Supplemental Instruction at a Hispanic-Serving Institution: Moving Towards a Model to Improve Equity in Student Outcomes

ABSTRACT

This research examines the role of Supplemental Instruction in assisting students at a small Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) in the Southwest United States to improve their final grades in a required statistics course for criminal justice majors. Data collected over three semesters were analyzed using multivariate regression to test if participation in Supplemental Instruction moderates the relationship between race, ethnicity, and final grades earned, with Latinx students and students from other historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups especially benefitting from SI participation. We find positive interactions for race, ethnicity, and final grades; however, the interaction term is only statistically significant for students from other, non-Latinx underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. These students attended SI most frequently, derived the most benefits from their participation, and were also notably the most underrepresented in the institution and the course. We go on to discuss evidence-based recommendations that SI and other collaborative learning programs may consider if their goal is to move toward servingness by improving equity in performance and academic success outcomes across students from diverse backgrounds.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaborative learning
• Hispanic-serving institutions
• SoTL
• supplemental instruction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Like Garcia, 2019, the authors here prefer the use of the term “Latinx” over “Hispanic” to refer to “people who have historic, social, and geographic roots in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Latinx people have a shared identity based on indigenous ancestry, Spanish colonization, and African slavery. The ‘x’ replaces the ‘o’ to be gender-inclusive” (p. 1). The term “Hispanic” is used only when in a quote or referring to the official term for HSIs.

² PASS is also known as peer assisted study session and is a different term used to describe SI.

³ To increase the sample size, we intended on collecting data for 2–3 more semesters. However, due to COVID-19 shifting courses online we felt it best to stop the data collection to make sure that SI and the course delivery are consistent across sections of the course included in the study.