As part of a 6-month seconded role in STEER, Claire Wolstenholme met with Ursula Klingel (Head of Wellbeing Service) and Jozef Sen (Lead Wellbeing Practitioner) to discuss research into male student mental health at SHU. Claire had recently completed a Doctorate in Education (EdD) in this area and was keen to further develop this work. The wellbeing team explained that they had seen a continuous underutilisation of the service from ethnically minoritized male students and wanted to understand the reasons for this, with a view to service improvement. Claire and Jozef decided to conduct a scoping investigation, undertaking qualitative research, and they aimed to give a voice to this demographic of male students about how they felt about mental health services at university.
A recent review of access, retention, attainment, and progression literature written by a team from Sheffield Hallam (Austen et. al. 2021) discussed the evidenced relationships between interventions and student outcomes. Knowing and understanding the demographics of a cohort and tracking outcomes over time were concerns, as was the description of how and why change occurs. At Sheffield Hallam, we recommend that all interventions which aim to impact of student outcomes are accompanied by a Theory of Change. An exploration of the context, assumptions and outcomes for these interventions is crucial for designing effective interventions. This evidence was used to commission, design and test an ‘Interventions Dashboard’. The dashboard contains demographic data, including trends in frequency of participation over time, and outcomes data, which compares the intervention cohort with the general population at Hallam and displays withdrawals (retention) and reasons for leaving, good honours, degree classifications, average module marks and if possible, graduate outcomes.
A team of researchers from the University have recently published ‘Access, retention, attainment and progression: a review of the literature 2016-2021’ as part of the Advance HE Connect Benefit Series 2021-22 on Student Success. Drawing on the findings from this review, the research team (led by Dr Liz Austen and Dr Rebecca Hodgson) are holding a Symposium Series that focuses on Student Retention and Success (What works and how do we know?). In this three-part Symposium Series, the research team will cover the following key topics: 1) Exploring Evidence for Change; 2) Constructing a Theory of Change; 3) Evaluation Planning and Implementation.
In March, April and May 2021, a team of researchers in STEER conducted a study entitled “A Digital Day in the Life”, exploring how the student experience had changed during the pandemic. The researchers asked students to document their daily teaching and learning activities through frequent diary entries over 3, 3-week periods. Students were then asked to participate in a focus group session to discuss their diary entries in more detail. To share the findings with students and other stakeholders, Graduate Interns in SETL (Tom Savage, Kiran Mahmood) have produced a series of graphics to communicate the findings, recommendations, and responses.
At the Advance HE Surveys and Insights Conference 2021, Alan Donnelly and Caroline Heaton led a workshop that was based on their work of applying cognitive interviewing techniques to examine students’ interpretations of, and responses to, items in the development of the Module Evaluation Questionnaire used at Sheffield Hallam University. Cognitive interviewing refers to a set of techniques used to assess the ways in which individuals mentally respond to survey questions.
Against the backdrop of a challenging Higher Education environment, where issues have been compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic, over 40 colleagues from across the University met for the launch of the new Interdisciplinary Higher Education Research and Practice Cluster (or HEC for short!).
A project at Sheffield Hallam aimed to conduct cognitive interviews with students as part of the development of a questionnaire to evaluate teaching and learning. This blog post will complement existing recommendations on ‘Doing fieldwork in a pandemic’ (e.g. Lupton, 2020) by considering whether technology can be utilised as a viable alternative to in-person participation for conducting cognitive interviews, such as by using phones and web-based video conferencing.