scholarly journals Fostering Retention in Online Higher Education: Students’ Perceptions of an Intervention Addressing their First-Year Experience

2020 ◽  
pp. 389-397
Author(s):  
Marlon Xavier ◽  
Julio Meneses
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Advising ◽  
First Year Experience ◽  
First Year ◽  
Continuous Assessment ◽  
Related Factors ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Online Higher Education ◽  
Intervention Measures

Dropout represents one of the greatest challenges faced by online higher education. This paper presents an institutional intervention aimed at fostering retention and success of first-year undergraduate students at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), an online and open University, through measures addressing learning design and academic support. Secondly, through analysing in-depth interviews with first-year students, the paper explores their perception of intervention measures and their possible advantages or risks. Results indicate that time-related factors represent the major issue for persistence and continuance. Intervention measures such as personalized course packages which prevent overlapping of submission deadlines; flexibility in continuous assessment; and personalized support and academic advising were valued highly by most students. Future retention interventions in open universities are also discussed.

scholarly journals Selective Planning of the First Year Experience in Higher Education: A Sweden-Australia Comparative Study of Support

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 128
Author(s):  
Michael Christie ◽  
Sorrel Penn-Edwards ◽  
Sharn Donnison ◽  
Ruth Greenaway
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
First Year Experience ◽  
Fourth Generation ◽  
First Year ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Satellite Campus ◽  
First Case ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
The University

Literature on the support of the First Year Experience (FYE) in institutions of Higher Education provides a range of modelled approaches. However, we argue that institutions still need to selectively plan which approach/es and attendant strategies are best suited to their particular contexts and institutional policy and practice frameworks and how their FYE is to be presented for their particular student cohort. This paper compares different ways of supporting students in their first year in two contrasting universities. The first case study focuses on a first year course at Stockholm University (SU), Sweden, a large, metropolitan, single campus institution, while the second investigates a strategy for supporting first year students using a community of practice at a satellite campus of the University of the Sunshine Coast (USC), a small regional university in South-East Queensland, Australia. The research contrasts a formal, first generation support approach versus a fourth generation support approach which seeks to involve a wider range of stakeholders in supporting first year students. The research findings draw conclusions about how effective the interventions were for the students and provide clear illustrations that selective planning in considering the institution’s strategic priorities and human, physical, and resource contexts was instrumental in providing a distinctive experience which complemented the institute and the student cohort. (212 words)

scholarly journals The Contribution of Learning and Mental Health Variables in First-Year Students' Profiles

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fotios S. Milienos ◽  
Christos Rentzios ◽  
Leen Catrysse ◽  
David Gijbels ◽  
Sofia Mastrokoukou ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Higher Education ◽  
At Risk ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Emotion Dysregulation ◽  
Educational Institution ◽  
First Year ◽  
International Studies ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Student Profiles

International studies focus on the successful transition into higher education, which is considered crucial for both the students and the educational institution in the context of students' learning and adjustment in higher education. The aim of the current study was to identify student profiles that include cognitive, metacognitive, and motivational aspects of learning, but also aspects of resilience, emotion dysregulation, and anxiety. The sample consists of 316 Greek undergraduate students (18.7% males and 81.3% females). The results showed four different (meta)-cognitive-emotional learner profiles: the emotionally stable and highly adaptive learner; the emotionally dysregulated and at risk learner; the emotionally dysregulated and highly adaptive learner; the emotionally stable and at risk learner. Emotionally dysregulated and at risk learner has a lower GPA than the emotional stable and highly adaptive learner, the emotionally dysregulated and highly adaptive learner and the emotionally stable and at risk learner.

scholarly journals First-Year Students and the Framework: Using Topic Modeling to Analyze Student Understanding of the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-69
Author(s):  
Melissa Harden
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Information Literacy ◽  
Topic Modeling ◽  
Topic Model ◽  
Student Understanding ◽  
First Year Experience ◽  
First Year ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Assigned Reading ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Objective – The Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education has generated a significant amount of discussion among academic librarians; however, few have discussed the potential impact on learning when students interact directly with the Framework itself. At the University of Notre Dame, over 1,900 first-year students completed an information literacy assignment in their required first-year experience course. Students read a condensed version of the Framework, then wrote a response discussing how a frame of their choosing was reflected in an assigned reading. The goal of this exploratory study was to determine if the students demonstrated an understanding of the themes and concepts in the Framework based on this assignment. Methods – Topic modeling, a method for discovering topics contained in a corpus of text, was used to explore the themes that emerged in the students’ responses to this assignment and assess the degree to which they connect to frames in the Framework. The model receives no information about the Framework prior to the analysis; it only uses the students’ words to form topics. Results – The responses formed several topics that are recognizable as related to the frames from the Framework, suggesting that students were able to engage effectively and meaningfully with the language of the Framework. Because the topic model does not know anything about the Framework, the fact that the responses formed topics that are recognizable as frames suggests that students internalized the concepts in the Framework well enough to express them in their own writing. Conclusion – This research provides insight regarding the impact that the Framework may have on student understanding of information literacy concepts.

scholarly journals Evaluation of information ethical issues among undergraduate students: An exploratory study

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Liezel Cilliers
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Computer Literacy ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Education Institution ◽  
Software Piracy ◽  
Information Ethics ◽  
First Year ◽  
First Year Students

Background: Higher education is increasingly making use of information and communication technology (ICT) to deliver educational services. Young adults at higher educational institutions are also making use of ICTs in their daily lives but are not taught how to do so ethically. Software piracy, plagiarism and cheating, while making use of ICTs, are the most common ethical dilemmas that will face digital natives.Objective: The purpose of this article was to investigate information ethics of young adults at a higher education institution in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa.Method: This study made use of a positive, quantitative survey approach. A closed-ended questionnaire was distributed to a group of 312 first-year students, who had registered for a computer literacy class. A response rate of 69.2% was recorded, resulting in 216 students participating in the study. The results were analysed using descriptive and inferential (t-tests) statistics in SPSS V22.Results: The results indicated that plagiarism is a problem among first-year students, and elements of authorship should be included in the curriculum. Students understood what software piracy was but did not think it was wrong to copy software from the Internet. Finally, the students understood that cheating, while making use of technology, is wrong and should be avoided.Conclusion: The recommendation of the study then is that information ethics must be included in the undergraduate curriculum in order to prepare students to deal with these ethical problems.

scholarly journals Academic Advising and the Student Transition to College

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe Cuseo
Keyword(s):  
Academic Advising ◽  
Student Development ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
First Year Experience ◽  
Development Theory ◽  
First Year ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Student Transition ◽  
Undergraduate Experience

The first year of college continues to be a critical period for student persistence, learning, and development. College students are under increasing pressure to make commitments to major and career plans at a very early stage in their undergraduate experience, often without the programmatic support to do so. First-year experience professionals, who are knowledgeable about student development theory and professionally committed to facilitating the transition of students to collee, are well position to fill the void in support for early academic and career decision-making. Provision of proactive and personalized support to meet the current demands for early educational and vocational decision-makingmay be pivotal for ensuring the success of today's first-year students in general, and today's growing number of first-generation students in particular.

scholarly journals Managing your mind: how simple activities within the curriculum can improve undergraduate students' mental health and wellbeing

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor Roisin Edwards ◽  
Heidrun Interthal ◽  
Heather McQueen
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Higher Education ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Well Being ◽  
First Year ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Transition Activities ◽  
Mental Health Awareness ◽  
Mental Well Being

The transition into higher education stretches students socially, academically and within their personal lives requiring adaptation and development of resilience. For many, such demands may lead to decreased mental well-being and, for some, mental ill-health.This project aimed to trial simple mental health awareness and well-being tasks with first year undergraduate students, and to determine whether students find these interventions beneficial and worthy of embedding as transition activities within the first-year curriculum. Four activities were trialled with 185 first-year students who reported the activities as beneficial. All activities caused an overall increase in student knowledge of how to maintain good mental well-being. In the light of this project’s findings, such activities are recommended for embedding into the first-year curriculum and throughout higher education. 

A FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS’ ADAPTATION TO DIFFICULTIES AT HIGH EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENTS

2021 ◽  
pp. 97-113
Author(s):  
Nailya R. Salikhova ◽  
◽  
Aida R. Fakhrutdinova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Personal Growth ◽  
Personal Development ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
First Year ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Social Community ◽  
Transition To Higher Education ◽  
Study Participants

Data from an empirical study aimed at identifying the difficulties faced by students in their transition to higher education, the overcoming of which is important for personal development, are presented in the article. The study participants (n=179) were asked to describe the difficulties of transition from school to University in the 1st year based on analysis of their autobiographical memory. The content analysis of texts allowed identifying the main themes and compiling a list of challenges, and then the frequency of occurrence of each of them was determined. According to the results, the most actual difficulties are the different aspects of integrating into the new social community due to sharp changes in the social environment during the transition from school to University. A big challenge is the need for self-organization in educational and everyday matters, planning and organizing your time. The third most frequently mentioned is learning difficulties, especially those related to mastering the material in the new educational environment. Problematic areas of adaptation to higher education that have not been previously reflected in the sources are the establishment of a common life in the dormitory, pressure from parents, the manifestation of their individuality, the increase in the length of classes and the pace of learning, romantic relationships and language barriers. The difficulties of the first examination session are much less frequently mentioned, and are more frequently mentioned when examining the current adaptation process. The results of the study can be used for the development and subsequent implementation of a system of practical measures aimed at helping students to adapt to the new environment and conditions. Such assistance to students in building a new way of life at a university, especially at an early stage of study, is necessary not only to improve the effectiveness of the educational process, but also to facilitate the processes of personal growth and development of students

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