The University of Lethbridge Library's contributions to student retention & success: suggestions and thoughts for consideration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From this background gathering exercise the 112 recommendations contained in this report were generated.Many of the recommendations are general.Some of them are probably already Library goals and perhaps underway.None of them are easy or particularly straightforward.All should be considered suggestions and thoughts relevant in one way or another to the topic of student success and the role of the Library in that endeavour.The report has two parts.The first part is a brief introduction to the topic that attempts to give context.The second part begins with a very brief overview of the role of the library in the academy followed by the report's recommendations and commentary relating to them.This later portion of the report has six broad themes: Mission, the Need for Data, Engagement (both Academic and Social), Environment, Communications & Outreach, and Miscellaneous.Except for the last, miscellaneous, theme each of the others has been identified in the literature as relevant to student retention and success.My hope is that the report will prove useful in helping the University Library to play its part in assisting all students at the University of Lethbridge to maximize their learning and realize success.This question has been extensively studied.It has the typical definitional complications associated with it and a voluminous body of literature attached to it.One thing that is clear, and agreed upon, is that there are no "magic formulas" for retaining students.(Bell, 2008, 1) A number of factors and characteristics have been identified as contributing (or raising the chances of) student withdrawal.Some relate to the individual student and others relate to the environment/institution.They have been categorized as: psychological, societal, economic, organizational and interactional.(Sarker, 3) Other studies use three categories: Academic, Non-Academic and Other to group variables.
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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 | 0.031 | 0.110 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.039 | 0.019 |
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".