One-on-One Review Intervention for Students Struggling in Discrete Mathematics

Helping struggling students succeed can be one of the most time consuming parts of education, but also has a significant impact on students. This is particularly true in introductory courses like discrete mathematics where students can be rusty on prerequisite content and lack intrinsic motivation for the course material. We evaluate an intervention to help struggling students catch up on material and gain confidence in the course. The intervention involved optional 30 minute one-on-one sessions with a course TA to review content from earlier in the course. The intervention was performed at a large R1 institution in the discrete math course for four academic quarters. We found that while the intervention increased TA workload, there was a notable decrease in DFW-rate for quarters where the intervention was offered, and that students who participated had higher course averages than those who were invited to participate but did not.