Abstract:

A big, common problem for the Italian universities is the low success rate, where only 55% of the enrolled students graduates. The best European performer, U.K., reaches almost 80%, while other countries present intermediate values (e.g. 72% for Finland and 64% for France). The dropping out phenomenon has multiple causes, which range from economical difficulties to the way admission is performed, with many others. Along with the abandon problem, there is another issue, which regards the delay, which is accumulated by many finishing students, who need more than three years to complete their bachelor.

We focus on one of the possible causes, and tried to attack it by developing a methodology, which attempts to diminish its impact.
Based on empirical observations, we noted that many students wait until shortly before the exam to actually start studying in a serious way. We believe, this attitude is carried on from high school, where students continuously have deadlines, which push them to study rather regularly. At the university, they do not have any more such stimulus, since the verifications are generally postponed at the end of the semester. Hence, most of them continue behaving like they did in the high school, dooming their career at the very beginning of their academic studies. We tried to support our intuition by administering a questionnaire.

Then, in order to deal with this problem, we developed a web-based system called "Peer", which pushes students to review multiple times the content of the lectures they assisted during the week in which the lecture was delivered, without waiting for the end of the semester. It is grounded on a reward-based cycle "ask-answer-evaluate", which is entirely performed on web-mediated, anonymous interactions among peers. The results we obtained are quite encouraging.

In the paper we will present the state of the art, illustrate our idea, describe the implementation and the tests of our proposed solution and finally discuss the results.

Keywords:

Dropout rate, web systems, peer education.