Part-time students in transition: supporting a successful start to higher education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The transition into higher education is a critical time for all students. A positive early experience provides a strong foundation for future academic success whilst a negative experience can be destabilising for a new learner. To date, research has primarily focused on full-time undergraduates in order to explain the reasons for high attrition rates at the end of the first year. Less is known about the experiences of part-time undergraduates despite the fact that they make up over one quarter of the total student population (HESA, 2015). This article reports on a study to investigate the initial experiences of a group of part-time undergraduates who have chosen to undertake a degree at a small study centre run by one university. Using a mixed methods research approach, the research captured the lived reality of the experience and identified the contributing and negating factors that can influence a successful transition. Perceptions of the level and type of support provided for students during transition were gained from both staff and students. The findings confirm a heterogeneous group. Despite being highly motivated, the early transition period was generally characterised by a sense of trepidation and self-doubt as students took their first steps in higher education. The research highlights the complexity of the initial decision-making process for part-time students and the barriers they face. It concludes that a flexible but unified approach, involving tutors and the wider support services, is needed, as unique students require unique responses to their transition needs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".