How undergraduate students ‘negotiate’ academic performance within a diverse university environment

Cross, Merylin; Shalem, Yael; Backhouse, Judy; Adam, Fatima

doi:10.4314/sajhe.v23i1.44800

Cited by 22 publications

(26 citation statements)

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“…The legacy of the apartheid history in South Africa is the racialized performance distributions and it seems that these also manifest at this university, much like found at other universities in the country (Cross et al 2009;Jansen 2009;Warwzynski et al 2009). Since democratisation in 1994 South African higher education has attempted to address issues of gendered and racialized persistence and success rates of students and we need to consider the complex interplay of factors across the academic-personal-social-institutional context in order to positively impact the national success rate.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Jansen (2009) and Cross et al (2009) point out, South African higher education hasn't yet overcome the injurious past and we operate in 'legally desegregated but socially segregated spaces' (Jansen 2009, 136).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, the Coloured group at UWC has a high in-group variance, and the data may reflect this diversity within the group of Coloured students. However, as universities are not exempted from the scars of our history, our peer-to-peer and student-and-staff interactions, as well as our campus environment may tend to be segregated along lines of race, as is reported from other higher education contexts in South Africa (Cross, Shalem, Backhouse and Adam 2009;Jansen 2009). …”

Section: Findings By Racementioning

confidence: 99%

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Exploring student engagegment practises at a South African university: Student engagement as reliable predictor of academic performance

Schreiber

Yu²

2016

SAJHE

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Student engagement is one avenue to explore how the experiences within and beyond the classroom impact student persistence behaviours. This article contributes to the sparse research in South Africa on the correlates of student engagement with academic performance at a Historically Disadvantaged University. The results suggest that engagement practices at this university differ across race and gender and that given the South African history we are able to generalise onto the South African higher education system. Influences on persistence and academic success are complex and require a comprehensive approach which embraces the entire context into which student persistence behaviours are embedded. Student engagement patterns are reliable predictors of academic performance and the trends across race and gender suggest that engagement and academic performance remain differentiated along race and gender.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Findings By Racementioning

confidence: 99%

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Exploring student engagegment practises at a South African university: Student engagement as reliable predictor of academic performance

Schreiber

Yu²

2016

SAJHE

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“…Prior research into student success at the University of the Witwatersrand has identified three sets of conditions that impact on student success; firstly the student's biography, which includes their socio-economic, cultural and linguistic background; secondly, the learning environment created by the institution; and thirdly the student's agency or the extent to which the student can negotiate the teaching and learning processes (Cross, Shalem, Backhouse & Adam, 2009). Thus we propose using these elements as the contextual constraints for an ecological model of student informationseeking behaviour based on Williamson's (2005) model (the outermost layer of Figure 2).…”

Section: What Theoretical Models Aid Our Understanding?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Research has shown that all students newly arrived at university are disadvantaged by their lack of understanding of the academic discourse and expectations (Mgqwashu, 2009) and that some lack specific skills or the self-efficacy needed to succeed (Cross, Shalem, Backhouse & Adam, 2009). Students need to develop sophisticated and highly individual personal information systems that can deal effectively with degrees of visibility of information, task urgency and workflows (Mizrachi & Bates, 2013).…”

Section: Figure 2: Ecological Model Of Student Information Seeking Anmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Ecological Model to Understand the Variety in Undergraduate Students' Personal Information Systems

Backhouse¹,

Hughes²

2015

Afr. j. inf. commun. (Online)

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A first-year undergraduate course in Information Systems in a South African university includes an opportunity for students to reflect on their own use of information and personal information systems. Their reflections provide data about the technologies and tools that they use to find and manage everyday life information, as well as academic information, and about the sources of information they draw on. This paper analyses data collected over three years and reports on the dominant technologies and information sources that students use. We then adapt the ecological model of information seeking and use developed by Williamson (1998) to make sense of the diversity of information sources and students' choices in engaging with them. The results show that students rely to a very small degree on traditional university information sources. The study offers insights into the information contexts and behaviour of students and argues for the importance of a flexible range of information sources to support students in the complex process of managing information for academic success. The results will be of interest to those involved in designing and delivering undergraduate programmes, as well as those providing information services and infrastructures. KEYWORDS personal information system, information behaviour, undergraduate students, information technology, information seeking, information sources, personal informatics INTRODUCTION "Fundamentals of Information Systems" is a one-semester course offered in the first year of the Bachelor of Commerce (B.Com) degree at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. It is a compulsory course for all B.Com students and an elective course for students from other faculties, with the aim of teaching them enough to be an "educated end user" of information systems, while gaining a basic understanding of Information Systems applied to the individual, organisational and societal levels.

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The First Undergraduate Year

Beckett

2024

Student Transitions From Further Education to University

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How undergraduate students ‘negotiate’ academic performance within a diverse university environment

Cited by 22 publications

References 0 publications

Exploring student engagegment practises at a South African university: Student engagement as reliable predictor of academic performance

Exploring student engagegment practises at a South African university: Student engagement as reliable predictor of academic performance

An Ecological Model to Understand the Variety in Undergraduate Students' Personal Information Systems

The First Undergraduate Year

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