Academic Conduct Matters: Assessing the Impact of Academic and Disciplinary Interventions on Student’s Retention, Progression, and Completion

This project is primarily concerned with investigating historic data (2011-2020) on referrals for poor academic practice in order to determine: 

• Whether there is a link between poor academic practice and specific student profiles, in terms of factors such as gender, age, disability, location as well as study pathway or intensity
• The impact the way cases of poor academic practice are handled has on the likelihood of similar problems arising again for student 
• The extent to which poor academic practice referrals are an indicator of likely retention, completion, or attainment prospects.  

A subsection of the project is exploring more closely the effectiveness of two different models of supporting the development of good academic practice at Level 1.  This interest emerges from the introduction of a new foundation module in 2019 (A111, Discovering the arts and humanities) which fully embeds the teaching of good academic practices, especially via a unit on Academic Integrity and a connected compulsory quiz that checks students have understood the basic principles covered in the unit.  This part of the project, therefore, is seeking to ascertain whether this new approach is more effective than the one employed by the predecessor module (AA100, The Arts, Past and Present) by: 

a.Comparing the number and type of poor academic practice referrals received by each module in order to ascertain whether there is a positive impact on attainment and completion linked to the innovative approach in the new module 

b.Inviting students who have recently studied either module to complete a questionnaire so as to gain a better understanding of their experience, in particular in relation to how confident they felt about academic writing at the end of the modules, and what helped with this.