The Public-Private Divide: Examining the Relationship Between Office Hours Attendance and Type of High School

Katheryne Burkhardt, Elizabeth Calby, Casey Dennis, Priya Krishna and Samantha Schiff Government Department, Dartmouth College

Advisor: Professor Brian Greenhill

Results & Diagrams

Method

Introduction

Conclusions

Why do some students take full advantage of office hours with professors, sometimes attending multiple times a month, while others tend not to attend such sessions? Some students seem very comfortable engaging with professors outside of class time, to discuss material, ask questions and talk through concepts with the instructor, while others generally tend to work through the material on their own or with peers, attending office hours perhaps only when they have a very specific question or concern. What makes a student more or less likely to seek out further professor-student interaction in the form of office hours? A variety of factors such as education, family background, mentorship and individual interest in the subject might partially explain the wide spectrum of office hours attendance among students at Dartmouth.

In our project, we sought to determine whether a student’s high school education—public or private—had any impact on his or her office hours attendance at Dartmouth. We speculated that students who had attended private schools might be more likely to seek out additional professor interaction at office hours due to the close student-professor relationships and intellectual curiosity that private schools are designed to foster. We thought that students who had attended public schools with less one-on-one student-professor interaction might be less likely to attend office hours because those high schools created students more accustomed to working through the material on their own. In order to investigate this question, we designed a survey to collect observational data on students’ type of high school and attendance at office hours. Our null hypothesis was that there would be no difference in the reported attendance at office hours attended per month between students from public schools and students from private schools. Our alternative hypothesis was that students from private schools would be more likely to attend more office hours per month than students from public schools.

The results of our study at Dartmouth may have implications for the ongoing debate about public versus private school education. Investigating whether private school-educated students are more likely to seek out additional student-professor interaction in the form of office hours may shed light on whether private schools actually foster more thirst for professor interaction and intellectual discussion in their students. Such qualities could contribute to future success both in the academic world of college as well as in the professional realm, and should be considered when evaluating whether the benefits of a private school education outweigh the financial costs of enrollment.

Percent Frequency for Type of High School Our Data vs. Dartmouth Data

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*Dartmouth data from US News Report, “Dartmouth College,” http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/dartmouth-college-2573

Our questionnaire was created through the survey feature in Google Documents. The survey was simple to set up, and the responses were automatically inputted into a spreadsheet within Google Documents so that the data could be analyzed and graphed easily. In order to obtain the most responses possible, our group decided to send out the questionnaire at 11:15pm on Thursday, May 10th. We sent our survey about a week earlier than most other Government 10 surveys were sent out in order to reach students before they got tired of receiving and taking statistics surveys. We picked this time of day specifically because Dartmouth students tend to do a lot of their homework on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday nights after dinner time, so we thought that a lot of people would be doing some kind of work on their laptops and thus would be more likely to respond to a survey. We received 464 responses in total. The length of the survey was short. There were only six questions on the survey in order to make responding quick and easy. Our survey consisted of the following questions, in this order: -What is your class year? - What type of high school did you attend? -What is your major? -What region do you live in? - During the month of April, how many times did you go to office hours? - What is your GPA?

In the survey and the implementation process, we encountered a few minor issues. First, the survey was not sent out to the entire campus. It was sent to large blitz lists compiled by the members of the group. The blitz lists were for the most part fairly random, but the fact that not every undergraduate received the survey shows that our study was probably not a Simple Random Sample; that is, not all subjects in the population had an equal chance of being tested. Regarding the survey itself, it did not include a “Mid-Atlantic” option, a region that represents a significant percentage of the Dartmouth population. This was not a major problem for our results because students could enter their own answer in the “Other” space, and we did not decide to use the “Region” variable in any of our tests. Also, we only asked about office hours attended during the month of April, which may not be representative of all terms. Some people may have chosen to take less or more rigorous courses in

Based on the data received in this project, we fail to reject the null hypothesis that there is no difference in office hour attendance between Dartmouth students who attended private high schools and those who attended public high schools. The P-value that correlated to this relationship was .243, showing insufficient evidence at a significance level of .05 that the students who attended private school attended more office hours than those who attended public school.

To test the relationship between high school and office hours, we conducted a chi-square test. We chose this test because there were two categorical variables from the population that we were trying to test. We used type of high school, public or private, as one variable. Office hours can also be considered a categorical variable in this experiment, as we provided concrete ranges in the survey in a multiple choice format. Had we allowed respondents to manually enter their office hours attendance, this variable would have been quantitative, allowing us to use other kinds of tests. However, to reduce the response biases associated with self-reporting, we made office hours into a categorical variable with only four options. In this test, we used a significance level of .05 and six degrees of freedom. The results from the chi-square test were not significant, as we calculated the chi-square statistic of 7.93, and a corresponding p-value of .243, which is greater than the chosen significance level.

464 students responded to this survey, of which 183 attended private school (a proportion of 39%), 269 attended

public school (58%), and 12 attended another kind of school (3%). According to the US News Report, the divide between private and public school attendance among the Dartmouth undergraduate population is 46% private and 54% public. The Dartmouth divide between public and private schools is reasonably close to the divide in our survey, and we are therefore comfortable that the sample surveyed in our experiment is representative of the Dartmouth undergraduate population. As for the 12 students who indicated that they attended a high school that did not fall into one of these categories, we chose to include this group in the chi-square test to maximize the precision of the calculation, yet we only chose to focus on the public versus private school divide. This is because we did not think that analyzing this small group of 12 students was critical to the overall results and conclusions of the experiment.

We divided the data up to look at the frequency with which private versus public school students went to office hours. 47% of students who attended private school attended zero office hours in the month of April, 32% attended 1-2 hours, 16% attended 2-3 hours, and 5% attended more than three hours. Students who attended public high schools had a similar divide: 43% attended zero hours, 37% attended 1-2 hours, 11% attended 2-3 hours, and 9% of students went to three or more hours.

After collecting all of the data, we noticed that there could be a potential relationship between types of high school and GPA. Out of interest, we looked further into this relationship. We ran a t-test, which was appropriate because we were testing whether there was a statistically significant difference between the sample mean GPA of public versus private school

students. We also used a t-test because type of high school is a categorical variable, while GPA is a continuous variable, since we allowed respondents to enter their own in a box. We stated as the null hypothesis that public and private schools would have the same GPA, while the alternate hypothesis was that private high schools would have a higher GPA. Using a two-sided t-test and a significance level of .1, we calculated a p-value of .06. This showed that there was a significant relationship between type of high school and GPA for the more conservative two-sided approach; therefore, we were able to reject the null hypothesis.

General Conclusions of Study 1.  Private schools do not necessarily create a lasting mentality among its students that “trains” them to

seek out relationships with their professors. Even though this environment may exist at school, it may not be translating into the minds of students to make them want to maintain it at Dartmouth.

2.  There is probably a large variation in the character of both public and private schools. Many public schools have large student bodies and subpar teachers, but there are also many public schools that more closely resemble private schools. Consequently, one cannot categorically assume that all public schools do not cultivate intimate student-teacher relationships. Similarly, not all private schools are created equal. Private schools have different qualities of teaching, student/teacher ratios, etc. Some probably just do a better job at instilling the intimate student-teacher relationship mentality into their students.

3.  Students at Dartmouth are generally intelligent and driven, so those that come from public schools and perhaps did not have access to as many resources as private school students were probably the students who had to work harder and go the extra mile to gain admission into an Ivy League school. These exceptional public school students, then, are probably the most likely out of all public school students to go to office hours.

4.  Our subsidiary finding of a positive relationship between private school education and higher college GPA suggests that a private school education might better prepare students for academics at Dartmouth. Due to the presence of other complicating factors such as socio-economic background, family values and individual motivation that could complicate the education-GPA relationship, we cannot confidently conclude that private school education results in a higher college GPA. In addition, we chose a high significance level of .1, which could have potentially resulted in a Type I error in which we rejected the null hypothesis when it is in fact true. The relationship, however, is an interesting additional finding.

Implications for the Future In general, despite the flaws in our study, our results are useful in that they show that we cannot

make sweeping assumptions about the nature of all public schools or all private schools, as each features varying levels of teacher-student involvement. More importantly, each student is unique, regardless of the type of school he or she went to, and has different strategies for attaining academic success, some of which involve extensive interactions with professors and some of which do not. Therefore, in the ongoing public versus private school debate, it is important for parents, colleges and even employers to understand that private school does not necessarily hold the key to strong student-teacher relationships or sustained intellectual curiosity within students. Rather, education is a very individualized process.

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the spring, which could affect the amount of times they visit their professors. Finally, because people had the option to enter their GPA in a box, there was more room for error. This includes problems with typos, people entering in joke answers, and dishonest reporting of one’s GPA. We asked the GPA question last because we felt people might be lured away from taking the survey if it was asked in the beginning. About 50 respondents chose not to answer the final question, which demonstrates how some people view their GPA as a private matter.

Potential Weaknesses and Areas of Further Study:   Despite the anonymous nature of the survey, people could have been reticent or embarrassed to admit how many times they went to office hours during the month of April.   Similarly, people could have been lying about their GPA. We had to remove two outliers that both indicated “7” for GPA, which is obviously an unattainable number.   The kind of person that fills out a Government 10 survey might be someone who is more likely to go to office hours — someone who checks their e-mail often is probably someone who values communication.   While we surveyed students about major and region in addition to GPA, type of high school, and office hours, we chose not to study the effect of major or region on office hour attendance. Analyzing these results might have helped us to identify additional reasons as to why we found no statistically significant relationship between education and office hours, as they could have given us a broader picture of the many factors influencing office hour attendance.   The sample was probably not a Simple Random Sample. If we had more time and resources, we would have ideally liked the survey to go out on the entire undergraduate population at Dartmouth so that each student had an equal chance of being chosen for the study.   This study only allowed us to draw conclusions about Dartmouth students rather than college students on the whole, and Dartmouth students are certainly not representative of college students as a whole. We might expect that Dartmouth students, whether they went to public or private high schools, on average go to office hours more than the typical college student. This makes it difficult to draw more general inferences about the tendencies of public versus private high schools, as Dartmouth probably comprises some of the most exceptional students across all high schools. If we had more time and resources, it would be interesting to study how many hours per month students go to office hours (or the equivalent) across many different colleges and universities. If we had been able to take Simple Random samples from many universities across the country, we would be able to make more robust conclusions about whether going to public or private school really does have a bearing on the level of interaction one seeks with his or her professors in college generally, not just at Dartmouth.