Journal Articles

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/7915

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    Exploring the Complexity of First-Year Student Belonging in Higher Education: Familiarity, Interpersonal, and Academic Belonging
    (Queensland University of Technology, 2022-07-06) Kahu ER; Ashley N; Picton C
    Belonging is critical to first-year student success and persistence in higher education. However, differing definitions make it challenging to fully understand why belonging is significant. Foregrounding student voice, this research explored how first-year Australian university students talked about their belonging. Using Kahu and Nelson’s (2018) framework of student engagement as a lens, 18 students were interviewed weekly throughout the year. Students talked about belonging in three distinct but interrelated ways: familiarity, interpersonal belonging, and academic belonging. While all were important for student wellbeing and engagement, academic belonging, students’ sense that university, their discipline, and courses were “right” for them, was critical for perseverance. Unlike interpersonal belonging which tended to build through the year, academic belonging fluctuated for many students. The findings suggest framing belonging merely as about relationships limits understanding of this important construct. Contributing to scholarship by bringing a refreshed perspective to the nuances and complexity of belonging, the research suggests higher education providers need to monitor and foster academic belonging in first-year students.
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    An exploration of course and cohort communication spaces in Discord, Teams, and Moodle
    (ASCILITE, 2022-12-30) Heinrich E; Thomas H; Kahu ER
    This research examined the impact of supplementing a learning management system, Moodle, with communication tools, Discord and Teams, to support communication in blended and distance undergraduate courses in computer science, information technology, mathematics and statistics at a New Zealand university with well-established use of Moodle. Nineteen students participated in semi-structured interviews. Findings show that adding Discord or Teams increases information and knowledge exchange and helps students to connect with peers and teachers in their courses. Teams was beneficial particularly in settings with formal group work. Discord, which enables both students and staff to set up additional communication channels that are not restricted to course enrolments, was instrumental in connecting students across year levels with peers and alumni. This enabled discussions on course selection, career options and disciplinary topics beyond the course curriculum. Importantly, these beyond-course communication spaces nurtured belonging to wider discipline and study communities. The research establishes the importance of the increased levels of communication by highlighting the effects on student learning and connections to others. Looking beyond the specific tools, the level of formality and the degree of student co-ownership are identified as key factors in supporting the within- and beyond-course communication spaces. Implications for practice or policy: Learning management systems provide valuable course support but do not meet all learning and teaching communication needs, partly due to their formal and university-controlled nature. Educators and students benefit from using strong chat tools with improved information and knowledge exchange. Both educators and students experience enhanced belonging when using collaboration and chat tools. Students value Discord’s informality and student-led characteristics. Educators who use Teams to support formal group work must carefully manage integration with Moodle.
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    “My Uni Experience Wasn’t Completely Ruined”: The Impacts of COVID-19 on the First-Year Experience
    (Queensland University of Technology, 2021-11) McKay L; O’bryan S; Kahu ER
    The first year at university is always challenging, but particularly in 2020 when COVID-19 triggered lockdowns and a rapid shift to online learning. This mixed methods study tracked the wellbeing and engagement of 60 new students in an undergraduate teacher education program at an Australian university throughout the first trimester of 2020. Follow-up focus groups with 14 students used interview and photo elicitation to explore how COVID-19 influenced wellbeing and engagement. Quantitative results demonstrate both student wellbeing and student engagement dipped strongly at the start of lockdown but recovered towards the end of the trimester. Focus group findings illustrate the diversity of experience in terms of student access to time and space to study, their ability to sustain relationships online, and the cumulative stress of COVID-19. The findings lead to recommendations for supporting this cohort and for future research.
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    Pathways to engagement: a longitudinal study of the first-year student experience in the educational interface
    (Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2/07/2019) Kahu ER; Picton C; Nelson K
    Student engagement is critical to success in the first year of university, yet evidence about how and why various factors influence engagement remains relatively rare. This study addresses this gap combining an existing framework of student engagement (Kahu and Nelson, Higher Education Research and Development, 37(1), 58–71, 2018) with student narratives to provide a detailed understanding of students’ engagement throughout their first year. Weekly semi-structured interviews with 19 first-year students at an Australian university illustrate how student and university factors interact to influence engagement, as conceptualised in the framework. The findings provide empirical support for the framework of student engagement, offering a more nuanced understanding of the student experience within the framework’s educational interface. The importance of self-efficacy, belonging, emotions and wellbeing as interwoven pathways to student engagement is demonstrated and the contextual and dynamic nature of engagement highlighted. Further work is necessary to understand how this knowledge can best facilitate student engagement and perhaps reduce cycles of disengagement.
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    Framing student engagement in higher education
    (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 1/06/2013) Kahu ER
    Student engagement is widely recognised as an important influence on achievement and learning in higher education and as such is being widely theorised and researched. This article firstly reviews and critiques the four dominant research perspectives on student engagement: the behavioural perspective, which foregrounds student behaviour and institutional practice; the psychological perspective, which clearly defines engagement as an individual psycho-social process; the socio-cultural perspective, which highlights the critical role of the socio-political context; and, finally, the holistic perspective, which takes a broader view of engagement. Key problems are identified, in particular poor definitions and a lack of distinction between the state of engagement, factors that influence student engagement, and the immediate and longer term consequences of engagement. The second part of the article presents a conceptual framework that overcomes these problems, incorporating valuable elements from each of the perspectives, to enable a better shared understanding of student engagement to frame future research and improve student outcomes. © 2013 Copyright Society for Research into Higher Education.
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    Muslim and Gay: Seeking identity coherence in New Zealand
    (Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2016) Tuffin K; Hopner V; Kahu ER
    The process of accepting oneself as gay and of ‘coming out’ to family and friends is well documented. For Muslim men, this is complicated by the tension between their emerging sexual identity and their religious and cultural birth identity, which labels homosexuality as sinful. This paper explores this process in a sample of five gay Muslim men living in New Zealand, a liberal secular society where homosexuality is widely accepted and gay rights are endorsed in legislation. Identity Process Theory drives the analysis, which identifies five themes encapsulating the process of striving for psychological coherence: resistance, acceptance, tension, renegotiation and pretence. Initial phases of denial and anger at their emerging sexuality are strongly linked to the conflict with their religious identity. Later, acceptance of their sexuality as natural and even God-given protects them from blame for their ‘sins’. In contrast to earlier work in the UK, for most men, renegotiation of their Muslim identity is adopted as the key strategy for achieving intrapsychic coherence. However, at an interpersonal level, families remain a source of conflict, temporarily resolved through pretence. Renegotiating religious identity leaves men having to pretend not just to be straight, but also to be strongly religious.
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    The engagement of mature distance students
    (Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2013) Kahu ER; Stephens C; Leach L; Zepke N
    An increasing proportion of tertiary students are aged 25 and over, and many of these students choose to study at a distance in order to more easily combine their studies with their family and work commitments. Higher attrition rates and lower course completion rates for this group highlight the need for a greater understanding of their student experience. To explore whether age and mode of study impact on student engagement, satisfaction, learning and departure intention, data from the Australasian Survey of Student Engagement from 1116 first-year undergraduate students from a single New Zealand university were analysed. Results confirm the influence of student engagement on both student satisfaction and learning, in particular the importance of a supportive learning environment. The findings suggest that while older and distance students are less likely to engage in active learning strategies with their fellow students, they have a much greater capacity to integrate their learning with their work experience. The finding that these students are as satisfied as the more traditional-aged, on-campus students suggests that their experience is different, but not second-rate. Universities need to build on the strengths of these students as well as provide greater opportunities for them to form collaborative relationships with similar students. Limitations stemming from the timing of the survey and the inherent limitations of cross-sectional surveys suggest the need for more in-depth longitudinal work to understand the changing nature of engagement for these students and to explore why they engage differently with their studies.
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    Using photo elicitation to understand first-year student experiences: Student metaphors of life, university and learning
    (29/02/2020) Kahu ER; Picton C
    © The Author(s) 2020. The transition from school to university is challenging and a greater knowledge of the first-year student experience will enable staff to better support their students. University- and government-run student surveys fail to capture the depth and breadth of the first-year experience and so qualitative research is needed to get a more nuanced and holistic understanding of students’ lives. The study described in this article used a photo elicitation method. We asked students to choose four images that represented their first year at university. The data – the chosen photographs and the students’ explanations of their choices – were thematically analysed, focusing in particular on the diverse metaphors students used to depict three dimensions of their experiences: life, university and learning. The findings highlight the dual nature of the transition to university – learning to be a university student and learning to be an adult – as well as the challenges and stresses of that process. The lack of agency that students felt is evident. The students likened their journey to a rollercoaster and talked of not being able to keep up with the fast-moving curriculum. They depicted themselves as passive acquirers of knowledge. The findings offer new ways for staff to understand the challenges that potentially disrupt student engagement in the first year. Both students and staff could benefit from recognising the metaphors in their thinking and, potentially, seeking new metaphors that might reveal different and more positive ways of experiencing the first year in higher education.
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    Student engagement in the educational interface: Understanding the mechanisms of student success
    (Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2017-07) Kahu ER; Nelson K
    Student success and retention continue to be of concern for higher education institutions. Wider participation, combined with lower completion rates for non-traditional students, highlights the need for new ways of understanding the student experience to ground policy and practice. This article provides this insight by drawing together a number of key constructs to refine a recent framework of student engagement. We argue that the transition metaphor, focusing on the first year, is limited because it depicts differences between students and institutions as both transient and temporal. Instead, we use a cultural lens to introduce the educational interface as a metaphor for the individual psychosocial space within which institutional and student factors combine and student engagement in learning occurs. Incorporating the interface into the existing framework of student engagement makes three contributions to our understanding of the student experience. First, the educational interface is a tangible way of representing the complex interactions between students and institutions, and how those interactions influence engagement. Second, the refined framework highlights four specific psychosocial constructs: self-efficacy, emotions, belonging and well-being, which, we contend, are critical mechanisms for mediating the interactions between student and institutional characteristics and student engagement and success. Finally, the refined framework helps to explain why some students with demographic characteristics associated with lower completion rates are retained and do go on to successfully complete their studies, while similar others do not. These three contributions, the interface, the key constructs within it being mediating mechanisms and their explanatory utility, provide focus for the design and implementation of curricula and co-curricular initiatives aimed at enhancing student success and retention, and importantly to evaluate the impact of these interventions.
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    The benefits of good tutor-student relationships in the first year
    (2019-08) Kahu ER; Picton C
    © 2019, QUT Library. All rights reserved. Teacher-student relationships (TSR) are an important influence on the student experience at university. Existing research, predominantly with lecturers, highlights that these relationships have academic and affective dimensions. Studies demonstrate good TSR increase student motivation, engagement, and learning. The current study adds a student voice to this topic, focussing on their views of tutoring staff, who undertake much of the face-to-face teaching in universities. The qualitative study followed 19 students through their first year at an Australian university. The students identified four characteristics of a ‘good’ tutor: Helpful, caring, likeable, and hands-on. Students talked about multiple benefits of having a good tutor including increased help-seeking, studying harder, more interest in class, and improved wellbeing and belonging. The importance of the tutor role is underestimated and institutions would do well to better support these valuable staff.