Study: The social side effects of academic activities can be crucial for reducing dropout
Academic activities cannot be evaluated on the academic gain alone. It is the social side effect that keeps students hanging in there, new research shows.
Students seek out mentoring programmes, tutoring rooms and excursions to learn their subject. But it is the social side effects of the activities that make students keep coming back.
A new study based on interviews with Norwegian STEM students indicates that the social gain of the academic offerings of their programme can be decisive for persistence in STEM programmes. And that the activities which gave students the chance to nurture their sense of community in this way indirectly created a stronger feeling of belonging.
The study has just been published in the journal Education Sciences.
“It was very clear in our interviews with the students that the social element of the academic activities is enormously important,” says Johan Kørvel Sørensen, PhD student at the USE Center and one of the study’s authors.
“When they struggled with a subject or with their studies, it was the social part that got them through.”
The students’ social wellbeing was far from depending solely on a Friday bar and other social activities, but just as much on the mandatory group work, field work and the tutoring room, explains Katrine von Bornemann, who is likewise a PhD student at USE and co-author.
“The social aspects are an extra benefit in many academic activities – and, according to the students, have an effect on the desire to stay in the programme. It is about much more than just getting help with your homework,” she says.
Come for the academic support, stay for the community
The research team carried out parallel focus group interviews with 21 students from a wide range of STEM subjects at the University of Bergen. The students had all completed at least one semester of their studies, and the interviews were therefore based on the fundamental question: What is it that makes you stay?
Whether the students talked about the resources that were part of the formal teaching – such as assignments and exams – or things outside the teaching – such as a mentoring scheme, the picture was the same, says Johan Kørvel Sørensen.
“The students took the resources the university offered and used them in a way that made sense to them on a social and emotional level,” he explains.
Therefore, you cannot view study activities in a purely academic perspective if you want students to feel at home in their subject and on their programme. On the contrary, even a mandatory assignment and an exam must be viewed with an eye to how it can strengthen social relations.
“We see that students seek out the academic offerings precisely because of the academic content. But it is the social value they highlight as the most important benefit,” says Johan Kørvel Sørensen.
“If we can design these offerings so that they also create strong social relations, we can better support the students’ sense of belonging and thereby persistence in STEM programmes.”
Getting the snowball rolling
The study supports previous research showing that once students build strong social relations and a sense of belonging, it can set a snowball effect in motion. In this way, students get more desire and opportunity to engage with their studies and their fellow students – for example when a student who has received help through a mentoring programme chooses to become a mentor themselves.
When they struggled with a subject or with their studies, it was the social part that got them through.
“We highlight that it is not enough for the programme to make these resources available. The students also have to be able to see the relevance and be helped into a rhythm of using them, so that they get the snowball rolling,” says Katrine von Bornemann.
As a mathematics student, she has herself experienced that the programme leadership made many resources available, and that the relevance was passed on through the social study environment.
“In my own case, the ‘older’ year groups played a big part in making visible and passing on the value of the different offerings to the newer year groups. This became particularly clear during covid, when the usual communities and the informal sharing of knowledge across year groups were challenged, and when some of the natural introduction to the resources disappeared,” she says.