Student Success

Student Success

StudentSurvey.ie - analysis of additional questions

This series of papers explores the many varied factors which influence the success of students within technological higher education.  StudentSurvey.ie fieldwork in THEA member institutions in 2019 and 2020 included optional additional questions that probed the reasons that influenced whether students had seriously considered withdrawing from their programmes.

These three papers explore student success in technological  higher education institutions based on the responses to the StudentSurvey.ie additional questions.

All students registered on first year and final years of taught programmes leading to major awards at NFQ levels 6 to 9 are invited to participate in the ISSE during February – March. Data is typically presented for various cohorts of first year undergraduate, final year undergraduate and taught postgraduate students. ISSE has facilitated individual institutions to add a limited number of optional question items to the core questionnaire for their own students for a number of years. The additional question focussed on reasons that influenced whether the student had seriously considered withdrawing from their programmes

Paper 1 explores responses to the optional ‘withdrawal’ questions which was included of StudentSurvery.ie fieldwork in 11 Institutes of Technology.

Paper 2 builds on analysis of these data from 2019 fieldwork by examining comparable data from 2020.

Paper 3 examines free text responses to two other specific questions included in StudentSurvey.ie (previously, the Irish Survey of Student Engagement) for respondents from all participating institutions. These two survey questions requesting free text responses were:

• What does your institution do best to engage students in learning? And
• What could your institution do to improve students’ engagement in learning?