Short Meetings with First Year Students
Back to All ActionsWhat is the Action?
To provide first year students with short support meetings organised by the faculty, to identify/address potential issues, to prevent potential drop-outs and therefore improve retention.
This action can be applied to both, male and female first year students.
Quick Facts to Support this Action
- TU Dublin’s CS4ALL initiative identified that students who progressed at the first attempt in first year had a far higher chance of finishing their degree.
Individual short meetings organised by members of the faculty at ATU Galway during the first term for all students and second term for at risk students have reportedly improved retention of first year computer science students.
- A strong relationship between the intention to continue in computer science higher education and mentorship/support has been found for first-semester female students in Germany.
Ways to Implement this Action
Discover each of the steps by expanding the headings below.
➤ Identify the critical point in time
Depending on the academic calendar, identify the time when the students are most likely to drop out of their first year term. For example, for several institutions in Ireland it is the 31st October in the first half of the year (students can defer their study for free and recommence the following year), and the reading/study week in the second half of the year (reported evidence from ATU Galway).
➤ Identify and contact students
During the meeting (whether online or offline):
- ask them how they think they are doing in their programme, what they think of it;
- identify any potential issues for their dropout that the faculty could address
- encourage them to persist where relevant;
- inform them of future opportunities career in computer science field (industry or academia) may present them with that they might not be aware of;
- answer their questions where relevant.
Evaluation Approach
The most straightforward way to see impact is to monitor retention rates of the relevant students who were attending respective meetings.
Altin, R. and Mühling, A., 2024. Why Female Students Are Dropping out of CS Programs. In Proceedings of the 2024 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1 (pp. 304-310).
McKeever, S. and Lillis, D., 2021. Addressing the recruitment and retention of female students in computer science at third level. arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.06090.
TechMate Evaluation – Transcript with a participant from ATU Galway – reports of evidence of impact.