| Abstract
Retention
rates among mature students have been increasingly viewed as a cause for
concern in recent years. This is particularly the case for students moving
from Further Education into Higher Education. The costs associated with
students dropping out of higher education are not only financial, but
also organisational, social and human. There is a need for a better understanding
of what is involved in retention, and what can be done about it.
A considerable
amount of good work has already been done in this area. However, there
is still much more which needs to be done. A key question is methodological:
how best to investigate this area. Anyone researching a topic such as
retention, which involves human beings’ perceptions of why they
dropped out of a course, is well aware of the problems involved in obtaining
a clear, accurate understanding of what is really involved.
This report
demonstrates methods for tackling this problem, via an approach which
originated recently in requirements engineering for safety-critical systems,
where obtaining a clear and correct understanding of users’ requirements
is extremely important. This approach uses a systematic framework to provide
guidance on selection of methods to investigate users’ perceptions
and needs, and can be readily adapted for use in areas other than software
engineering.
The report
contains three sets of studies showing how different techniques can be
used for different aspects of investigating retention.
The first
study focuses on students’ perceptions of the course they are about
to undertake. If students join a course under a misapprehension about
what the course covers, then it is quite understandable that they might
decide to drop out. With increasing pressure to recruit students, it is
tempting for academic institutions to emphasise the positive aspects of
their courses in prospectuses and Web sites, as opposed to giving a clear
overall picture of what is and is not involved in the course. This study
uses the method of on-line self-report to investigate what potential students
think that a course will entail; this information can then be used to
identify areas where the prospectus and Web material could be changed,
to improve the fit between expectations and course.
The second
set of studies focuses on students’ experiences while on a course.
One part of this investigates students’ understanding of “craft
skills” in a specific area where students often have problems (use
of bibliographic references). Two techniques are used to show how the
skills of weak students, strong students and experienced staff can be
compared qualitatively and quantitatively, so as to identify suitable
areas for targeted training. The second part investigates beliefs about
retention; this uses a projective questionnaire to elicit beliefs about
stated and actual reasons for students dropping out of a course.
The third
study focuses on ways of predicting retention, withdrawal and success.
Although understanding retention from the students’ point of view
is important, people’s perceptions are not always the best predictors
of the future – in fact, people are usually surprisingly bad at
forecasting outcomes. This study shows how a widely held belief about
predicting student success can be empirically tested via appropriate empirical
research.
We conclude
that this approach provides useful new ways of tackling different aspects
of the retention problem, and recommend that it be more widely adopted.
This report
is based on work funded by a grant from the Government Office of the East
Midlands; we are grateful for their support in this project. |
