Ryan Chapman & Rachel Justice (With support from Erkan Demirbas)
The Peer Study Group for ECO1032 Business Environment (Micro) is a student led, student focused initiative with the aim of improving the performance of students who do not have level 3 qualifications in subjects such as mathematics and economic, which are heavily integrated into their degree. By creating a positive working environment for students to feel comfortable in working together and enhancing their understanding of key subjects such as break-even analysis and supply and demand within a market; for themselves and others. The Peer Study Group consists of volunteer students, who are trained by the MASH team, to ensure that they can support their peers effectively. We have chosen to participate in this project alongside Erkan as it contributes to the ‘One Community’ spirit at the University of Lincoln as well as giving us the opportunity to gain new skills and learn from our tutor.
The objectives of this project are to enhance student performance through the support sessions, promote collaboration across different students within the business school, increase student engagement and contribute to the ‘One Community’ spirit. To achieve these objectives, we implemented different strategies such as peer mentoring sessions, online tutoring sessions, email support, equality and diversity considerations and MASH team training for volunteer students.
During the ECO1032 module we organised multiple support sessions for our seminar groups with the focus on the upcoming TCA assignments. Therefore, our support sessions consisted of working through trial questions and KAHOOT quizzes to recap the content expected to appear on the assignment. We also offered pizza to students as an initiative to increase the number of attendees and improve engagement. To assess the impact of the Peer Study Group on students’ performance and ensure we were meeting our objectives we collected feedback after each support session in the form of an online questionnaire.
Table 1: Feedback from ECO1032 Test 1 Support Session
| Strongly Agree | Agree | Neutral | Disagree | Strongly Disagree | |
| Attending this event helped me prepare for Test 1 | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| I feel more confident now | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Were the members of the support team effective? | 6 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
From the data collected during the Test 1 support session students said:
‘Everyone was very helpful, Brodi spent specific time breaking down certain questions and Ryan was constantly offering help’.
‘It was useful and informative’.
‘It met my expectations’.
This allowed us to identify that our Peers were happy with the support session we had delivered and as a result they felt more confident with their approach to Test 1. Therefore, we successfully achieved our objective of preparing our peers for their first test whilst contributing to the ‘One Community’ spirit as everyone involved benefited from the support session.
After the success of the Peer Study Group for ECO1032, we decided to continue offering support for the next mathematical based module in Term B, ECO1031 Data Analytics for Business. As Erkan is the module leader for ECO1032 we were able to increase awareness for the support group through announcements in lectures and emails went to the whole cohort. Due to the increasing demand that this created we were able to expand our volunteer support group across the business school to include third year, Master’s and PhD students. This helped us contribute further to the ‘One Community’ spirit across the whole of the LIBS rather than just our cohort.
As part of continuing and expanding this project, we wanted to promote the work that we have completed – we held an interview with Siren radio, as a way of making students more aware of where they can receive support and to help any of those that want to become a mentor also. This interview is available to listen at: https://www.sirenonline.co.uk/listen-again/podcasts/in-conversation-with/episode/the-peer-support-group-project-erkan-demirbas-and-ryan-chapman/. As a way of assessing the impact we are having on the university and as further promotion, we also wrote a report which was published in the Ideas bank on Economics Network: https://economicsnetwork.ac.uk/showcase/chapman_studygroups. This report is available for other universities and individuals to view our findings and understand the benefits of our project.
For this module we offered three formal support sessions, one for each of the TCA assignments and a third for the group project assignment. The group project assignment offered a unique experience for us as the format of this assessment is very different to the TCAs – Application of data was more important than the calculations themselves, but the calculations also need to be correct to provide sufficient information and accurate results to comment on. It is crucial that we can help sufficiently, as we don’t want students to feel that they cannot contribute enough to their final reports. We also changed the format of our sessions to accommodate for the large number of attendees, we did this by separating our peers into smaller groups which could be supported by two volunteer students.
The feedback collected from these support sessions included the following testimonials from students who attended:
‘Very friendly and easy to understand. Helped significantly’
‘It was very helpful, relaxed, and enjoyable. A fun event’.
‘I would prefer to have the support in other modules as well’.
As well as the following comments from volunteer students:
‘Next time as well as going through the questions in front of the class I would make time at the beginning to talk directly to students so that I could find out which questions they were struggling with and then focus more on these with the whole class.”- 1st year student.
“It was awesome, students showed great willingness to learn and improve themselves and I believe this is a very wonderful initiative to help them achieve success.”- PhD student.
“We went through all the questions provided, explaining how to approach them and answer them in excel format. Any students who required more help we went round and helped individually and ensured everyone understood how we concluded our answer to each question before moving on. We gained valuable experience of helping people and speaking in front of a class, we both enjoyed doing it and appreciated the opportunity.”- 3rd year student.
This highlighted that students were very satisfied with the Peer Study Group; however, they would benefit further from similar support groups in other modules such as finance for specialists. This supports our long-term plan of establishing a framework to grow the Peer Study Group further, which would in turn grow the ‘One Community’ spirit across the business school.
Future plans will involve maintaining a strong sense of community: enticing students to attend and increasing incentives for helpers too. We feel we have developed skills which can be passed on to students joining in September and those new to the business school. Other module leaders may notice groups or individuals are struggling with specific skills and feel that schemes similar to ours can be implemented for their own courses. It is important to pursue collective growth, so we hope schemes like this can become a selling point of the university.
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