Factors Associated with University Students’ Development and Success: Insights from Senior Undergraduates
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In order to effectively support students’ learning and development at university, we need a better understanding of what helps undergraduate students thrive in the university environment. In this study, we surveyed 204 senior undergraduate students at a large research-intensive university in western Canada to explore factors related to thriving as a university student. We measured sense of belonging (including perceived faculty understanding, peer support, and classroom comfort), task value (students’ perceptions of the value of their course content), and academic achievement (self-reported grade point average) for students’ current year and their recollections of their first year at university. We also asked students to identify factors they considered integral to becoming a successful university learner. Both sense of belonging and perceived task value increased from first to senior year. Sense of belonging was consistently associated with academic achievement, whereas task value was associated with academic achievement in first year only. Two components of belonging (faculty understanding, classroom comfort) predicted academic achievement in first year; only one (classroom comfort) predicted academic achievement in the current year. Qualitative analysis of responses to open-ended questions identified themes in four categories as key contributors to students’ development and success: personal development, social support, course design, and university resources and opportunities. Factors related to personal development (e.g., learning to prioritize health, improving time management skills, and developing self-regulated learning skills) were identified most frequently as key components in students’ adaptation to university learning environments. Insights from this study can inform development of curricular and co-curricular strategies to better support undergraduate students’ learning and development at university.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".