Abstract:

It is typical for the first year engineering and information technology students to have several problems in their studies. Various studies have been conducted on the curriculum redesign as well as on improvements in the teaching methodology. Still, one area that is typically paid less attention to is the student counselling. In this paper, we present a four year study, where the student counselling methodology was thoroughly redesigned in the Department of Information Technology, University of Turku. The goal of the redesign was to improve students’ performance and social networking as well as the communication between students and the department staff. In the redesign, several new methods were presented, including various improvements to group counselling and individual meetings. Moreover, an enhanced technology support was designed and developed to assist the counsels and to help students’ self-reflection during the first year of IT studies. These include, for example, the usage of RFID technology to record attendances and homework. Besides the methodology redesign, we discuss the results of the redesign in relation to various student performance statistics collected during the freshman year.

Keywords:

Student counselling, Educational guidance, Methodology redesign, Student performance, First year studies.