Coming to belong in the university through small acts of connection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Belonging is recognised as an important factor in student well-being, persistence and success at university, particularly for first-year students. Belonging is often described as an individual basic human need; to feel accepted, valued, and connected with peers, teaching staff, the curriculum, the university or places and communities. However, less is known about what students do to foster belonging for themselves. This paper adopts a relational and situated perspective to examine how first-year university students create belonging in an experiential sense. Based on qualitative semi-structured interviews with 19 participants, this study explores the range of connections that students make in their first year of study and the meaning they attribute to these connections in relation to belonging. The findings suggest that multiple senses of belonging may arise from small acts of connection made by students and reciprocated by others (e.g. peers, teachers, support staff, family and friends). These insights contribute to understanding how students see themselves as belonging, and what might be needed to nurture these connections in ways that acknowledge their diverse needs, backgrounds and experiences.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 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".