2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on student life and student academic performance. Moreover, different demographic groups have experienced the pandemic very differently. An important factor in the student learning process and therefore academic performance is student help seeking behaviors in office hours. In this paper, we examine the ways in which the pandemic has affected student use of office hours.
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The onset of the pandemic expanded the use of web-based educational tools. One example was an office hours queue. When a student needed help, they added themselves to an online queue and instructors removed each student when it was their turn to be helped. Before the pandemic, some courses in our study used the system. After the onset of the pandemic, use of the tool became more widely used as office hours shifted to virtual.
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Office hours are an important aspect of instruction outside of the classroom. To study its usage trends, we compiled office hours usage data from three large computing courses. We augmented this dataset with demographic information from university records. Each entry in our dataset contains information about the time and date of an office hours encounter, the instructor, the student, and the student’s gender and underrepresented minority (URM) status. In total, our dataset comprised 33,134 unique encounters.
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We examine student use of office hours among different demographic groups before the COVID-19 pandemic and after its onset. More specifically, did the onset of the pandemic and the move to virtual learning affect the way that students use office hours?
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Our results suggest the impact of the pandemic on office hours usage patterns was small. We were surprised to find that the factor with the largest magnitude affecting office hours usage was not the onset of the pandemic, but rather a student’s gender. In fact, our results suggest that after controlling for multiple other factors, men averaged 31.51% fewer office hours encounters compared to women, regardless of pandemic status. The association of URM status with office hours encounters was not statistically significant.