The Role of the Campus Environment in Fostering a Sense of Mattering among Postgraduate Commuter Students in Botswana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Commuter students can be found at practically every institutional type in higher education. Despite their increasing numbers as students returning to pursue Master’s and PhD programs, little is known about postgraduate commuter students and their experiences at US and international universities. A mixed-methods embedded design was utilized to investigate whether and how postgraduate commuter students at a rural public research-intensive university in Botswana perceived they mattered or were marginal to their university. Findings revealed that the physical, human aggregate, organizational, and socially constructed environments of the university influenced perceptions of mattering among study participants. Postgraduate students perceived they did not matter to the university because of its focus on undergraduates, its approach to managing postgraduate education, its failure to provide postgraduate housing, and the cost and unavailability of transportation. However, the availability of a teaching assistantship and supervisors’ interest and support fostered the sense among these students that they were receiving attention, considered important, depended on, and empathized with.Keywords: mattering, marginality, commuter students, postgraduate student experience, campus environments
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".