Transition Buddy Scheme for all new first years, academic year 2012/13
Some departments within the University of Southampton are currently offering peer support to new students. The Transition Project is keen to support the already existing schemes, but would like to offer peer support more widely. In order to advise the University how this could be moved forward into an institution-wide practice, a pilot with a larger number of students will be beneficial to understand staff implications, costs and benefits of peer support. The project is therefore piloting a peer support scheme for all new undergraduate students in Engineering for the academic year 2012/13.
All 450 new undergraduate students have been allocated to a Transition Buddy (a student in 2nd, 3rd or 4th year). The Transition Buddies received training and a guide booklet, which explains their role and gives them useful contact details which they can share with their group of first years. The scheme has been running from October to December 2012 and is currently being evaluated.
If you are interested in running a similar scheme in your faculty or academic unit, please do not hesitate to contact us. We will be happy to share training material and buddy booklets, as well as checklists on how to set a similar scheme up.
The experiences of international postgraduate research (PGR) students with verbal feedback
This project will explore international postgraduate research students' (PGR) experiences of strategies for learning from and building upon diverse forms of verbal feedback.
The research questions are:
The project's aim is to explore the utility of spoken feedback in its many forms to international PGR students who do not have English as a first language.
This project will:
Good practice guide for supporting international student learning
Internationalising the curriculum has increased the requirement for academics to have an understanding of the needs of international students in order to support them to perform at their best ability. There are resources available for academic staff to provide them with information on the variety of needs and challenges faced by the international students in their learning but these are scattered and not always easy to find and would prove to be an unnecessary challenge for many academics at a time when they perceive other priorities need their focus.
The aim of this project is to develop a ‘Good Practice Guide for facilitating learning for International Students' which will provide a comprehensive single point of information for staff about how to support International student learning particularly during the transition period. The guide will be made available to academics in all Faculties within the University. The project aims to bring information together in one place and the main principle will be to keep the guide brief, and make links to existing materials.
If you are teaching in an international classroom and would like to share your experiences, please do not hesitate to contact Dr Jenny Carl, who is the researcher working on this project.