Assessing the Impact of Changes to the Tuition Model for English Literature Modules in Terms of Attendance, Attainment, and Retention

This project aimed to better understand student engagement with live tuition and the impact on their chances of success, by analysing data over a five-year period (2017-2022) on four undergraduate English Literature modules (A230, Reading and Studying Literature; A233, Telling Stories – the Novel and Beyond; A334, English Literature from Shakespeare to Austen; A335, Literature in Transition: 1800 to the present). Indeed, it initially emerged from a desire to interrogate the effectiveness of some tuition changes introduced from the autumn of 2019, in particular the implementation of strategically-placed, tutor-group only, online sessions at which students could meet their own tutors and fellow students.  This was arguably a profound change, especially in the context of the new University-wide move, from 2016, towards making all live tuition events more widely available, enabling students to attend events on their preferred date and time, regardless of which tutor was teaching.  Student survey data suggested that the opportunity to attend regular sessions with their allocated tutor was a welcome development.  Encouragingly, too, attendance data shows that the majority of students taking part in live events attended at least one of these tutor-group sessions.  Significantly, too, just under 12% of all students who took part in tutor-group sessions did not participate in other cluster- or module-wide events, and the proportion of students attending tutor-group sessions also increased in 20/21 and 21/22.

More broadly, data analysis revealed improvement in attendance levels between 2017 and 2022.  Higher mean percentages of registered students engaged in live tuition events, and there were also more students attending more tuition events.  Where there was a choice of attendance mode (Autumn 2017 – Spring 2020), face-to-face attendance was the strongest preference in 17/18, making up 41.19% of all attendance.   In 18/19, however, a mixture of online and face-to-face attendance became the most common choice before exclusive online attendance took first place in 19/20 (43.74% of all attendance).  This seems to point to changes in tuition preferences before the pandemic since, in terms of demographics, the majority of students attending live events continued to be white females, with the proportion of registered students attending being higher the older the age group. Finally, in line with other projects’ findings, we identified correlations between attendance and attainment with Distinctions or Grade 2 Pass module results being especially more common for students attending live events than those who did not.  Such correlation is more difficult to establish, however, for students registered on two of the undergraduate English Literature modules concurrently.