Abstract
Travelling the rocky road: Navigating the challenges of an enabling program
Enabling programs typically experience high attrition rates. However, the specific timing of students’ departures and whether the reasons for departing vary over time are poorly understood. This project seeks to fill this knowledge gap by using a mixed methods approach to explore the challenges students face and when they encounter them in Bioscience, an elective science unit in the Tertiary Enabling Program at Charles Darwin University (CDU). Understanding when and why students discontinue study will help develop better just-in-time support strategies for students.
This presentation will present preliminary results from the three stages of this project. In the first stage, data from the CDU learning management system (LMS) was used to divide Bioscience students into four distinct groups based on their engagement with the LMS and success in the unit. This stage also identified when students discontinued their studies. The second stage employed a thematic analysis of student emails and online communications to identify the challenges students faced. In the third stage, surveys were distributed to past students to determine the extent to which different challenges influenced their decisions to discontinue their studies. The results from the second and third stages were then mapped onto the first stage to identify how the challenges faced by students and their reasons for discontinuing study changed during the semester.
Enabling programs typically experience high attrition rates. However, the specific timing of students’ departures and whether the reasons for departing vary over time are poorly understood. This project seeks to fill this knowledge gap by using a mixed methods approach to explore the challenges students face and when they encounter them in Bioscience, an elective science unit in the Tertiary Enabling Program at Charles Darwin University (CDU). Understanding when and why students discontinue study will help develop better just-in-time support strategies for students.
This presentation will present preliminary results from the three stages of this project. In the first stage, data from the CDU learning management system (LMS) was used to divide Bioscience students into four distinct groups based on their engagement with the LMS and success in the unit. This stage also identified when students discontinued their studies. The second stage employed a thematic analysis of student emails and online communications to identify the challenges students faced. In the third stage, surveys were distributed to past students to determine the extent to which different challenges influenced their decisions to discontinue their studies. The results from the second and third stages were then mapped onto the first stage to identify how the challenges faced by students and their reasons for discontinuing study changed during the semester.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Publication status | Published - 2024 |
| Event | National Association of Enabling Educators (NAEEA) Conference 2024: Shaping the future of our discipline - Charles Darwin University, Darwin City Campus, Darwin, Australia Duration: 2 Dec 2024 → 3 Dec 2024 https://agentur.eventsair.com/naeeaconference2024/ |
Conference
| Conference | National Association of Enabling Educators (NAEEA) Conference 2024 |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | Australia |
| City | Darwin |
| Period | 2/12/24 → 3/12/24 |
| Internet address |