Compulsory attendance in communication skills courses offered at colleges of engineering seems to be a problematic issue for many students because it prevents them from performing well in such courses. Many students believe that time spent on these courses comes at the expense of focusing on core courses and worsens their overall performance in…

This study examined the relationships between first-year university students' academic motivation, retrospective evaluation of school experiences, subjective well-being, engagement and intention to drop out. Self-determination theory, the SInAPSi model of academic engagement, the hedonic approach, and the retrospective judgment process were used…

Despite the benefits swift academic progress holds for many stakeholders, there is scarce literature on how academic progress may be improved by changes to assessment policies. Therefore, we investigated academic progress of first-year students after an alteration of characteristics of the assessment policies in three large course programmes:…

Academic dismissal policies are increasingly implemented to promote academic success, with existing empirical evidence mostly restricted to short-run outcomes. This study examines long-term academic outcomes of academic dismissal for two cohorts (N=1707) of first-year bachelor students in Economics and Business at a Dutch university. Using…

This article interrogates an Academic Monitoring and Support system (AMS), which was designed to enhance first-year student progression at a South African University. Institutional research evidence produced through engagement with AMS practitioners and university leadership, analysed through the lens of Systems Thinking, reveals a…

Developing "global graduates" or "global citizens" is a goal often expressed in university mission statements. This study draws on Amadasi and Holliday's (2017) distinction of block narratives and thread narratives of culture and applies these to interviews with first year students. It shows that some ability to draw on thread…

Universities' internationalisation rhetoric suggests that students studying on internationally diverse campuses will automatically engage positively with one another and develop intercultural competence. This study examined the extent to which a cohort of first year UK and non-UK students studying on an internationally diverse campus developed…

A survey of 376 first-year Arab university students at Sultan Qaboos University (Oman) investigated attitudes about the use of English as a medium for instruction in science and technology. Questionnaires elicited information about student language background, reasons for studying English, patterns of present and future use of English, and…

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…