scholarly journals Factors that Influence Student Retention

Author(s):  
Aisling Devereux ◽  
Markus Hofmann

With the increase in enrolment figures from second level education to third level education over the last number of decades, non-progression rates continue to give cause for concern in certain levels and disciplines. It has been widely argued that in addition to increasing enrolment numbers, higher education must also be concerned with the success of these students. In both the Irish and the international sector, the negative consequences of non-progression has been highlighted, not just on a societal level, but also for the students themselves. It is crucial for first-year student experience to have a positive experience and be fully supported in achieving the goals of higher education. From researching several reports in the area of retention and in particular the reports published by the Irish Higher Education Authority and the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education in this area, it is clear that there is a need to analyse the data available and present the findings in a clear way to the key decision makers to allow for early intervention. This paper uses the different phases of the CRISP-DM methodology and applies data mining techniques and models to a real student dataset with the aim to predict the students that will progress. Keywords: Learning analytics; Data Mining; Higher Education; Retention.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Andrew M. Wender ◽  
Valerie J. D’Erman

ABSTRACT Teaching and learning in higher education is occurring, unavoidably, within the broader civic context of today’s extraordinarily polarizing political times. We seek to help students situate themselves with respect to and, above all, thoughtfully assess others’ as well as their own perspectives on issues of profound contention, without contributing to exacerbated polarization ourselves. Specifically, we offer students in our first-year exploratory political science course a vital tool—critical rigor—for navigating but not being inundated by the storm. This article discusses our experiences in teaching the course titled, “The Worlds of Politics,” as we attempt to help students deeply engage in cognitive processes of critical thinking and analysis, without undue infringement from their own—and least of all our own—personal political biases. Our focal learning objective is the cultivation of critical-thinking skills that promote students’ drawing of distinctions between advocacy and analysis, as well as their discerning civic engagement.


Author(s):  
Emma Riordan ◽  
Clive Earls ◽  
Áine Furlong ◽  
Colin Flynn ◽  
Silvia Benini

Higher Education Language Educator Competences (HELECs) is an inter-institutional project which investigates the range of language educator skills needed in higher education (HE). The purpose of the project is to develop an empirically-informed competence framework which is aligned with the National Forum for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education’s National Professional Development Framework for all Staff Who Teach in Higher Education (2016). The framework will provide individual language educators and programme developers with a reference point and practical tools, based on a comprehensive profile of language teaching skills, to ensure that all HE language educators are appropriately supported in their professional development. The project is funded by the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education’s enhancement fund.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-84
Author(s):  
Katy Seery ◽  
Albert Barreda ◽  
Stephanie Hein ◽  
Jokima Hiller

The purpose of this paper is to examine online retention research in higher education over a 5-year span (January 2015–March 2019) to further advance research in higher education retention. Through an academic database search, 18 articles were collected from EBSCOhost, Google Scholar, and Research Gate using combinations of the keywords online, retention strategies, and higher education. All articles were analyzed for proposed retention strategies. Retention is a global topic. As such, this study demonstrates the importance of retention and clarifies issues or challenges students encounter, which may cause lower retention rates. The data reviewed suggest the most common retention issues or strategies involved student factors/motivation as well as faculty and student interactions. Common retention strategies most often included enhancing faculty training and/or support and adding student services positions and/or support.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Laura Costelloe

It is broadly recognised that professional development (PD) to enhance academic practice amongst those who teach in Higher Education (HE) encompasses a range of approaches; while there is an established culture of accredited PD provision – particularly for early-career academics – literature points to a preference among more established faculty for non-accredited or informal PD activities such as workshops, projects, conferences, professional dialogue, experimental approaches or activities related to the scholarship of teaching and learning (Ashgar and Pilkington 2018; Kálmán et al. 2019; Spowart et al. 2017). The provision of accredited PD is now commonplace in the Irish context and many Irish HE Institutions offer programmes in academic practice at Graduate Certificate, Diploma or Masters Level (Maguire et al. 2017; Maguire et al. 2015). However, evidence also points to a long-standing culture of engagement in in- and non-formal PD activities among Irish HE teachers (Kenny et al. 2015). This has been recognised in the Irish National Professional Development Framework which is underpinned by an ‘acknowledgement of the spectrum of activities that could be considered under the umbrella of PD’ (National Forum 2016a; National Forum 2016b). Thus, a considerable amount of the professional learning that is undertaken to enhance academic practice takes place through experiential or work-based practices including communities of practice, conversations with colleagues and practice-based innovations (Knight et al. 2006; Nerantzi 2015; Warhurst 2008). Furthermore, there is a growing body of literature highlighting the use of portfolios to support academic professional learning activities and reflective practice in Higher Education (Costelloe et al. 2019; Hamilton 2018; Hoekstra and Crocker 2015; O'Farrell 2007; Pelger and Larsson 2018). Described as ‘a purposeful collection of evidence, consisting of descriptions, documents and examples of what is good teaching for the teacher’ (de Rijdt et al. 2006, p.1086), portfolios are being used in multiple ways to support PD: to provide evidence of a quality approach to professional development, to document teaching practices for the purposes of promotion, to showcase and reflect on academic practice and to provide evidence of engagement with PD activities. An eportfolio adds an extra dimension to the affordances of a more traditional portfolio through the potential inclusion of multimedia artefacts such as audio, video and text to capture, share and reflect on academic practice.          Bearing in mind the Irish HE context and the recent introduction of the National Professional Development Framework, this paper will explore the potential of eportfolios – and specifically digital teaching or professional practice portfolios – to support, document and evidence the wealth of non-accredited and in/non-formal professional learning undertaken by HE teachers to enhance academic practice. Drawing on semi-structured interviews carried out with Irish HE teachers in three institutions in the Mid-West region, this paper will consider how digital teaching portfolios offer a space to capture, evidence, reflect on and share the wealth of practice-based and in/non-formal PD in which HE teachers engage.


Author(s):  
Raquel Ajates Gonzalez

While inter-university and interdisciplinary research projects are very common in Higher Education (HE), inter-university and interdisciplinary teaching programmes are still very rare. This paper reflects on the first year of the Innovative Food Systems Teaching and Learning (IFSTAL) programme. IFSTAL is a three-year project funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) with the aim of bringing together postgraduate students from very different programmes to learn about food and farming beyond their own disciplines. IFSTAL creates learning environments and activities that encourage students to think systemically about the transdisciplinary challenges facing the food system. IFSTAL combines both face to face events and an inter-university virtual learning environment (VLE) that was created from scratch for this project. At the end of its first year, a survey was carried out to evaluate the programme and inform the structure for year two (Y2). Survey data revealed students preferred interacting at face to face events over the shared VLE. The programme for Y2 was re-designed to incorporate more flipped classroom features with an andragogy-based approach.


2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 6-9

In this feature of the Bulletin, we highlight members of the SIGCSE community. In this issue, Bulletin co-editor Charles Wallace interviewed Dr. Brett Becker, Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at University College Dublin (UCD) in Ireland. Brett double-majored in Computer Science and Physics at Drew University in New Jersey. He then moved to Ireland and completed an M.Sc. in Computational Science and a Ph.D. in Computer Science (Heterogeneous Parallel Computing) at UCD. Since then, he has completed three postgraduate qualifications in Teaching & Learning including an MA in Higher Education. His research interests include the psychology and other human factors of learning programming, including how novices interact with programming languages and environments. In 2020, he received a Teaching and Learning Research Fellowship from the Irish National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education - the highest individual national distinction the sector offers to those teaching in higher education. Brett is active in all four SIGCSE conferences including serving as Chair of the CompEd Steering Committee and Co-chairing ITiCSE 2022 in Dublin next summer. He has co-authored several award-winning papers including best computing education research papers (SIGCSE Technical Symposium 2019, 2021) and best reviewed paper (ICER 2020). Brett is chair of the Ireland ACM SIGCSE Chapter and recently co-authored a textbook aligned with the Irish national second-level Computer Science curriculum.


2010 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 464-490 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Lynn Gusa

In this conceptual paper, Diane Gusa highlights the salience of race by scrutinizing the culture of Whiteness within predominately White institutions of higher education. Using existing research in higher education retention literature, Gusa examines embedded White cultural ideology in the cultural practices, traditions, and perceptions of knowledge that are taken for granted as the norm at institutions of higher education. Drawing on marginalization and discrimination experiences of African American undergraduates to illustrate the performance of White mainstream ideology,Gusa names this embedded ideology White institutional presence (WIP) and assigns it four attributes: White ascendancy, monoculturalism, White estrangement,and White blindness.


Author(s):  
Ana María Baptista Oliveira Dias Malva Vaz

Abstract.BEHAVIORS AND ATTITUDES OF HIGHER EDUCATION STUDENTS IN RELATION TO SEXUALITYSexuality and the way it should be addressed still has no solutions and the young people continue to have the attitudes/ behaviours they deem appropriate and the results that follow aren’t always the best. The objective is to study the sexuality in young students who attend the first year of higher education (area of health), considering that most of them are for the first time out of their family, with typical experiences of students entering higher education, and also because it is at this stage of life that sexual maturation begins, very close to adulthood. The study is of a quantitative nature, putting in evidence the attitudes and sexual behaviours of young people who have already begun their sexual activity (64.6%). The scale used has four dimensions that are subdivided into: Behavioural Intent: Practice “safe sex”, which is understood as the use of condom. Reactions: positive and negative feelings of the subject towards the use of condom and beliefs about the positive or negative consequences associated with this behaviour. Subjective norm: subjective judgment about the degree of approval-disapproval of certain significant persons to the subject (parents, friends, partner) about the use of condom. Control perception: expectations of self-efficacy, subjective judgment about the degree of conviction in the difficulty or ease of using (or making use) the condom at the next sexual encounter. We have concluded that there is a large percentage who use the condom (36%), followed by a double protection, condom and contraceptional pill (26.1%). Most of those who already had sex, (65%) had sex again with the same partner. Health professionals should understand the complexity of the problem of sexuality and be aware of the reality of the lifestyles adopted by young people, so that they can define strategies for health promotion and intervene in the causes. Keywords: sexuality; young people; behaviours; attitudes; contraceptionpanish and English were: “baile”, “lesión”, “prevención”, “prevalencia”, “flamenco”, “danza”, “dance”, “injury”, “prevention”, “prevalence”, “common”, “frequent”, “lession”, “flamenco” and “ballet”. The majority of injuries occur in the lower extremities and are often related to muscular overload or weakness, rather than traumatisms. These injuries are commonly produced by a lack of technique or a wrong application of it, or even sometimes by the bad fitting-out of the room where the activity is being practised.Keywords: dance, injuries, physiotherapy, prevention, exercises, psychologyResumo.A sexualidade e a forma como deve ser abordada ainda não tem soluções e os jovens continuam a ter as atitudes/comportamentos que entendem e nem sempre os resultados que daí advêm são os melhores. O objetivo é estudar a sexualidade nos jovens estudantes que frequentam o 1º ano do ensino superior (área da saúde), considerando que na sua maioria se encontram pela primeira vez fora do seu agregado familiar, com vivências próprias dos estudantes que ingressam no ensino superior e também porque é nesta fase da vida que se inicia uma maturação sexual, muito perto da idade adulta. O estudo é de natureza quantitativa onde são evidenciadas as atitudes e os comportamentos sexuais dos jovens, que já iniciaram a sua atividade sexual (64,6%). A escala utilizada apresenta quatros dimensões que se subdividem em: Intenção comportamental: praticar “sexo seguro”, que é entendido como uso de preservativo. Reações: sentimentos positivos e negativos do sujeito face à utilização do preservativo e crenças sobre as consequências positivas ou negativas associadas ao desempenho desse comportamento. Norma subjetiva: julgamento subjetivo sobre o grau de aprovação-desaprovação de certas pessoas significativas para o sujeito (pais, amigos, companheiro) sobre o uso de preservativo. Percepção de controlo: expectativas de auto-eficácia, julgamento subjetivo sobre o grau de convicção na dificuldade ou facilidade de usar (ou fazer usar) o preservativo no próximo encontro sexual. Concluímos que existe uma grande percentagem que utiliza preservativo (36%), seguindo-se uma dupla proteção, preservativo e pilula (26,1%). A maioria dos que tiveram relações sexuais, (65%) voltaram a ter relações sexuais com o mesmo parceiro. Os profissionais de saúde devem compreender a complexidade do problema da sexualidade e ter conhecimento da realidade dos estilos de vida adotados pelos jovens, para poderem definir estratégias para a promoção da saúde e intervir nas causas.Palavras chave: sexualidade; jovens; comportamentos; atitudes; contracepção


Author(s):  
Gregor E. Kennedy ◽  
Terry S. Judd ◽  
Anna Churchward ◽  
Kathleen Gray ◽  
Kerri-Lee Krause

<span>This paper reports on a study conducted in 2006 with more than 2,000 incoming first-year Australian university students. Students were asked about their access to, use of and preferences for an array of established and emerging technologies and technology based tools. The results show that many first year students are highly tech-savvy. However, when one moves beyond entrenched technologies and tools (e.g. computers, mobile phones, email), the patterns of access and use of a range of other technologies show considerable variation. The findings are discussed in light of Prensky's (2001a) notions of the 'Digital Natives' and the implications for using technology to support teaching and learning in higher education.</span>


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 53
Author(s):  
Carina Van Rooyen ◽  
Ingrid Estha Marais

In a highly unequal society such as South Africa, higher education is seen as having a social justice mandate to widen participation, and using technology is one way to achieve this. One university in South Africa made mobile devices compulsory for all first-year students since 2014. This article, drawing on data collected from first-year Humanities students at this university, attempts to understand whether the use of mobile devices for learning met requirements for a socially just pedagogy. We used a sequential mixed methods research design, first surveying the first-year Humanities students in late 2015, and then followed up with focus group discussions in 2016 and early 2017. We utilise Nancy Fraser’s idea of ‘participatory parity’ to unpack a socially just pedagogy, and specifically focus on the component of access to resources. We found that most students had functional access to devices and on-campus data. The manner in which these were accessed was affirmative, rather than transformative. By extending the notion of access beyond just opportunity (functional access as owning or having access to a device and data), to also knowing how to use the opportunity (digital access through digital literacies and fluencies), we found that our case study fell short of being socially just pedagogy. We urge that lecturers take up a central role in enabling students to use their devices for transformative learning.   How to cite this article:VAN ROOYEN, Carina; MARAIS, Ingrid Estha. A socially just pedagogy in the use of mobile devices in higher education? The case of Humanities first-year students at a South African university. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South v. 2, n. 2, p. 53-70, Sept. 2018. Available at: http://sotl-south-journal.net/?journal=sotls&page=article&op=view&path%5B%5D=66   This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/


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