Organizing tutorial lessons: Challenges and perspectives

Abstract

The high failure and dropout in programming courses all over the world is around 30%. The Bachelor of Information and Communications Technology of the Federal University of Santa Catarina has failure rates up to 80% in recent years. Although there are several studies around this topic, a few of them discuss the academic tutoring for these courses. The concern with the student dropout is a major challenge for both public and private universities. The main goal of this paper is to analyze the student's and tutor's perception of the tutoring activities to identify the main actions to engage and motivate them in programming courses. We investigate the academic tutoring program during three semesters and proposed a different kind of activities during this time. We found that students have solitary habits of studies and look for the tutors only a feel days before the tests or exams. Our results also show that despite the initial contact between tutors and students, the students liked the presence of the tutors during the classroom. Another interesting result is that the creation of an email for asynchronous communication or web conferences, it was not used as student suggested. Only two emails were sent in a period of three months. This is something that must be investigated.