The COVID-19 pandemic introduced significant disruptions in the learning environment for many post-secondary students. While emerging evidence suggest mental health has declined during the pandemic, little is known about how the pandemic has affected students academically. This study investigates how COVID-19 psychological distress impacts…

Grading practices at Dalhousie University have changed considerably over the past 120 years. From 1901 until the early 1970s, Dalhousie used a variant of the British system. Initially, a grade of 65% or higher was required for distinction. In 1937, Dalhousie moved to a 2-category system (Distinction vs. Ordinary Pass) and in 1942 the distinction…

University students experience stress from academic demands. Stress is in fact expected in academic settings and important for achieving goals. How students experience the inevitable stress in the academic context, and whether stress is a support or hindrance for them, is related to their beliefs about stress. This study examined two types of…

Unlike university classrooms, academic support services provide students opportunities for enactive mastery of a skill with immediate feedback in a low-risk learning environment. Given that this environment likely alters affective states, this study tracked support-seekers' perception (n=107) of their anxiety and confidence before and after…

The ability of universities and colleges to predict the success of admitted students continues to be a key concern of higher education officials. Apart from a desire to see students have successful academic careers, there is also the fiscal reality of greater tuition revenues providing needed support for university budgets. Using administrative…

Nearly all college students require some academic assistance throughout their learning experiences. Rather than a dependent act, help-seeking is a self-regulated and motivated strategy; however, there are mixed findings regarding the relationship between academic help-seeking and academic achievement. Thus, the current study used meta-analytic…

This study aims to determine whether university students' levels of online self-regulated learning, online technologies self-efficacy, and motivated strategies for learning predict their general academic achievement and online academic achievement. In this study, the scanning design and the prediction research design were used. The participants of…

Increasingly, students engage in multitasking during lecture by shifting their attention between class material and irrelevant information from texts and webpages. It is well established that this divided attention impairs memory and learning. Less is known about how to correct the problem. This study used an educational intervention in the form…

Conventionally, regression discontinuity analysis contrasts a univariate regression's limits as its independent variable, "R," approaches a cut point, "c," from either side. Alternative methods target the average treatment effect in a small region around "c," at the cost of an assumption that treatment assignment,…

This report provides highlights of the latest research from the Student Transitions Project (STP), with a focus on the first transitions of B.C. grade 12 graduates into B.C. public post-secondary education. The study was conducted by the Student Transitions Project (STP), a collaborative research partnership involving B.C.'s education and advanced…

This study investigated the effectiveness of a combined academic and personal counselling initiative on student performance and emotional well-being outcomes of 289 at-risk students at a Canadian University. Criterion for risk included academic struggles, mental health distress, or both. The program was developed to be tailored to individual…

This study examined differences in the psychological constructs of motivation, academic self-efficacy, and learning strategies between higher education students who participated in a work-integrated learning (WIL) programme and those who did not. Undergraduate WIL (n = 1048) and non-WIL (n = 656) students in all years of study and from several…

This newsletter provides highlights of the latest research from the Student Transitions Project (STP), with a focus on the first transitions of B.C. grade 12 graduates into B.C. public post-secondary education. The study was conducted by the Student Transitions Project (STP), a collaborative research partnership involving B.C.'s education and…

This newsletter provides highlights of the latest research from the Student Transitions Project (STP), with a focus on the first transitions of B.C. grade 12 graduates into B.C. public post-secondary education. The study was conducted by the Student Transitions Project (STP), a collaborative research partnership involving B.C.'s education and…

This report features selected research findings from the most recent annual Student Transitions Project (STP) update in Fall of 2018, including B.C. grade 12 graduates of 2001/2002 to 2016/17 and B.C. public post-secondary registrants from 2002/2003 to Fall 2018. In lieu of a brief highlights newsletter, an annual tradition for the STP every June,…