Enhancing the early student experience

By Eileen Trotter, Carole Roberts. 2006

125 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper is concerned with identifying how the early student experience can be enhanced in order to improve levels of student retention and achievement. The early student experience is the focus of this project as the literature has consistently declared the first year to be the most critical in shaping persistence decisions. Programme managers of courses with high and low retention rates have been interviewed to identify activities that appear to be associated with good retention rates. The results show that there are similarities in the way programmes with high retention are run, with these features not being prevalent on programmes with low retention. Recommendations of activities that appear likely to enhance the early student experience are provided.

Subfields: Education, Modeling and Simulation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3708d45eaad5d68dd61dba70e31182ae975a611d

Citations in the corpus

• Student success : the identification and support of first year university students at risk of attrition (2009, unknown): “The literature on university attrition is dense, plentiful and universal as indicated by a representative selection: From Australia – Hinton (2007) and Marks (2007); from the United Kingdom (UK) – Bennett, Kottasz, and Nocciolino (2007) and Yorke and Longden (2008); and the United States of Americ”
• First year expectations and experiences: student and teacher perspectives (2009, unknown): “There has been increased scholarly concern in recent times that students are inadequately prepared for entry level university courses and a perception that this has led to falling standards (Trotter and Roberts 2006).”
• Asian students’ perceptions of group work and group assignments in a New Zealand tertiary institution (2008, unknown): “There is an assumption that students experience adjustment difficulties in the initial period at institutions of higher learning, especially in the first semester (Trotter and Roberts 2006 ).”
• Participation Apprehensive Students: The Influence of Face Support and Instructor–Student Rapport on Classroom Participation (2014, unknown): “Specifically, instructors may build rapport by using “getting to know you” activities in the classroom (Trotter & Roberts, 2006) and engaging in out of class communication (Frisby, Sidelinger, & Heisler, 2012), which may demonstrate that instructors are willing to be affiliated with students (i.e.,…”