Differences between Students' and Lecturers' Perceptions of Factors Influencing Students' Academic Success at University

Qualitative data from 46 lecturers and 72 students were used to identify factors that were perceived as making the most important contributions to students' academic success at university and factors that were perceived as most likely to lead to student failure at university. A questionnaire based on this information was administered to a further 112 lecturers and 392 students. The resulting data highlighted some similarities and many differences in the perceptions of lecturers and students about student success and failure. Some possible reasons for these differences in perceptions are explored, and some of the consequences of the different views are discussed. Particular reference is made to the different views that lecturers and students have about the student effort required for success at university.     

What to do next: an exploratory study of the post-secondary decisions of American students

Research on college choices is the new tool used by Higher Educational Institutions to help them identify the influences and factors affecting potential student populations. To measure the growing rate of working students in higher education, we propose to examine the decisions made after graduating from high school to current demographic changes. In this study, we use data from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS: 2002) to estimate the influence of individual variables on post graduating high school choices using multinomial logistic regression analysis. Untangling the individual choices allows us to examine, four possible after high school life choices—students who decide to pursue post-secondary education (student); those who decide to work while attending a post-secondary institution (working student); those who decide to enter the workforce (worker) or high school graduates who neither work nor enroll in postsecondary education (unemployed). Results suggest that aside from socioeconomic status and achievement, interesting patterns for gender, ethnicity and family composition and its effect on the likelihood of a high school graduate’s life choices emerged. As an example, Asian students are more likely to enter their next phase in life as a student than a working student in comparison to white ones. That result is a clear example that not all high school students are alike in their life choices; therefore, for a better understanding in the needs and decision making ways of high school graduates, this paper addresses different factors that lead to a post-secondary decision in order to accommodate their transition to HEI.     

Academic involvement at university

The call for students to become more involved in their academic study is not new. However few studies have investigated academic involvement as it is experienced by university students. This paper discusses the results of a study that was designed to explore student perceptions of the nature of academic involvement in learning. In addition students were asked to identify factors in their learning experience that encouraged or discouraged their academic involvement. The results reported here are drawn from interviews with 58 first and second year students attending Victoria University of Wellington.The results demonstrate that students experience involvement in qualitatively and quantitatively different ways that appear to be related to approach to learning. A major focus of the paper is on the interactive role personal and contextual factors play in the development of involvement. It is suggested that such factors combine to produce a particular learning climate that directly affects involvement in learning. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of this research for university policy, teaching practice and course design and makes some suggestions for further research.     

Bursaries and Student Success: a Study of Students from Low-Income Groups at Two Institutions in the South West

This article draws on quantitative and qualitative data from two institutions to compare the student experience of those with and without bursary awards. Using the student life cycle model, the article examines the ways in which bursaries impact on the student experience before they enter the institution, in the early weeks of their studies and as they progress through their programmes. At these two institutions, students with bursaries were more likely to be retained and to perform well during the first year than those without bursaries. The study found that bursaries can ease financial pressures during their transition to higher education (HE) and that institution‐specific bursaries can affect students’ perceptions of an institution and their commitment to succeed. After 2006, those institutions wishing to charge variable fees will be required to provide bursary support for low‐income students. The findings from this article suggest that HE providers should consider the timing of the bursary payments and the implicit message the bursary sends to applicants if they want to ensure that their bursaries have a positive impact on the student experience.     

Effort Analysis: Individual Score Validation of Achievement Test Data

Whenever the purpose of measurement is to inform an inference about a student’s achievement level, it is important that we be able to trust that the student’s test score accurately reflects what that student knows and can do. Such trust requires the assumption that a student’s test event is not unduly influenced by construct-irrelevant factors that could distort his score. This article examines one such factor—test-taking motivation—that tends to induce a person-specific, systematic negative bias on test scores. Because current measurement models underlying achievement testing assume students respond effortfully to test items, it is important to identify test scores that have been materially distorted by non-effortful test taking. A method for conducting effort-related individual score validation is presented, and it is recommended that measurement professionals have a responsibility to identify invalid scores to individuals who make inferences about student achievement on the basis of those scores.     

Searching the Web: New Tools-New Dilemmas

Drawing on their experiences as researchers and teacher educators, the authors discuss issues concerning student research that uses web-based references. This article describes ways the authors: 1) structure the inquiry process for student research, 2) help students manage the quantity of information, and 3) provide a model for analyzing the quality of information that students find on web sites. The web-site analysis form provided to students requires them to evaluate information provided about the “who, what, when, how, and where” of a web site. The authors conclude with a discussion of the ways this model helps students engage, organize, and publish information in ways that share the knowledge that the students have constructed and the process of their inquiry.     

Reasons for aggressive classroom management and directions for change through teachers’ professional development programmes

This investigation was designed to determine whether there are significant relationships between the reasons teachers provide for aggressive classroom management techniques and the type of professional education created to help them reduce their reliance on such techniques. The study reports data from a survey of 192 Australian teachers showing that teachers’ gender and their school (primary or secondary) are related to rationales for teacher aggression. Teachers more accepting of the Attribution narrative as an explanation for teacher aggression are less likely to be supportive of gaining more knowledge about a misbehaving student. In contrast, those who more readily identify Efficacy as a reason for teacher aggression are more likely to gain more knowledge about a misbehaving student and about techniques that work with that student in other settings. Finally, teachers more accepting of the Attachment narrative did not exhibit a preference for any specific kind of support. Consequently, all types of PD activities might contribute to teachers who are seeking to feel close to students.     

Using Automated Scores of Student Essays to Support Teacher Guidance in Classroom Inquiry

Computer scoring of student written essays about an inquiry topic can be used to diagnose student progress both to alert teachers to struggling students and to generate automated guidance. We identify promising ways for teachers to add value to automated guidance to improve student learning. Three teachers from two schools and their 386 students participated. We draw on evidence from student progress, observations of how teachers interact with students, and reactions of teachers. The findings suggest that alerts for teachers prompted rich teacher–student conversations about energy in photosynthesis. In one school, the combination of the automated guidance plus teacher guidance was more effective for student science learning than two rounds of personalized, automated guidance. In the other school, both approaches resulted in equal learning gains. These findings suggest optimal combinations of automated guidance and teacher guidance to support students to revise explanations during inquiry and build integrated understanding of science.     

The potential for student performance prediction in small cohorts with minimal available attributes

The measurement of student performance during their progress through university study provides academic leadership with critical information on each student’s likelihood of success. Academics have traditionally used their interactions with individual students through class activities and interim assessments to identify those “at risk” of failure/withdrawal. However, modern university environments, offering easy on-line availability of course material, may see reduced lecture/tutorial attendance, making such identification more challenging. Modern data mining and machine learning techniques provide increasingly accurate predictions of student examination assessment marks, although these approaches have focussed upon large student populations and wide ranges of data attributes per student. However, many university modules comprise relatively small student cohorts, with institutional protocols limiting the student attributes available for analysis. It appears that very little research attention has been devoted to this area of analysis and prediction. We describe an experiment conducted on a final-year university module student cohort of 23, where individual student data are limited to lecture/tutorial attendance, virtual learning environment accesses and intermediate assessments. We found potential for predicting individual student interim and final assessment marks in small student cohorts with very limited attributes and that these predictions could be useful to support module leaders in identifying students potentially “at risk.”     

Modeling Retention at a Large Public University: Can At-Risk Students Be Identified Early Enough to Treat?

We examine the extent to which readily available data at a large public university can be used to a priori identify at-risk students who may benefit from targeted retention efforts. Although it is possible to identify such students, there remains an inevitable tradeoff in any resource allocation between not treating the students who are likely to exit without treatment and treating students who are likely not to exit in the absence of the treatment. At-risk students are found to remain at risk throughout their college career. Moreover, conditional on exiting the institution, the degree to which the student was at risk is predictive of whether the student subsequently re-enrolls elsewhere and the type of institution at which this re-enrollment occurs. In this context, we discuss how retention policies relate to insuring the initial match is appropriate, recognizing that some attrition can be in keeping with the broad social interest.     

Quizzes: Tools or tyrants

Quiz questions can be very effective teachers. They may condition students to study in particular ways, to attend to some types of information and to ignore others, and they may determine how the student processes information.Basic reinforcement theory holds that rewarded behavior is repeated while unrewarded behavior is extinguished. Successful test performance is a powerful reward for specific study techniques; and students, consciously or unconsciously, adapt their study techniques to fit and patterns in requirements of test questions.It has been demonstrated in several studies that frequent quizzes improve final test performance. But it has also been demonstrated that students identify very subtle patterns in test questions and focus their study efforts according to these patterns. A teacher could presumably use this phenomena to insure that students will notice pre-defined classes of information, or by unintentional patterns in questions, may motivate students to memorize inert and useless data.There is some evidence that quiz questions can be used to induce reasoning about information and discovery of unstated implications of particular kinds. Two studies have demonstrated that when a particular type of reasoning is required in a series of quizzes, students improve in their ability to solve similar problems on subsequent tests.Several general rules for designing constructive quizzes may be extracted from these data. Frequent quizzes of appropriate difficulty for individuals can be constructed by identifying a particular type of information or reasoning to be learned. Questions can be written which consistently require students to use the desired knowledge or skill and the questions may be segmented into a series of quizzes to produce a desired type of study.Since any quiz may affect study habits, teachers must insure that their quizzes have positive effects.     

Who attends and completes virtual universities: the case of the open University of Catalonia (UOC)

A highly touted feature of the so-called global “revolution” in higher education is the trend to use information technology to reach a broader clientele. Although there is evidence that students may be learning the material in on-line courses as well as in traditional face-to-face universities, how well students learn content is not the only reason they persist to a degree, and student persistence is an important goal of higher education institutions. In this paper, we make the case that the life conditions for students attending virtual universities are different from those of “traditional” students in face-to-face universities, and that this difference puts a particular (largely non-pecuniary) premium on time to degree. With our data from a Catalan virtual university, the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), we are able to test this hypothesis directly by using the heterogeneous degree structure of the Catalonian/Spanish higher education system to estimate whether the number of courses required to get various degrees (the length of the degree program) is significantly related to student persistence. The study analyzes several cohorts of students (those who entered in 2000–2003) studying in the UOC and estimates the factors that influence their degree completion. We find that the completion rate is generally low, but that students taking shorter degree courses at the UOC are much more likely to complete their degrees. This suggests that, given their clientele, on-line universities operate under very different constraints from their face-to-face counterparts. Our results are important for higher educational researchers, who have mainly focused on younger populations attending face-face universities. They also can serve university administrators who launch distance education degree programs and make high stakes decisions about them with little of no information on the likely behavior of their older students, and can serve employers who are deciding whether to subsidize their employees to take advanced degrees through on-line programs of study.     

Student contribution in asynchronous online discussion: a review of the research and empirical exploration

The increasingly prevalent use of Internet in schools and homes has resulted in asynchronous online discussion becoming an increasingly common means to facilitate dialogue between instructors and students, as well as students and students beyond the boundaries of their physical classrooms. This article is organized into two main sections. In the first section, we review 50 empirical studies in order to identify the factors leading to limited student contribution. Limited student contribution is defined as students making few or no postings, or students exhibiting surface-level thinking or low-level knowledge construction in online discussions. We then identify the various empirically based guidelines to address the factors. In the second section, we discuss three potential guideline dilemmas that educators may encounter: (a) use of grades, (b) use of number of posting guideline, and (c) instructor-facilitation. These are guidelines where previous empirical research shows mixed results when they are implemented. Acknowledging the dilemmas is essential for educators and researchers to make informed decisions about the discussion guidelines they are considering implementing. Finally, we report two exploratory case studies on student-facilitation that we conducted. Using students as facilitators may be an alternative solution to educators who wish to avoid the instructor-facilitation guideline dilemma.     

Student Transfer-Out Behavior at Four-Year Institutions

While abundant studies on college student departure exist, few studies focus on student transfer-out behaviors. One may reasonably believe that transfer students leave their institutions at different times for different reasons. Coupled with the national dataset, this study longitudinally investigated transfer students who left their initial 4-year institutions. Results suggest that student characteristics, such as race and family income, had varying effects on the timing of transfer. Social integration was found to have significant effects on reducing the likelihood of transfer.     

Using TPACK as a framework to study the influence of college faculty’s beliefs on online teaching

The purpose of this multiple case study was to understand how the beliefs of college of education faculty members about their students and teaching online influenced their online teaching. The study focused specifically on beliefs regarding student digital literacy and preparedness. The study used the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework as a lens for looking at online teaching. Results indicate that participants’ beliefs about students did in fact influence their online teaching in a variety of ways and with differing teaching outcomes. The results of this study have implications for those who teach online as well as those who support them.     

Examining student immobility: a study of Irish undergraduate students

This paper explores student mobility among Irish higher education students. It specifically focuses on the profile of ‘stayers’, that is, students who have no plans to study abroad, thus addressing an underexplored topic in existing literature on student mobility. The article aims to identify factors that impact on students’ decisions not to pursue study abroad. Drawing on a national survey of students, Eurostudent V, the findings demonstrate that immobility is predicted by mother’s level of education and family income, showing the salience of socio-economic factors. Age and language proficiency are also visible factors, with the main obstacles to mobility being finances, language barriers and not wanting to separate from family and friends. Trends are also visible in the education institution a student is enrolled in, with those in institutes of technology more likely to be immobile than those in universities.     

Judging plagiarism: a problem of morality and convention

This paper considers the problem of plagiarism as an issue of morality. Outrage about student plagiarism in universities positions it as dishonesty and a transgression of standards. Despite this, there has been little work analysing the implications of positioning plagiarism as a moral matter in the making of judgments about plagiarism and academic dishonesty. This paper sets the scene by reviewing research about the characteristics of students who cheat and analysing student and lecturer differences. It then discusses perspectives from moral behaviour, moral philosophy and moral reasoning. The paper concludes that emotion and reason are brought to moral judgments, and so makes a case for those who are making judgments about plagiarism to reflect on whether they are faced with a matter of morality or convention. Greater awareness of the domains of convention and morality, the issues of justice and care, the roles of emotion and reason and what is involved in making judgments, will open ways of understanding reactions to plagiarism so that better ways to deal with accusations and make judgments can be developed.     

A Further Study of Personalized Instruction for Students in Large University Classes

The 161 students enrolling in a beginning psychology course were taught using a variant of Keller’s personalized instructional procedures. Course material was divided into twelve units and complete mastery of the material in each unit was demonstrated with a short written examination and a brief interview conducted by a more advanced student. Students could progress through the course material at their own rate. Data are reported on the number of students who withdrew from the course, when they withdrew, and characteristics of their performance prior to withdrawal. For students who completed the course, data on rate of completion of course requirements and level of mastery of course material are presented. Furthermore, student evaluation of various facets of the course are summarized. Of special interest is the finding that student test evaluators were rated as a very favorable feature of the course, and that there was no apparent distinction made between graduate-student and undergraduate evaluators. This suggests that the instructional manpower pool might be extended through the careful use of undergraduates in the college classroom.     

Determinants of higher education choices and student satisfaction: the case of Poland

The dynamic changes in tertiary education that were observed in Poland for the last 20 years transformed the Polish educational market and led to the immense expansion of educational institutions. The rapid increase in the number of students that continued until 2006 is however over and Polish universities have begun to compete for their clients. Increased competition along with the pessimistic forecasts for Poland with regard to demographic changes result in the growing demand for the knowledge on determinants of student educational choices and satisfaction. Although the amount of studies in this field is growing, Poland is still substantially underrepresented in the current research. The purpose of this article was to examine the underlying factors behind the choices that Polish students make while pursuing their tertiary education. The research method that combines focus groups’ discussions and a survey study among 1,420 business major students helped us to identify the factors behind three phases of the decision making process: pursuing higher education; information search along with final choice of a university; and satisfaction from chosen studies. Our research implies that decision making with regard to tertiary education is multifaceted and longitudinal as it combines a different set of factors in each stage of the decision making process.     

School Variation in General Intelligence

Abstract

One key to effective teaching is the ability to identify and understand the different ways students process information and acquire skills. The purpose of this study was to examine experienced and preservice teachers’ ability to diagnose student learning-style preferences. The subjects were 15 pairs of physical education teachers and their student teachers and 5 randomly selected students from each school site. To determine student learning styles, students completed the Canfield Learning Styles Inventory, and corresponding teachers and student teachers completed the Canfield Learning Styles Profile Assessment on each of their 5 students. The relationship between preservice/experienced teachers’ perceived scores and the students’ actual learning style scores was analyzed by the Pearson product-moment correlation technique. The results indicated that a wide variety of learning styles existed among the students and that neither experienced nor preservice teachers accurately diagnosed the learning styles of their students. The implications of this study are twofold. First, if teachers are going to make informed decisions about the teaching process, then they need to know the learning styles of their students. Second, information about learning styles should be included in the curriculum of professional preparation programs.