Enhancing Student Experience Research Symposium (St Andrews)

The Centre for Higher Education Research (CHER) and the Medical Education Research Group (MERG) are pleased to present this symposium on enhancing the student experience.

Schedule

Attendance is open and free, but for catering purposes, please sign-up here

Keynote Speaker

We are delighted to have Natalie Colson (BHSc, Grad Dip Higher Ed, MND, PhD, SFHEA) from the School of Medical Science at Griffith University on The Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia as our keynote speaker for this event.

Natalie has been involved in a number of projects promoting student engagement and empowerment, the most recent being the flexible delivery of the Foundation Year Health program.

She has received over $600K in grant funding for teaching and learning projects over the past 5 years. Natalie has been formally recognised for her distinctive teaching approaches, including an Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning.

Abstracts

Natalie Colson (School of Medical Science, Griffith University)

Strategies from Down Under To Enhance the Student Experience

In this presentation, Natalie will discuss several strategies aimed at enhancing the student experience that she has been involved in developing and implementing. These strategies span from course level, such as flipping a large first year class, to program and Health group level, such as establishing a professional development training program for laboratory demonstrators, and introducing first year students to the research culture of the university and their discipline with an embedded research encounter experience.

In addition, Natalie will discuss one of her research interests; the online communication of science information and misinformation, and how it may impact our students.

Paula Miles (School of Psychology and Neuroscience, St Andrews)

Student wellbeing: from research to best practice

Student well-being is a critical factor influencing the student experience at university. This study sought to better understand the wellbeing of first year undergraduate students as they transition into university life. By tracking wellbeing levels across an academic year, we aimed to identify: 1) points during the year when first year students would most benefit from additional support; and, 2) whether particular cohorts of students would benefit from further support. The findings of this study will be discussed, along with plans for extending this research in the upcoming academic year. This initial study has resulted in the development of the University’s ‘Wellbeing Working Group’ who have developed a number of initiatives to help support student wellbeing. The final part of this talk will focus on this work, demonstrating the positive impact that research has had on University practice.

Laurence Lasselle (School of Management, St Andrews)
Mike Johnson (Admissions, St Andrews)

Levelling the playing field between rural schools and urban schools in a HE context: a Scottish case study

At a time where the work of access and participation outreach interventions aims to maximise their impact by engaging with schools located in the most deprived communities, pupils who experience deprivation and are enrolled in schools in remote communities are less likely to benefit from them.  From publicly available statistics, we show that state secondary schools located in Scottish remote or rural areas are not well served in indictors capturing socio-economic, education, or geographical deprivation widely used in the school selection for these outreach interventions. We construct a marker that identifies schools facing higher levels of deprivation than the Scottish average. We argue that (1) this marker is a step in the direction towards levelling the playing field between remote and rural schools and urban schools; (2) it could facilitate a wider selection of schools for outreach interventions.