Undergrad CS research with lasting impact

Hello! I’m Natalia Ozymko and I’m a senior in computer science.

This past year, I participated in research with Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider, Karle Flanagan, and Matthew McCarthy. The purpose of our research was to determine how student office hour usage impacted their final grades, specifically in CS 225 (the data structures course). CS 225 uses something called the Queue, which is an online queueing system for office hours. The way the Queue works is that members of the course staff put themselves on duty when they are holding office hours, and students can join at any time to be put in line. When it’s a student’s turn to get help, a member of the course staff goes to their location, which the student inputs on the Queue website, and helps them with whatever they are stuck on.

One benefit of this system is that it logs when a student puts themselves in line on the Queue, when a member of course staff starts helping them, and when the student leaves the Queue. We were able to combine two semesters’ worth of this data with students’ final grades in CS 225 in order to determine how office hour usage impacts students’ grades. We ended up with three major findings from this research:

1: Student office hour usage follows the Pareto principle, which means that about 80% of all office hour interactions came from about 20% of the students.

2: Although students who used office hours the most typically got higher grades on programming assignments, these students typically scored lower on graded assessments when compared with students who didn’t use office hours as much or at all. This suggests that as of right now, course staff may be focusing more on debugging students’ code rather than helping them understand the concepts being taught.

3: Students who typically go to office hours closer to a due date end up with lower grades than students who seek help earlier.

Overall, it was amazing to be a part of research that can leave a lasting impact on the CS community, and I would recommend it to anyone. Doing research gave me experiences and connections that I otherwise wouldn't have, but will be valuable to me through my senior year and after I graduate.