Effectiveness assessment of a formative tutoring programme

Abstract

University tutoring is a central process in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), with its different modalities and strategies. Nowadays, in post-secondary education a new attention to customer-tailored educational actions coexists with the goal to promote a whole-person development of students in order to improve learning and contrast drop-outs: university tutoring plays a crucial role in this new vision. The study is focused on the evaluation of a programme of formative tutoring that involved three first-cycle degree courses at the University of Padova. The hypothesis of effectiveness, in particular, was verified by ex-post selection of a control group, composed of the most similar not treated students to treated ones. The selection of the control group members was carried out by propensity score matching, a statistical technique that predicts the probability to receive the treatment accounting for a set of students observable characteristics. This counter-factual causal analysis gave significant results: the drop-out rate fell by half, and performance increased in terms of learning outcomes.