Focus groups / Fokusgruppen: A new type of exercise class for students to thrive, regardless of their background, at ETH Zurich
Investigators @RILL: Sarah Hofer
Collaborators: Martina Niggli, Klara Sasse (VSETH – Verband der Studierenden an der ETH)
Duration: October 2021 (start)
Main Goals, Key Methods, and Practical Relevance: Exercise classes aim to support students in understanding lecture material, working on problem sets, and successfully passing exams. Students have diverse backgrounds and different levels of prior knowledge and assess their skills and abilities differently. These differences can lead to students not daring to ask questions during exercise classes. Such early negative experiences can affect students’ self-perception and sense of belonging and sustainably influence motivation and performance, dropout rates, and connection with the university. Numerous studies suggest that underrepresented groups (e.g., women in STEM and first-generation students) are particularly affected by this. On the other hand, teaching assistants face a very heterogeneous group of students and cannot meet everyone’s needs. Focus groups provide a solution for students with little prior knowledge (based on self-assessment). The teaching assistants in the focus groups spend more time on the essential basics than in regular groups. This is communicated to students before enrolling in the exercise classes. Professors can easily implement focus groups into the existing setup. They do not require additional teaching assistants or other resources. In the fall semester of 2021, a pilot took place with two focus groups in the Physics I lecture of the first year in Mathematics / Physics. The pilot was very successful: 79.6% of the focus group participants passed the exam (compared to 74.6% in the entire cohort). The proportion of women in the focus groups was 52.5%.
Related Publications
Hofer, S. I., Reinhold, F., Hulaj, D., Koch, M., & Heine, J. H. (2022). What Matters for Boys Does Not Necessarily Matter for Girls: Gender-Specific Relations between Perceived Self-Determination, Engagement, and Performance in School Mathematics. Education Sciences, 12(11), 775.
Hofer, S. I., Markwalder, U., Deiglmayr, A., & Berkowitz, M. (2022). Potentiale nutzen - unabhängig von Geschlecht und sozialer Herkunft. In M. Schneider, R. H. Grabner, H. Saalbach, & L. Schalk (Hrsg.), Wie guter Unterricht intelligentes Wissen schafft (S. 69-87). Kohlhammer.
Lesperance, K., Hofer, S. I., Retelsdorf, J., & Holzberger, D. (2022). Reducing gender differences in student motivational‐affective factors: A meta‐analysis of school‐based interventions. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 92(4), 1502-1536. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12512
Berkowitz, M., Stern, E., Hofer, S. I., & Deiglmayr, A. (2020). Girls, boys and schools: On gender (in)equalities in education. In F. M. Cheung & D. F. Halpern (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook of the International Psychology of Women. Cambridge University Press.
Hofer, S. I. & Stern, E. (2016). Underachievement in physics: When intelligent girls fail. Learning and Individual Differences, 51, 119-131. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2016.08.006