What Drives Students to Office Hours: Individual Differences and Similarities

Undergraduate teaching assistants (UTAs) office hours are an approachable way for students to get help, but little is known about why and for what do the students choose to attend office hours. We sought to understand what kind of help the students believe they need by analyzing the problem-solving step students self-reported when joining the office hours queue app. We used the UPIC framework to aggregate course specific problem-solving steps to enable comparing between seven data sets from a CS1 and a data science course across four semesters. We then compared the class-level and student-level phase distributions to understand the differences between the two courses and the two levels in the courses. We found most students have a "primary phase" where a majority of their interactions fall, and there are significant individual differences in their phase distributions. Moreover, we did not find either students' demographics or the context of their first visits to significantly impact their individual differences in the phase distributions, suggesting students may have fixed beliefs on how to approach office hours. Finally, a strong majority of interactions happen within 3 days of the deadline, such that the UPIC distribution for those days looks like the class-level phase distribution.