A systematic review of widening participation: Exploring the effectiveness of outreach programmes for students in second‐level schools
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract A major challenge for universities across the globe is to address the lack of diversity within higher education. Widening participation (WP) programmes can vary between in‐reach and outreach programmes. Some initiatives focus on either pre‐entry stage (primary or secondary schools) or post‐entry stage (helping students adapt to university life). This systematic literature review provides an analysis of the effectiveness of widening participation outreach programmes, a topic that is relatively unexplored, particularly at school level education. By examining empirical studies of widening participation interventions, the paper allows for the investigation of the educational outcomes measured in these programmes. A total of 19 studies were included, which analysed quantitative or mixed‐method data. The findings indicate a growth in the evidence base for widening participation programmes for second‐level students over the last decade. Interventions identified in the literature were categorised by their approach, which included guidance‐based interventions, multidimensional interventions or pedagogical interventions. The findings confirm some positive effects for widening participation outreach programmes on a range of outcomes including students' college readiness, educational aspirations and college enrolment. The review argues for consistency in the way in which educational outcomes are measured, as well as the need for cross‐collaboration and sharing of data between schools and universities, to enable more effective measurement of widening participation programmes in future research. Context and implication Rationale for this study This study gives an up‐to‐date synthesis of outreach interventions in secondary schools which aim to widen participation at higher education. A review of its kind has not been conducted in the last decade. Why the new findings matter Findings highlight the most effective new interventions, as well as, the challenges in defining success, research design and collecting accurate data across secondary and tertiary educational institutions. Implications for educational researchers and policy makers This systematic review provides an overview for widening participation WP practitioners of what types of outreach interventions are out there, offering templates and ideas for introducing these kinds of initiatives in other universities and partnership schools. The paper highlights to policy makers, the need to create policies that enable cross‐collaboration and sharing of data between schools and universities. Implications for researchers include discussion around how success is being defined, what outcomes are being measured, the need for longitudinal studies with larger sample sizes as well as the collection of baseline data of participants.
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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 | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it