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July 28, 2014

Trial shows PASS can increase a student’s performance

Early results from a randomised controlled trial suggest that the academic mentoring programs known as PASS can considerably increase a student’s performance.

The study, which was conducted by Associate Professor Peter Siminski, Dr Alfredo R. Paloyo and Sally Rogan, Director of Peer Learning at UOW, found that attendance rates for Peer-Assisted Study Sessions (PASS) were 17 per cent higher for an incentivised group of students compared to a control group that received no incentives.

The incentivised group also saw higher average marks.

“Estimating the causal impact of programs such as PASS is difficult because students self-select into the program, which means that the decision to participate may be related to unobserved characteristics which cannot be controlled for,” Associate Professor Siminski said.

“To get around this problem, we incentivised a random set of students to participate in the PASS program. This ‘randomised encouragement design’ (RED) shares the internal validity of a randomised controlled trial, without denying anyone the opportunity to participate in PASS,” Associate Professor Siminski added.

UOW is the National Centre for PASS in Australasia, and provides training on the award-winning program to over 70 institutions.

Sally Rogan said PASS is now in its 13th year of operation at UOW and supports students in all Faculties.

“The program continues to grow and in Autumn Semester this year, it delivered 25,000 contact hours to 4,000 UOW participants. This was a 20 per cent increase in contact hours on Autumn Semester last year,” Ms Rogan said.

The results of the study are from the first semester of the evaluation. Funded by the Australian Government’s Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP) scheme, the study will continue through the Spring session. It will also focus on the effects the peer-learning program has on particular student subgroups, including those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

UOW will host the annual PASS conference in September that will be attended by 180 delegates from across Australia, NZ, Fiji, Malaysia and Canada.

UOW students involved in the RED project, who won participation incentives, were awarded $1,000 gift cards by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) Professor Eeva Leinonen at a presentation on Friday 25 July.

For more information on the PASS program, please visit