Empowering tertiary level students to solve their own study related problems to improve performance and prevent drop-outs

Abstract

Students progressing to tertiary level education often have many problems – problems that may affect their studies. In addition to other problems, they may suffer from low self-esteem, which in turn may result from another set of problems, negative parents, negative peers, past poor results, inability to get into a school of choice, etc. Those who have to live away from home to attend a university could have their own set of problems. To provide support many universities have counseling offices to help the students tackle their problems. The counseling officers often give repeated appointments in an attempt to help solve these problems. At Daffodil International University (DIU), a relatively new private university, more than 75% of the students come from a rural background, i.e., they have had to move to the urban metropolitan city of Dhaka for the purpose of their tertiary level education. These students have additional problems like adjusting to urban life, missing home, managing all household chores by themselves, even a culture shock given the nature of urban life, etc., all of which may affect their studies. Being a new university, DIU has an international division that looks after incoming students but does not employ a student counselor. So at DIU we experimented with a collaborative approach to help students solve their own problems. From three different departments, Software Engineering, English and Law we took students with a low CGPA (<2.5) and held a collaborative problem solving workshop. The students were guided in a collaborative environment where individual problems were first identified anonymously by working in pairs and possible solutions were presented by the students themselves by collaboratively working in groups. The paper proposes a model of how the approach can be beneficial, shares application of the model and how many in the sample have ultimately graduated with a better CGPA or currently have improved their CGPA. The perception of effectiveness of the collaborative guidance model was also measured by taking feedback from students. Finally, the collaborative problem solving approach is compared with the traditional counseling approach. The collaborative approach benefits students by empowering them to solve study related problems by themselves, develop self-esteem and prevent dropping out.