What do we mean by student support? Staff and students’ perspectives of the provision and effectiveness of support for students
Abstract
The aim of this small-scale study is to explore the effectiveness of the support available to students registered for programmes of study in the School of Education. This includes the provision of university-wide student support and guidance services as well as the more localised study skills and academic and personal support provided by personal tutors. The perceptions of both staff and students were sampled through questionnaires and interviews. This paper presents a review of literature on the provision of student support for the increasingly diverse body of students in higher education and some preliminary findings from our survey of current students. The literature and findings from our investigation indicate discrepancies between the officially declared provision of student support services and the accessibility and use of these services in practice. There is ambiguity around the role of the personal tutor and inconsistency of practice in the level of support provided by ‘personal tutors’ which suggest that a review of the personal tutor role is needed. Student responses to our questionnaire also indicate that drop-in study skills provision in useful and being used but that other student support services, such as careers and counselling services are rarely used by students from the School of Education. This is mainly due to accessibility of these services and the lack of provision on the Walsall campus. The other major theme in the data is the process of induction to the University which students regard as being too intensive an ‘event’ and inappropriate for getting to know about support services.Citation
CELT Learning and Teaching Projects 2005/2006Publisher
University of WolverhamptonAdditional Links
http://www.wlv.ac.uk/celtType
Journal articleLanguage
enDescription
This article was first published in the Wolverhampton Intellectual Repository and E-Theses (WIRE). There is no printed version.Collections
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Students, studies and styles: an analysis of the learning styles of leisure, tourism and hospitality students studying generic modulesThe aim of the research was to investigate the different learning styles of leisure, tourism and hospitality (LTH) students who were studying generic modules. Anecdotal experience of the research team has shown that students on LTH courses have a range of learning styles that influence their overall performance.
-
Storying students’ ecologies of belonging: a narrative inquiry into the relationship between ‘first generation’ students and the UniversityThis research study explores the ways in which articulations of belonging are expressed by a small number of second year education undergraduates in a post-1992 university in the UK. Issues of student engagement and belonging in Higher Education (HE) have been the subject of research within recent years as a way to enhance rates of student retention and success, as the Widening Participation agenda has realised a changing demographic within the traditional student body. This study focuses on the First Generation Student (FGS), as reflective of the non-traditional student, who is subject to a negative framing within the educational literary discourse. The research adopts a metaphorical lens to locate the FGS as migrant within the HE landscape and to consider HE institutional efforts to foster a sense of belonging, as a strategic tool for success, as a colonising process. Working within an ecological framing of the topic, the study focuses on the differing contexts within which the research participants operate and considers the impact these have upon student engagement with the university. As a way to foreground respectful working with research participants, a person-centred approach has been employed, using a narrative inquiry methodological framework. Voices of the participants, as narrators, are privileged within this study in order to afford them the opportunity to add to the ongoing conversation on belonging. Creative strategies, based upon photo- and metaphor-elicitation, have been employed to facilitate discussion of the abstract and intangible concept of belonging and to provide a participatory nature to this research study. Findings signal a strong resolve by these narrators to overcome obstacles in their path to success within what is often an unfamiliar terrain within HE. The potentiality of the individual is privileged, showing strengths that are brought to the world of study which are often unrecognised by university practices. The affective dimension of belonging is emphasised within the research and metaphors of belonging, articulated by the narrators, offer alternative conceptual structurings which privilege aspects to do with security and adventure. Such insights afford opportunities to view belonging from differing perspectives, to re-figure ways in which students see themselves within HE processes, and to alert staff and personnel to new ways in which they might view the non-traditional student. Aspects of valuing the diversity of students and of a person-centred approach to working are viewed as key to creating the possibilities for belonging.
-
Distance learning and the empowerment of students: applied statistical analysis for students of the Built Environment.Built Environment students (including construction management, quantity surveying and so forth) generally exhibit limited understanding of mathematics and statistics, both from a theoretical and practical perspective (cf. Johnson, 1998; Llewellyn, 1999; Mtenga and Spainhour, 2000). This statement is supported by the fact that over half of the first year students (2001/2 intake) who completed an Individual Learner Profile (ILP) admitted to exhibiting poor mathematical skill. In addition, fewer than one in forty students have gained a mathematical qualification higher than a GCSE. Hence, undergraduate students are faced with a huge task when initially conceptualising the analytical component of a dissertation. Consequently, students elect to avoid robust and rigorous analysis in preference for elementary and somewhat naïve statistical methods to interpret any gathered data. This problem is further exacerbated by the reference to many ‘introductory’ statistical texts that are written for persons who have an ‘above average’ mathematical knowledge. Due to their background, Built Environment students struggle in transferring their data into a format that can be analysed and interpreted by statistical software. To do so requires time and commitment of staff combined with student initiative and drive. The problem here is that over 50% of students in the School of Engineering and the Built Environment (SEBE) attend University on a part time basis. Hence, physical restrictions limit these students’ ability to access the library and search for an appropriate textbook. Therefore, an easily accessible (internet) reference tool would provide an ideal opportunity with which to overcome this potential stumbling block. The aim of the proposed project was to develop an internet-based tool to assist undergraduate students learn ‘applied’ statistical analysis of data (relevant to typical construction problems) not just statistics per se. Such a tool would facilitate students, who actively seek to enhance their general mathematical and statistical knowledge as well as gain an insight into using commercially available statistical software simulation packages.
