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For delayed and long-term students, the education process is often a lonely journey. The main conclusion of this research is that learning should not be an individual process of the student connected to one lecturer, but rather a community where learning is a collective journey. The social interaction between lecturers, groups of delayed students and other actors is an important engine for arriving at the new knowledge, insights and expertise that are important to reach their final level. This calls for the design of social structures and the collaboration mechanism that enable the bonding of all members in the community. By making use of this added value, new opportunities for the individual are created that can lead to study success. Another important conclusion is that in the design and development of learning communities, sufficient attention must be paid to cultural characteristics. Students who delay are faced with a loss of self-efficacy and feelings of shame and guilt. A learning community for delayed students requires a culture in which students can turn this experience into an experience of self-confidence, hope and optimism. This requires that the education system pays attention to language use, symbols and rituals to realise this turn. The model ‘Building blocks of a learning environment for long-term students’ contains elements that contribute to the study success of delayed and long-term students. It is the challenge for every education programme to use it in an appropriate way within its own educational context. Each department will have to explore for themselves how these elements can be translated into the actions, language, symbols and rituals that are suitable for their own target group.
In this paper I measure first year student Facebook usage as part of a broader PhD study into the influence of social media usage on the success of students in higher education. A total of 906 students were asked to complete 3 surveys on Facebook usage with their peers, for two consecutive years (2011-2012 and 2012-2013). The different purposes for Facebook usage, in addition to whether or not students used (self-created) Facebook-groups, were measured and the relationship between the use of pages compared to the purpose of Facebook usage. This resulted in significant correlations between the purpose of Facebook usage and the use of different pages, as well as correlations between the purpose and use of different pages. This study hereby explores the variation in student Facebook usage and provides valuable insight into the potential value of Facebook for students in an educational setting, without the interference of teachers. It is also the next logical step in revising existing integration and engagement theories that predict student success in higher education in contemporary society.
In this paper I measure first year student Facebook usage as part of a broader PhD study into the influence of social media usage on the success of students in higher education. A total of 906 students were asked to complete 3 surveys on Facebook usage with their peers, for two consecutive years (2011-2012 and 2012-2013). The different purposes for Facebook usage, in addition to whether or not students used (self-created) Facebook-groups, were measured and the relationship between the use of pages compared to the purpose of Facebook usage. This resulted in significant correlations between the purpose of Facebook usage and the use of different pages, as well as correlations between the purpose and use of different pages. This study hereby explores the variation in student Facebook usage and provides valuable insight into the potential value of Facebook for students in an educational setting, without the interference of teachers. It is also the next logical step in revising existing integration and engagement theories that predict student success in higher education in contemporary society.
Tinto’s integration theory has highly influenced research on student success in Europe and America. However, due to the complexity of the theory and the enormous amount of variables, the theory is not suitable for use in regular evaluations in higher education.By including only the best-proven predictive variables, I reduced the amount of variables from Tinto’s theory, avoiding the capitalization of chance and establishing a more easy to use model for teachers and management. The latent variable ‘satisfaction’ was built by using a fraction of the original manifest variables. It was tested, using principal component analysis, in a previous study to prove a good fit of the model. In this paper I focus on the role of background variables (gender, ethnicity, previous education and living situation), to measure their possible influence. A multi-group comparison (X2 difference test) in SPSS AMOS is conducted and path analysis is done to uncover differences on individual paths between the variables.This paper is part of my PhD research, wherein I investigate the possible influence of the use of social media by first year students in higher education.
