The Relationship of the Socioeconomic Status of Participants in an Advanced Academic Skills Program with Their Motivations, Perceptions, and Academic Outcomes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigated undergraduate students’ experiences and perceptions of a free co-curricular advanced academic skills program for research skills development, with particular attention to the role such a program might have for students from low socioeconomic status backgrounds. Nine students who had participated in the program were interviewed about their motivations and views of the program, the role the program played in their academic success, and the value the students found in participating in the program. Each student was interviewed three times. The third interview included questions about their socioeconomic backgrounds, their parents’ education, and their financial circumstances. All of the students were motivated to participate in the program as a way to set themselves apart academically in a large institution, although individual motivators varied slightly. Regardless of their parents’ educational backgrounds, all students expressed that their parents’ experiences were a source of motivation for them to achieve success in their academic studies, although students who grew up in working-class families noted that seeing their parents struggle to find work with only a high school education was an especially important motivator. Students found the program they participated in valuable for the soft skills, such as confidence, they learned, as well as the academic skills. Several students found that participating increased their level of engagement with peers, faculty, and the campus community. While students said they would still participate if a small fee was charged, they felt it was important the program remain free in order to be accessible to all students. Some of the students had completed it in person, some online, and others a mix of both. Eight of the students work year-round and emphasized how important it was for them to have the flexibility of online or in-person offerings so that the program could fit their busy schedules. This study contributes to our understanding of the role that free programs can have in supporting students’ academic success, especially for students who may not have the financial means to enroll in fee-charging programs. For students whose parents did not attend university, access to such programs may be particularly helpful.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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".