Bencilsulfonamidas (IV) con un sustituyente nuclear (Tabla VI) En parte fueron preparadas por una vía general como se des­

The core activity of teaching normally begins for most students after the induction week, and it is this commencement of key operations that arguably have the largest impact on the student stay-leave decision. Programmes and initiatives tend to be diverse and located and administered at different levels in the institution. In some cases a service may be provided at several levels for example counselling whilst traditionally provided at the level of the institution could conceivably also be manifest within academic schools on a more focussed level. What differentiates ‘bolt-on’ solutions to ‘support solutions’ is the increase in immediate problem focus that they

tend to have. They are also normally targeted at addressing what are perceived to be immediate student related problems such as integration, academic skill levels and learning skills generally. They are normally administered at a local level.

Support services

Most HE institutions traditionally dealt with non-academic affairs at the university level and as such there has been a tradition of some form of counselling service being available as well as other support services such as finance and perhaps housing. The potential importance and role of student support services in the battle against student dropout has been noted (Thomas et al. 2002) although evidence for its impact and use by students is lacking, as is the evidence for its impact on student retention. Some form of counselling has long been a staple offering, the academic aspect being particularly important for the NA model where many students only choose a major after the freshman year. Early manifestations of counselling encompassed many of the support programmes and ideas for solving retention that we find today, for example Snyder (1936) considered induction, mentoring, and skills support all to be part of a student counselling. Academic counselling would later be the catalyst for emergence of specific academic skills support programmes such as supplementary instruction.

Given the extensive interest of psychologists in retention and the early assumptions that failing students were deficient in some aspects of their psychological makeup, psychological counselling was equally if not more highly considered as a tool for addressing dropout. Rose (1965) for example in an experiment found that students who were engaged in counselling were less likely to dropout, and Frank and Kirk (1975) taking as their sample a whole cohort of freshmen compared users and nonusers of counselling services and found similar results. Certainly when participation was relatively low then such services were not heavily in demand but the emergence of WP has created a cohort of students that is drastically different. These students have a wider variety of needs, and such services are now considered a key part of the university experience offering with an increasing number of students availing themselves of the service (Wilson et al. 1997). Turner and Berry (2000) provide a summary of the contribution of psychological counselling to the retention of students, and point to the increased remit of the service in contemporary HE environments. In their own investigation they again found that persistence was

consistently higher amongst counselled students, although they emphasise that there was little difference in long term graduation rates of both users and nonusers of counselling.

3.4.1 Bolt-on programmes

As already stated bolt-on solutions are programmes and initiatives that tend to be specifically aimed at addressing a particular problem related to retention. The majority of these initiatives are based around helping students academically although some are specifically aimed at integration. The term ‘bolt-on’ refers to the fact that these programmes are normally offered as open service; that is students usually volunteer to use it. Additionally they are normally, although not always, initiated at the course level.

Peer Mentoring

For students entering university for the first time it can be a traumatic and often lonely experience and small setbacks can have a major impact (Peat et al. 2001). It is no surprise then that the mentoring of new students by their more experienced peers, especially early on, has gained coinage in HE as a way to help ease students through this transitional period. Research has shown that students repeatedly place a high priority on making friends as an objective when coming to university. In a comprehensive review of mentoring in HE Jacobi (1991) suggests that a key problem exists in the lack of an operational definition of mentoring. She goes on to identify common features often found activities to be part of the mentor remit, things such as training, advice, friendship and so on. Peer mentoring can take many forms, and be tailored at particular groups, for example Hutchins and Miller (1979) established an experiment using group advising by teams made up of academics and trained student advisors. Students allocated to the teams generally performed better than the control groups along a number of dimensions, in particular they had better retention and academic performance. Using a very similar programme Dixon and Gudan (2000) report the impact of a programme intended to address the problems experienced by commuting students. The programme called “Peer assisted Learning” actually combined peer mentoring with formal academic tasks so academics worked alongside

student mentors in mentoring first year students. Again they reported that programme participants had higher academic performance and lower dropout rates.

Academic support

Academic skills support and advice has a long history of use in HE. It was seen as being particularly useful to address the perceived skills deficiencies that many non- traditional students were entering university with. Because of the association of academic weakness with poor retention, academic skills support programmes became a staple within most HE institutions, and indeed it is rare not to find an established academic skills support unit in any institution. The central idea behind academic skills support initially was to provide students with some of the skills that were required for effective HE level study. The natural urge was to identify students who were considered at risk of having problems and then target these students for support. This model has generally been discredited and replaced by the development model where all students are invited to make use of the service to enhance their performance (Hill et al. 2010). Lowe and Toney (2000) suggest that academic advising has an inconsistent lineage in terms of usage and cites problems with the way in which it is viewed in institutions; often as a minor activity. Coupled with lack of trained personnel, ambiguity about where it fits into institutional operations, and problems with evaluation, it remains of ambiguous value for retention improvement.

Whilst academic skills support tended to focus on the student, other forms of academic support began to address institutional issues. One such approach is supplementary instruction (SI) which according to Kochenour et al (1997) focuses on problem subjects, programmes or modules. Additionally SI normally involves formal group sessions rather than individual targeted help and these groups are often lead by other students. As well as moving the discourse away from the deficiency model, the advantage of this approach is that it potentially provides a community into which students can integrate. The problem remains of course that students are required to opt in, although there may be scope for the provision of obligatory sessions.

Like academic skills, the final manifestation of SI is its integration into the curriculum. This approach according to Congos and Schoeps (1998) has proven to be effective at improving both student performance and retention. SI also potentially

circumvents the oft cited problems inherent in targeting at-risk students in that it avoids the labelling of students as inadequate (Blythman and Orr 2002; Martin and Blanc 1980). Kochenour (1997) et al in their study of the effectiveness of SI across the University of Utah indicate the importance of this feature in helping students to integrate more quickly and develop friendships and other forms of interaction.

University experience courses

The transition into university is a daunting prospect for most students, and particularly for NT students who are exposed to a challenging and unfamiliar academic environment. In response to these issues many institutions in NA have initiated what are commonly known as university experience courses or seminars. The original idea of a university experience course emerged at the University of South Carolina in 1972. Its apparent success was clearly indicated by Fiddler (1991) who in an evaluation of its effects between 1973 and 1988 found significant positive impacts on the retention of students who enrolled on the programme.

The general idea behind experience courses is to equip students with some of the skills and knowledge that would help them through this early transition. The earlier experience courses tended to be thematically similar, for instance Stanley and Witten (1990:345) suggested a number of common characteristics that such courses might have, such as being credit bearing, small class settings, and a content that focuses more on the non-cognitive development of students. As such the types of activities normally found within such courses might include general guidance on availability and access to services, engaging with and access to extracurricular activities, and perhaps identification of mentors. Over time the format of experience courses has changed somewhat and as Hendle (2006:414) suggested can vary significantly based on the mix of academic and non-academic content, how and where the programme is delivered and who is involved. An example is that provided by Noble (2007) where the first year programme included a residential element where participants in the experience course were situated in the same accommodation areas.

Irrespective of the individual peculiarities of different experience courses there is now a significant and stable body of evidence that would seem to point to their impact on student retention, particularly in the first year (Boudreau and Kromrey 1994; Cox et

al. 2005; Fidler 1991; Glass and Garrett 1995; Keenan and Gabovitch 1995; Schnell and Doetkott 2002; Sidle and McReynolds 1999; Starke and Harth 2001). This is supported by the evidence of heavy use of such courses across NA institutions although some contemporary work such as Hendel (2006) casts some doubt over the economic cost of such courses by finding only a tenuous link between participation and retention. He also suggests that retention is more affected by the type of student recruited and that evidence for the impact of experience courses needs to be more robust to justify the resource expenditure they imply.

One particularly important theme that recurs consistently is how experience courses can act as a vehicle to develop student mutual support groups, certainly important in NA where the freshman year is typified by large impersonal class sizes. Many evaluations of such courses commit premium space to their interactive and integrative impacts, and are one of the main explanations for the positive outcomes that experience course have on participants (Boudreau and Kromrey 1994). The notion of enhanced learning in smaller groups as a reaction to the problems of the large class sizes experienced in NA, would become increasingly important as part of the general emergence of learning community ideas.

All of the solutions up to this point are aimed at helping the student adapt to the university environment, and as such despite their well-meaning intentions they tend to calcify the ‘student as problem’ perspective. The next category, institutional change, covers activities aimed at adapting the institution to fit more effectively with the changing student body. Finally process essentials are activities that are deemed as vital operational processes that are necessary to enable and enhance effective retention programmes.