The 2022-23 academic year is almost upon us. Plans for welcome and induction activity are well underway and although there is more of an opportunity to have a summer break this academic year than in the past two, it’s never too early to start thinking of ways to help your new students to develop academically purposeful behaviours that will help them feel a sense of belonging to their university and, importantly, to the nursing profession more generally to encourage student nurse retention.
It can take time for students to feel like they truly belong at university. Many nursing educators also seek to encourage students to consider themselves as nurses from the start of their academic studies. But feeling like you really are a nurse doesn’t necessarily happen after a week, a month or even a term studying Nursing at University.
Helping students to recognise that they belong on their course and, ultimately to their profession, starts with helping them to get the foundations right – attending classes, engaging with online learning activities, accessing physical or electronic resources and studying independently or with peers outside of class. In time, these foundational behaviours should morph into a sense of belonging, overcoming feelings of being an imposter in unfamiliar surroundings, wearing an unfamiliar uniform that marks you out as being a nurse yet knowing very little at that point about what it means in theory and practice to be one.
Research at Aston University Business School has found that students who engage well with their academic studies in the first 3-4 weeks of starting university are more likely to have some of the highest end-of-year marks. This correlation continues even when engagement is initially high and then drops off, albeit to a lesser extent. Early engagement is also highly predictive of future engagement behaviour and outcomes – a finding that can help universities meet the Office for Students policy initiative for higher education institutions to deliver positive outcomes for all students via their setting of a minimum continuation threshold of 75%.
Developing healthy and successful academic behaviours in the first few weeks at university isn’t a foregone conclusion. Welcome and induction weeks can play an important part in a successful start to university life. But induction is not complete after a week, as we all know. Spreading out the sharing of key programme information to allow students time to digest and process it, can remove feelings of being overwhelmed. The provision of multiple low-stakes opportunities to engage with academic activities can help build learning confidence as well as help students build the right social capital to successfully navigate university life, systems and procedures.
There are also practical steps that you can take, using StREAM to provide a data-informed overview of students’ early engagement behaviours. Sending automated alerts to staff or students who have not logged in to the VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) within the first couple of weeks can quickly identify any logistical challenges (e.g., issues with logging in) or following up on non-attendance can show where a simple solution like moving to a different seminar group can be the difference between success and failure.
Collaboratively determining what early engagement activities matter at your institution can inform ways of working for both students and those charged with supporting positive outcomes. Reviewing these processes in conjunction with expectations around the use of StREAM will strengthen the holistic nature of support available to each student, with a view to stopping students falling through the gap.
In this regard, StREAM is more than a data insights platform. It functions as a catalyst to streamline and enhance student support in line with your institutional approach to the provision of personal and pastoral support. Aligning the configuration of StREAM to your institutional processes and practice enables tutors to better understand student engagement behaviours and to hold data-informed conversations with tutees that provide deeper insights into how students are engaging with their academic learning. The in-built interventions functionality makes it easier to signpost or refer your tutees to expert help and support across your university.
We will be taking a deeper dive into this use case and provide an opportunity to share ideas and examples from within the nurse educator community at the first Nursing Community of Practice for the 2022-23 academic year. We are delighted to have two fantastic guests joining us – Jo MacDonnell, Director of Engagement and Students at the University of Brighton who will be sharing her work on developing a student support policy and associated processes to support student nurse retention from university in conjunction with a new deployment of StREAM. First up though, will be Ed Foster, Head of Student Engagement Analytics and StREAM pioneer from Nottingham Trent University, who will be sharing what works when it comes to creating meaningful, data-informed interventions for students.
Ed Foster manages the delivery of the NTU Student Dashboard at Nottingham Trent University, a learning analytics resource using StREAM which supports both students and staff. Ed has been working in partnership with Solutionpath from the beginning as NTU was our pathfinder institution. He oversees research into the efficacy of using data to support student success, particularly for students from socially-disadvantaged backgrounds. Ed is also researching the interplay between learning analytics and student success in higher education. This includes the role of technology in retention, transition, widening participation and reducing disparities of attainment.
Jo MacDonnell is a highly experienced Higher Education practitioner with a track record of cross institutional leadership in Education and Student Experience, excelling in the areas of Widening Participation, student retention, success and progression. As the business lead for the deployment of StREAM within Nursing at the University of Brighton, Jo works closely with the Student Engagement Leads to support the implementation and evaluation of analytics alongside the introduction of a new Attendance and Engagement Policy designed to support students to continue and progress at university.
The Solutionpath Community of Practice for Nursing brings together academic colleagues from across our client-base to explore ways to manage student nurse retention by improving student engagement behaviours and academic practices.
To date, Nursing Community of Practice members have:
Author – Dr Rachel Maxwell, Community Manager at Solutionpath Feeling like you belong at university The 2022-23 academic year is almost upon us. Plans for welcome and induction activity are well underway and although there is more of an opportunity to have a summer break this academic year than in the past two, it’s […]
Fill in your details in the form to the right to access the full article.