Yan University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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I'm a Master's student majoring in Computer Science at the University of Michigan. I am working with Heidi Huang and Dr. Andrew DeOrio on Engineering Education.

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Andrew Deorio University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-5653-5109

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Andrew DeOrio is a teaching faculty member at the University of Michigan and a consultant for web and machine learning projects. His research interests are in engineering education and interdisciplinary computing. His teaching has been recognized with the Provost's Teaching Innovation Prize, and he has twice been named Professor of the Year by the students in his department. Andrew is trying to visit every U.S. National Park.

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Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on student life and student academic performance. Moreover, different demographic groups have experienced the pandemic very differently. An important factor in the student learning process and therefore academic performance is student help seeking behaviors in office hours. In this paper, we examine the ways in which the pandemic has affected student use of office hours. _ The onset of the pandemic expanded the use of web-based educational tools. One example was an office hours queue. When a student needed help, they added themselves to an online queue and instructors removed each student when it was their turn to be helped. Before the pandemic, some courses in our study used the system. After the onset of the pandemic, use of the tool became more widely used as office hours shifted to virtual. _ Office hours are an important aspect of instruction outside of the classroom. To study its usage trends, we compiled office hours usage data from three large computing courses. We augmented this dataset with demographic information from university records. Each entry in our dataset contains information about the time and date of an office hours encounter, the instructor, the student, and the student’s gender and underrepresented minority (URM) status. In total, our dataset comprised 33,134 unique encounters. _ We examine student use of office hours among different demographic groups before the COVID-19 pandemic and after its onset. More specifically, did the onset of the pandemic and the move to virtual learning affect the way that students use office hours? _ Our results suggest the impact of the pandemic on office hours usage patterns was small. We were surprised to find that the factor with the largest magnitude affecting office hours usage was not the onset of the pandemic, but rather a student’s gender. In fact, our results suggest that after controlling for multiple other factors, men averaged 31.51% fewer office hours encounters compared to women, regardless of pandemic status. The association of URM status with office hours encounters was not statistically significant.

Huang, H., & Yan, K., & Deorio, A. (2023, June), Office Hours, Demographic Groups, and COVID Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--43755

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