Determinants and Consequences of Office Hours Attendance

Overview

College instructors typically spend a substantial fraction of their teaching time talking with students during office hours. Research on one-on-one tutoring says it is very effective (e.g., Bloom, 1984), but does this translate to what instructors do during office hours? While some studies find that students who attend office hours have better learning outcomes than students who do not (e.g., Guerrero and Rod, 2013), this comparison gives a poor estimate of the causal effect as the two groups of students may be quite different. Attenders are likely to be a mix of those students most in need of help, the most curious, and the most grade-conscious.

For the past several years we have been collecting detailed data on student attendance at office hours in multiple courses. This includes attendance at professor’s hours, teaching assistants’ hours, in-person hours, and Zoom-based hours. We also track the times of day when office hours are offerred. While our ultimate goal is to estimate the impact of attendance on student performance, we are also trying to determine how students decide when to attend based on their own characteristics and the kind of office hours offered by the course.