Monitoring the Results of the Tutoring Program in its Face-to-Face and Virtual Modalities on the Academic Achievement of Students at a Mexican University

Abstract

The tutorship program is aimed at supporting students throughout their university career and its objective is to prevent future problems of adaptation in the educational ambience as well as intervening in matters of academic achievement. At the Instituto Tecnológico de Sonora (Technological Institute of Sonora) (ITSON), the individual tutorship program began in 2000. In 2002 group tutoring began in order to see to the entire first year student population and today group tutoring is offered in both the face-to-face and virtual modalities. The general objective of the present study is to determine the impact the programs of face-to-face and virtual tutoring at the ITSON has had on students’ academic achievement, during the four semesters after having participated in this program. Information on 2,995 students from the different areas of study offered at the university was collected from databases which existed at the Institute and analyzed using different statistical techniques. The tutoring program is shown to have had a favorable impact on the index of students’ failing classes, during the semester they were enrolled in tutoring, but not during the subsequent semesters, during which they did not participate in the tutorship program. The grade point averages obtained by students who had face-to-face tutoring were statistically different from those of the students who did not have tutoring. This was true for all of the semesters analyzed. The same thing happened with the students who had virtual tutoring except for during the second semester when the two were statistically equal.