USC leads national study into retention of students
The University of the Sunshine Coast is leading a consortium of seven universities in an extensive teaching and learning research project that could help reduce the number of students dropping out of higher education across Australia.
This consortium – which includes the University of Sydney, Monash University, the University of South Australia, Murdoch University, the University of Southern Queensland and Griffith University – has received a Carrick Institute grant of almost $220,000 for the study.
USC’s Faculty of Business Accreditation Coordinator Dr Lesley Willcoxson said the other universities had jumped at the chance to take part in the study that she and fellow USC academics Dr Mark Manning and Dr Monte Wynder had designed.
“This will build on what has been done before in studying retention and attrition,” she said. “But it will provide a new perspective because it will look at all of the student’s time at university, not just a slice of it.”
Dr Willcoxson said most research in the past had focussed only on why first-year students withdrew from study.
“But just as many students leave university in the second and third years combined as leave in the first year,” she said. “There’s a lot we don’t know about second and third-year students”.
“We will survey students as well as interview them to get a clear understanding of the factors that encourage students to stay at university as well as the factors that lead them to leave.”
Dr Willcoxson said the three-year study would involve 15 academics (three from USC and two from each of the other institutions) and had two primary goals.
“The first goal is to flesh out information we have about retention and attrition over the full period of a student’s time at university,” she said.
“The second goal is a much more practical outcome of investigating the experiences of students in terms of the support that they receive at university and what types of support are most helpful”.
“We can feed that information back to the support services so they can utilise it to build a really, really strong supportive environment for students.”
Dr Willcoxson said the support services included learning support, information literacy support, counselling, course and program advising, and activities such as the USC’s Faculty of Business Employability program, .
“The support services are delivering help in areas that are critical for students who are making decisions about staying or leaving,” she said.
She said the $219,877 grant was the largest available under the Carrick Institute’s competitive grant program.
“To get a grant like this with the USC as the lead institution involved in a national study is a huge thing for us,” she said. “It puts USC firmly on the national teaching and learning map.”