Student Retention and Success Project

Focus on final year students

kined — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 13:38:51 +0000

We’re taking our survey a step forward! With good help from Dr. Felicity James we have just finished collecting data from the 3rd year students in the English Department. One of our goals this semester is to be able to explore the differences in sense of belonging between first and final year students. Having found that the transition from a secondary or FE setting to an HE institution plays an important part in shaping the first year experience, we are now concentrating on what university life is like for students who are coming to the end of their undergraduate degree. Interesting times ahead!

Thumbs up from Alan

kined — Tue, 18 May 2010 18:27:58 +0000

Dr Alan Cann, prize-winning blogger

Dr Alan Cann, senior lecturer at the Department of Biology and a significant figure within the use social media in teaching and learning, talks about our recent paper in his excellent blog, Science of the Invisible.

Alan is currently involved in a project using the social aggregator site FriendFeed to deliver course-related information and provide a forum for discussion and feedback amongst students. The project is so far proving very successful, with student activity blowing the socks of Blackboard.

Social networking sites can improve student retention

kined — Tue, 18 May 2010 18:12:07 +0000

Part of our study focuses on the effect of social networking sites such as Facebook on students’ sense of belonging. Our findings so far suggest that for students who live off campus and are to some degree cut off from the informal social interaction that takes place among students who live on campus (e.g. in halls) benefit significantly from using social networking sites. Making friends online aids social integration, which in turn translates to increased sense of belonging and more positive attitudes towards university life. The paper, entitled The Effect of Online Social Networking on Facilitating Sense of Belonging among University Students Living Off Campus is to be presented at the World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications (ED-MEDIA) in July this year.

Teaching and Learning Day

kined — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 10:56:37 +0000

With the majority of our core team trapped in Africa due to the volcanic ashes the remaining members (i.e. Kine) are attending the Teaching and Learning Day arranged by the College of Medicine, Biological Sciences and Psychology at the University of Leicester. The event is being chaired by Prof. Annette Cashmore, who is the director of GENIE and member of our project’s management group.

In our surveys we identified feedback and assessment as key elements in students’ perception of and attitudes to life in academia, and so far the interesting perspectives on this have been provided by Dr. Jon Scott (from Leicester) and also Prof. Tony Gardner-Medwin from UCL.

Survey – Round 2

kined — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:25:01 +0000

Taking on board things that came to our attention during the Leeds convention, we have now finalised our survey to be distributed among students at the College of Arts, Humanities and Law next week. These data will be compared to our previous set form the College of Medicine, Biological Sciences and Psychology. This will hopefully allow us make some comparisons between the experience of university life among students from two very different subject areas, and give us a fuller picture of what contributes to sense of belonging within the student population.

The poster!

kined — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:03:19 +0000

After having rocked up poster-less at the January summit in Derby, we realised that something needed to be done. We finally managed to put together a blue, shiny and laminated A0 poster to take with us to Leeds. And Craig did a terrific job carting the thing from Leicester to Nottingham, back to Leicester, to Leeds via Derby, back to Leicester via Sheffield and finally back to Nottingham. It has now taken up permanent residence in the boot of Craig’s car. Just in case.

Workshop at the Leeds convention

kined — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:53:10 +0000

: Martin wrapping up after our workshop

Although a bit delayed, our workshop went more or less according to plan. Trying to pin down sense of belonging as a concept and relate it to student persistence and retention is quite a complex task, and asking the delegates what they think about when they hear the term elicited a wide array of words and terms. We were particularly happy with the enthusiastic discussion and amount of feedback and useful comments we received at the end. It certainly gave us a lot to think about, and also a lot to take with us in our further work!

Nutt at the Convention

kined — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:35:14 +0000

: Charlie Nutt

Charlie Nutt from NACADA (The Global Community for Academic Advising) and Kansas State gave a very entertaining talk and managed to put some life into the crowd early Thursday morning. His take-home message was essentially that student success, persistence and retention is not about finding the one programme, initiative, activity or strategy to solve all our problems; and also that the focus needs to be on changing the student experience, not the student.

A number of the issues he talked about tied in with things we have looked at and ideas we have had for our own project. Particularly interesting were his views on the way students’ attitudes affect their intentions to leave or stay, and how their intentions are affected by the interaction between the student and their department/faculty, peers, and academic/non-academic staff.

Project update

martinpen — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:52:00 +0000

The project is now getting underway with some research into the first year experience and into the experiences of students who leave without completing their courses.

The former is beginning to add to our understanding of what most affects a student’s feeling of belonging to the University. We have given the questionnaire to nearly 400 students in the College of Medicine, Biological Sciences and Psychology. The results are now being analysed and we are about to spread our net more widely to cover students from the College of Arts, Humanities and Law, by giving the questionnaire to about 200 first year English students in the next couple of weeks.

The survey of early leavers is now going out to those who left in the last two academic years and we expect to get a response rate of about 15% to this which should provide us with about 150-200 responses.

The Retention Summit last month in Derby gave us a chance to meet with the other six projects and catch up with their activities. There seem to be some real overlaps emerging in terms of looking at similar concepts from different angles so we are looking to develop our links with at least two of these projects.

We are also planning our workshop at the Retention Convention in Leeds next month where we will present some of the early research results and get some feedback from delegates at our workshop.