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Tinto's model of student retention
Last changed 25 Feb 2008 ............... Length about 8,000 words (53,000 bytes).(Major first draft completed 7 May 2003.)This is a WWW document maintained by Steve Draper , installed at
http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/localed/tinto.html. You may copy it. How to refer to it.
Web site logical path: [www.psy.gla.ac.uk ] [~steve] [localed] [dropout] [this page]
ToDo
Go over papers for method criticism
Pursue wider lit. e.g. via Lynn chapter.
*Find measures used by others
Tinto's model of student retention
By Stephen W. Draper , Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow.
These notes are a very personal view, not well researched, and possibly severely flawed.
The first topic is what determines whether students stay on or drop out at universities. Various
terms may reasonably be used for this area. The negative-looking ones are failure, dropout,
attrition; the positive-looking ones are retention, persistence. Tinto offers a theory for understanding this. Elsewhere I also have some notes on basic comparative dropout rates.
The follow-on topic is about the school-university transition. In it I argue that this is in fact a
sub-part of the Tinto issue.
Some other pointers related to Tinto are on another page including surveys related to dropouts at
this university, a review of the literature related to Tinto, and a variety of diagrams expressing
Tinto's theory.
Contents (click to jump to a section)
Tinto's model
o Methodology
Common failings in papers reporting studies of Tinto's model
Standard possible methodological failings in studies of dropout
New methods required
Beyond the original model: my extensions/interpretation
o Summary of dimensions
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o The questions
o Unresolved issues with this scheme
Liz Thomas: 5 spheres of integration
Tinto interventions
o Classics / majors
o Classic but not easily recognised as Tinto-relevant
o Other HEI standards implied by Thomas
o Designing new, ideal interventions
Where do these models fit?
o Senses of "social"
o Why is this synthesis, and Tinto's part in it, important?
o What practical use could these models be?
School-university transition
o Prose argument about this
o Transition: bullet point summary of my view
o Summer schools
References
o Yet more Tinto-related references
Tinto's model
The most commonly referred to model in the student retention/dropout literature is Tinto's. It was
first offered in a literature review (Tinto, 1975), and so began with the support of being broadly
consistent with a considerable range of other people's research, as well as having a theoreticalderivation by analogy to Durkheim's model of suicide. It probably gains most support though
because it immediately appeals to people's commonsense with its central notion of "integration".
It is less clear whether there is much direct empirical support for it, and certainly it is hard to find
direct empirical tests of and challenges to it. The literature claiming to support it seems to beabout reporting weakly consistent evidence: not controlled experiments, nor comparing
alterantive theories against Tinto's with respect to data.
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This is adapted by me from Tinto,V. (1975) "Dropout from Higher Education: A Theoretical Synthesis of Recent Research" Review of Educational Research vol.45, pp.89-125.
Its central idea is that of "integration": it claims that whether a student persists or drops out is
quite strongly predicted by their degree of academic integration, and social integration. Theseevolve over time, as integration and commmitment interact, with dropouts depending on
commitment at the time of the decision. A first pass might perhaps try to measure these by:
Academic integration
o Grade / mark performance
o Personal development -- or does this just mean a student's private judgement onthe value of what they are learning (as opposed to official marks / teachers'
judgements).
o "Do you think you are doing well academically?" (Academic self-esteem)
o Enjoying your subject(s).
o Enjoying studying your subject(s): i.e. the study patterns required/requested are or are not enjoyable.
o Identification with academic norms and values
o Identification with one's role as a student
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Social integration
o How many friends you have. It probably doesn't matter whether you fit with the
dominant social crowd, only whether or not you have a group of friends you fitwith.
o Personal contact with academics. In fact, it may be that it is important to measure
really small amounts of contact: how many staff know your name, smile at you, ...("How many staff have you had a personal interaction with, however small?""How many personal interactions with staff have you had this year?").
o "Are you enjoying being at university?"
Methodology
Tinto was keen for studies to measure / distinguish different reasons for departure: being thrown
out for failing exams vs. voluntary leaving. In reality there is a middle category where you can'ttell if students are marked fail because they stopped attending (voluntary but didn't tell the
university), or did badly and although not told they must leave this removed their commitment
and they then decided to leave.
Common failings in papers reporting studies of Tinto's model
Such papers seldom report the actual questionnaire items used to operationalise the theory. This
means that they may not test the theory at all, but the reader cannot know this. For instanceBorglum & Kubala (2000) seem to have used a questionnaire designed for a quite different
purpose, simply measuring student satisfaction with the college, yet assumed that all items could
be classified post hoc as measuring a Tinto-related variable.
More perniciously, by never discussing the design of questionnaire items, major theoretical
issues are ignored. For instance does "social integration" mean integration within that institution,or generally? Probably Tinto meant the former. Yet a student with no friends anywhere, and astudent with plenty of friends who however are not enrolled at the same college are likely to
show different tendencies to dropout. Scrutiny and discussion of individual questionnaire items
is a good way to identify theoretical issues, and conversely eschewing such discussionfurthermore makes it likely that no two studies are measuring the same thing, yet are unable to
determine this.
Standard possible methodological failings in studies of dropout
Need 100% samples especially of the dropouts: any less, and self-selection must be likely to
distort it by losing those ashamed in some way (or leave only those with the most distortedrationalisations).
Furthermore, face to face as opposed to paper instruments (i.e. interviews not postal
questionnaires) may be very important for quality all round. Certainly comparing face to face persisters with paper dropouts could be bad.
Even then, it will be like interviewing people about their divorces: everyone will have a story, but it is a story they can live with, scarcely a dispassionate account. Rationalisation by each
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student, particularly dropouts, may mean that what they say about causes is not useful. They will
be very likely to describe cause as external factors (the classic Social Psychology attribution
error?). So for this, should attend only to data on external factors, and get it equally for persisters. In fact the Brown and Harris method of collecting descriptions of external factors for
all, and getting a panel of experts to rate their seriousness "blindly", may be essential.
Similarly for "internal" and all "ask them" measures of attitude, Tinto integration etc.: we should
ask all students before as well as after external events, and before exam results, and before
dropouts. I.e. do prospective studies.
SO:
1. Prospective studies, with measures (especially subjective/internal ones) taken before (as
well as after) dropout events such as failing exams, and collecting these measures for
both persisters and dropouts.2. For external events (always collected retrospectively), collect these for both persisters
and dropouts.3. Get a panel to assess the seriousness of external events; don't trust subjective assessment.
(And hence, don't use dropouts' own opinion on why they dropped out.)4. Must get 100% or random samples especially of dropouts (not self-selected samples).
New methods required
The literature to date seems not to provide strong proof or even good tests of the theory.However to do so would require a large programme of research with multiple methods,
particularly to address the extensions to Tinto's model discussed below. The simplest approach is
to generate large questionnaires, with items relating to parts of the model, and use correlations.
The trouble with this is that it implicitly treats all factors as independent and as adding linearly.Thus it fails to test the structure of the model, and similarly cannot deal with quite simple
aspects. For instance consider vitamins: eating more of one vitamin does not compensate for
having too little of another; and furthermore, if most subjects have enough of one vitamin,correlations will be low and tell you as much about the population as they do about the
importance of the factor. Techniques such as path analysis, and structural equation model testing
try to addrss this to some extent, but probably not sufficiently. It seems extremely likely thatlearning is determined in some places by conjunctions like vitamins: a learner has to have all of a
set of factors, and will fail if any one is deficient (e.g. must have both motivation and adequate
study skills and adequate learning resources). In other places it is probably determined by
disjunctions: a learner may either learn from lectures or from textbooks, but may well need onlyone of these alternatives to work well for them.
At the opposite end of a spectrum from statistical treatment of multiple factors at once, would becase studies: looking for cases where a particular feature of the model is crucial, for instance
personal staff contact as essential for adequate "social integration" which in turn is an important
pre-requisite for whether nor not a student seeks help when they need it. Slightly beyond casestudies might be surveys measuring just this factor every 2 weeks (say), then when a jump is
seen in an individual's measure on this, following up with an interview to identify what critical
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incident caused this shift. Such an approach might both operationalise and establish parts of the
overall model, piece by piece.
Beyond the original model: my extensions/interpretation
Recently a different sociological approach claiming to be a rival has appeared (Braxton; 2002).A key phrase is "social capital" (see also in the Liz Thomas section below). However, perhaps
we could see this as a part of what is implied in Tinto's model, but with more emphasis on
integration between the student and social groups (and forces) outside the university.
Another notion is Bordieu's "habitus", which Thomas (2002b) explicates as "the norms and practices of particular social classes or groups". For me, the issue this indicates can be construed
as to do with how the role of student has aspects to do with fitting the academic institution, withfellow students, and with external social groups and their views of the place and value of
students.
What follows is my proposed extension of Tinto or synthesis of Tinto's original model withadditional concepts. A further development of the concept(s) might expand the notion of
"integration" in the following way. Firstly, consider it as a measure of fitting the role of student.Does the student feel that they fit happily into the role of student? Fit has two aspects: internally,
do they feel it fits them from a personal perspective, and externally, do they feel happy in how
others view them in this role. Fitting is about any causes of friction or dissonance, even those too
slight to be consciously noticed and spoken about. We can see the role as having two major aspects, academic and social. The academic is about learning, and the activities necessary for
that. The social is about fit with the groups the student cares about, both inside and outside the
university. A person who identifies totally with being a student will care only about their placewith other students, ignoring the values of any outside groups; someone who comes from a
family that expects a university qualification will probably make friends in the university butalso expect family and employers to regard being a university student as an expected and
worthwhile stage in life; but someone from a family or group unused to university may havetrouble with the mismatch between being a student and markers of respect such as a job, current
income, an expensive car, children of one's own, etc.
Another dimension is to distinguish goals, methods, and effectiveness or achievement. Clearly a
person may love an objective but dislike some method necessary to achieving it: may likewriting essays but be bored by the preparatory reading (or vice versa), just as someone may love
tropical holidays but be afraid of flying to get there. Treating the achievement as distinct from
the goal is in a way redundant, but provides an opportunity to examine the gaps there can be --
for instance due to the problems of assessment -- between the measures used and the aims theyare supposed to assess, and also between a student's aims and their actual achievement. A personcan sometimes feel they love a subject and yet be hopeless at learning it. Another reason (for
looking at both goals and achievement) is that a person may not have thought much about a goal,
yet on failing to achieve it they feel a problem e.g. not getting on with staff or fellow studentsmay not have been an aim one way or the other, but can subsequently be felt as a problem
anyway.
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The third distinction, between internal / external aspects of fit, comes from the standard
distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for learning: whether you do it for
personal reasons (interest, enjoyment, curiosity, "for its own sake"), or for extrinsic reasons(means to another end, to get the qualification, to be admired, ...). But in principle this can be
applied not just to the motivation (the goal), but to activities/methods and results. For each
activity may have some positive or negative inherent value for an individual apart from the goal,and this may be for intrinsic or extrinsic reasons. For instance asking questions in class mightdraw dislike from other students (extrinsic negative value), but be useful for the individual in
checking whether they have understood (a standard personal learning technique with positive
intrinsic value). In general, for methods and intrinsic/extrinsic, we should ask a) are there anythings others (staff or students) require of you but you hate (or love); e.g. tutorials make you
nervous, computer use is compulsory, hours in the lab are tedious. b) are there any things
(learning methods) that you require or find important for your learning, but which others
obstruct; e.g. you need to ask questions (but there's not time); you want time to think, but thelecture always rushes on; you want to discuss an idea, but everyone has to leave and there is no
place or time to do it.
Summary of dimensions
Putting these together, we have [A] three fields for integration: academic, and social inside and
outside the university. Fit (or conflict or dissonance) [B] might be divided into arising from goals
(or wishes, or desires), from methods (or skills or capabilities or habits), and from effectiveness
(or measurable achievement). And [C] there are always two aspects of fit: with the individual'sown internal self, and with external demands on them. Multiplying these together would give us
the set of questions and issues below: {Academic, social within university, social outwith the
university} X {Goal, method, effectiveness} X {Intrinsic, extrinsic}. (I shall interpret thecombination of methods with intrinsic/extrinsic as follows. Method-intrinsic: deals with the
student's own existing methods and asks the question: are they allowed/used or obstructed /not
useful. Method-extrinsic: deals with the methods / activities externally required by the course,
and asks the question: does the student like or hate them, are they good or useless at them?)
For each resulting element I indicate one or more draft phrasings for a correspondingquestionnaire item. These items may be in an open-ended form (asking the participant to tell us if
there's anything that might be an issue in this category), or sometimes specific where experience
suggests examples of specific things that have been a problem for some students. Additionally,
for some I indicate a remedial intervention (abbreviated below to "fix") that might be tried if theaspect seemed a particular problem in a given context. Words in [square brackets] are pointers to
other theoretical concepts.
The questions
Here is how the dimensions play out into parts, each with a draft questionnaire item.
Academic integration(We should ask all of these repeatedly for each course a student is doing. Feeling
unhappy with just one of the three courses a first year student takes is often sufficient for
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some to drop out, just as anyone of principle will resign from a job that violates a single
one of their ethical principles.)
"How are you getting on with your studies? What is the worst thing about it?"
o Goals. "What are your reasons for studying?"
Fit with intrinsic goals
"Do you enjoy what you are studying?"; "Is the subject interesting?" Fit with extrinsic goals
"Is what you are studying useful?"
"Is what you are studying leading to the job or career you want?"
"Is getting a (good) degree (grade) important to you?"
o Methods.
"Is studying the subject like you expected it to be? What are the differences?"
"What difficulties do you have in learning on this course?"
[Breen]Fix: Put them off before they come and sign up to a course they don't like.
Fit with intrinsic/existing skills and aptitudes.
"Does the course exercise things you like to do? e.g. problem solving,showing skill in essay writing, ..."
"Are there any things (learning methods) that you require or find
important for your learning, but which they obstruct; e.g. You need to ask
questions (but there's not time); you want time to think but the lecturealways rushes on; you want to discuss an idea, but everyone has to leave
and there is no place or time to do it."
Fit with extrinsic/demanded skills and aptitudes."Does the course demand kinds of study and work you like or dislike or
have trouble with? e.g. maths, long lab hours, ....writing, ...?".
E.g. tutorials make you nervous, computer use is compulsory, hours in the
lab are tedious. Writing long essays whose structure you have to invent(rather than many small exercises).
"Are you able to participate in seminars, or are you too shy?"
"Can you take effective notes in lectures, or don't you have the skill?"Fix: Introductory courses, summer schools, before entry, study skills
support / teaching.
o Effectiveness.[Snyder's Hidden curriculum]
"Are you learning as much as you want?"
Achieving intrinsic goals
"Do you feel you understand the material by your own standards?"
Achieving extrinsic goals
"Are you getting good enough marks?"
Social integration within the university
"Do you feel comfortable being a student at this university?"
o Goals.
"Do you want to get to know a) staff or b) students and if so why?"
Fit with intrinsic goals"Do you like being part of the university, or do you think it's a worthless
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institution (apart from giving you a qualification)?"
"Do you want to get to know other students, or aren't they worth
knowing?"
Fit with extrinsic goals
"Do you think that getting to know staff and students is useful to you?"
o Methods."What are the good and bad things about the ways for getting to know staff andstudents you find here?"
Fit with intrinsic/existing skills and aptitudes.
"Does student life go with your preferred kinds of socialising (e.g.clubbing, hill walking, dinner parties, ....)."
"Does the kind of chat you like to have go down well with students and
staff?"
Fix: "Peer assisted learning" i.e. mentoring by students a year or twoahead.
Fit with extrinsic/demanded skills and aptitudes.
"Do you know how to make friends with other students?""Do you know how to talk to other students?"
"Do you enjoy the social activities other students propose?"
"Is the kind of chat you find yourself having with other students or staff
enoyable or not?"
o Effectiveness.
"Do you feel comfortable around campus, the department, in lectures, etc.?"
Achieving intrinsic goals"Have you made as many friends as you want?"
"Are you able to get the kind of conversations you would like?"
"How many staff have you had a personal interaction (however brief)
with?" ["Empathy" in Bridget Cooper's sense]"How many other students do you know?"
Fix: Field trips, reading parties, tutorials, advisors, office hours meetings
with staff
Achieving extrinsic goals
"Do you feel able to ask staff questions when you need to or want to?"
"Do you feel you fit in with other students in the class? in the university?""Do you have a problem collaborating in group work as required?"
Social integration outside the university
"Does having been to this University fit with the kind of person you want to be?"
"Do you feel comfortable being a student in the UK today?"
o Goals.
"Do you want to get on with people outside Uni, and for what reasons?"
Fit with intrinsic goals
"When you're with people outside the university, do you feel proud or embarrassed that you are a student?"
"Does being a student make you feel better or worse about yourself than if
you were doing something else?"
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Fit with extrinsic goals
"Will going to university and being a student be good or bad for you in
getting on with people outside the university e.g. family, friends,employers?"
o Methods.
"What are the good and bad things about presenting yourself to outsiders assomeone from this university?"
Fit with intrinsic/existing skills and aptitudes.
"My family constantly nag me to come home in the vacations whereas I
find it important to stay near the University to catch up on work"
Fit with extrinsic/demanded skills and aptitudes.
"I want to get a degree, but my family want me to earn money for them."
o Effectiveness.
"Do you feel comfortable telling others you go to this University?"
Achieving intrinsic goals
"Does, or will, going to University make you fit better into your life
outside the Uni.? More the sort of person you see yourself as being?" Achieving extrinsic goals
"Do you expect to get the recognition from others outside the University
that you want?"
"Is being at this university impressive to others?"
Unresolved issues with this scheme
Goal - strategy - but also opportunities.
Does "integrated" mean:
Comfortable
Identified with the role
Identified with our (expert, teacher's) view of the role i.e. not with their misguided view
of a student's role. At least for academic-integration this seems important, as aconsiderable cause of dropouts can be misunderstanding the role of a student. If so, then
don't ask students what THEY feel about integration, but ask them for indicators about
whether they are integrated in OUR view.
Does social integration mean:
Social identity theory
What a student needs to get collaboration with peers over learning e.g. to borrow lecture
notes.
There aren't just 3 points on the dimension of {Goal, method, effectiveness}. Instead there are at
least 5 points, maybe an arbitrary number. If so then should multiply out the schema above by 5
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not 3 points. The basic idea is that some goals correspond to large external motivations, others
are simply means to an end serving larger goals. And similarly, a large method like a lecture
requires component skills from the student to benefit from it much. My suggestion for anexpanded dimension might be:
1.
Goal2. Subgoal e.g. learning statistics as a subgoal of learning another topic. Learning to touch
type as a subgoal of the whole course. Learning mind mapping as a study technique for
the whole course.3. Large scale M-acts e.g. seminars, tutorials, lectures
4. Small scale M-acts e.g. bringing a personal agenda to each tutorial; reviewing notes after
every lecture; ...
5. Effectiveness
Similarly, perhaps should split the goal and method points above and multiply all by {(don't
know), Know, can do, fit/like}. As well as asking questions that presuppose they KNOW what is
needed for methods (say), we should test this assumption by questions about whether they knowwhat is needed. That is, do they HAVE:
The ability to judge success and their own understanding (under "effectiveness").
Do they have the right subgoals e.g. realise they should learn new note-taking skills etc.
Do they even know the methods needed e.g. the time spent, when to spend it, how to get benefit from tutorials, seminars, other students, ...
I.e. it is not only fit between the students' methods and the required methods, but also the issue of
knowledge of what method is needed, and then possession of that method.
Liz Thomas: 5 spheres of integration
Thomas (2002a) suggests 5, not 2 or 3, types of integration / spheres.
Academic
Social: peer interaction and mutual support
Economic. Hence university support services for bursaries, scholarships etc.
"Support" meaning counselling services.
Democratic: students's union, student representatives on various institutional bodies.
What do I think of this? well it is true that all of these have typical university structuresassociated with them, so if I want to explain the LTP perhaps I do need to expand to cover them?
On the other hand, they are probably important to dropouts, but maybe not otherwise to learning.
She is interested in a) dropouts b) "widening access" i.e. getting and retaining a wider set of
types of student. And argues with evidence that maximising these means attending more to all 5spheres.
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She uses, and partly explains, the notion of social capital. (Her paper gives some explanation of
the concept and a number of references such as Shuller & Bamford (2000).) But perhaps it
actually isn't necessary except broadly to think of this broader set of spheres, and the general idea(already in Tinto) that weakness for a student in one can be compensated by strengths in others.
But in fact maybe her data (Thomas; 2002b) really partly goes against this: i.e. she found that
money wasn't an important reason for presistence or dropout, and so isn't the same kind of predictor as, say, social integration.
Social capital (seems to) mean: prior acquisition of contacts substitutes to some extent for present knowledge. This is both learning but also actually connection to people/resources i.e. not
just internal learning but connection. Actually consistent with Unix expertise: you can substitute
knowing how to learn for already having learned; and consistent with socially distributed
knowledge. I don't know if the metaphor of capital helps; but it is in another way a smpleextension of the idea of pre-requisites from facts and skills in the chosen topic to other things.
So what do I take from it?
a) To predict dropouts, we may need all 5 spheres. b) And they are all definitely about integration (e.g. economic: learning to live on that amount,
and this is eased by living with others using the same constraints).c) "Capital" does signal the advantage of pre-adaptation or prior preparation, and how it can be
traded on to solve new problems rather than be the pre-solution.
d) And how it is not just about individual knowledge so much as working contacts: having access
to the socially distributed resources important to being a student.
I'm dubious because:
a) The support and democratic spheres don't seem to affect all or even most students; but theothers do. The capital metaphor may help in understanding the preconditions for these spheres
too to work well; but I don't believe they are so important? b) The economic sphere affects all students; yet her research apparently suggests it isn't asimportant in determining dropouts. So Tinto was right after all? focus on academic and social
spheres.
There are really 3 possible views of this:
Thomas is right, there are 5 spheres needed to explain retention, and all are equally
important, with strong integration in some allowing weaknesses in others not to cause
dropout.
Tinto is right, 2 spheres are key, the other 3 only affect some students.
Tinto points to the key 2 spheres; 2 others are in fact really subdivisions of his. "Support"
sphere is really an occasional substitute for friends i.e. a subsphere of "social".
"Democratic" again is just a form a few students use for peer and staff interaction.
Campaigning is an alternative to going for a beer with friends, and in fact likely to lead todeeper interaction than most bars do. As for money, while it applies to all students, it also
applies to all non-students too, and so is no more a specific predictor of dropouts than
avoiding car accidents, keeping your liver healthy etc.
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Tinto interventions
This section is to collect and list educational interventions that can be explained by Tinto-like
theories (but often not by other theories). They may also be designed to increase poor scores onsome Tinto-related variable e.g. "integration".
This is a crucial section because:
Main point for me of exploring Tinto is to explain these mathemagenic activities that areoften put on at some cost by HEIs but don't fit in the Laurillard model.
Can I think of any new interventions?
Classics / majors
Summer schools: to widen participation by increasing integration for targeted groups in advance.
The whole business of school qualifications as preparation for HE. Commonsense says that thisis about knowledge pre-requisites: knowing facts and skills that will be necessary and
presupposed at university. However it may really be a case of "pre-integration": of giving
students previous experience of what the subject mattter, and its associated study patterns, feelslike so that they can make an informed choice about what university course they may like and be
competent at. A relevant study would be to measure prior conceptions of both subject matter,
higher education, jobs, ... etc. as tacitly creating a pre-integration level.
Field trips
Reading partiesCheese and wine welcome parties
So called peer assisted learning (PAL) or supplemental instruction: student-student mentoring.
Classic but not easily recognised as Tinto-relevant
Personal staff-student contact; "Empathy".
Tutor assignments and contacts.
Advisor assignments and contacts.
Feedback: summative assessment information to tell students that they "are" a Geographer or
whatever. Rank in the class?
Summer scholarship / working in a staff member's lab.
Groupwork (i.e. organised and made compulsory by the course).
Study groups (i.e. student-only peer groups).
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Amount of discussing in L-acts (class, seminars, ...) BOTH personal contributions AND seeing
what others think.
Other HEI standards implied by Thomas
There are other units and services, widely funded by universities, to do with student support, and presumably likely to reduce dropouts. Implied by Thomas' expanded list of spheres of
integration.
Finance: bursaries, scholarships, hardship funds, etc.
Support services e.g. counselling, health
Students' unions. Student representation on committees etc.
Designing new, ideal interventions
What do they need to be or include?
Staff "empathy" i.e. a bit of the personal tutor idea.
Get students working together (social integration)
But also, working together on subject content. This is good for study skills, good for
personal work-useful skills. And gets some content discussion going which we suspect
seldom happens in HE. And good for learning. And good for academic integration.
More feedback on learning. Actually formative, though at an acad-integration level;
though may seem to be summative in technical form. That is: it should tell them how well
they are really doing (rather than correct detailed task performance), and so allow them to
self-regulate their effort rather than help to correct some specific task or skill such asessay writing. This could be related to Snyder i.e. self-assessment, and also with rank in
class, on several different types of measure (shallow MCQ, deep essay, feeling of
understanding). Note that in PBL (problem-based learning) students often complain thatthe staff don't tell them how they are doing yet they enjoy it. This could be that working
ingroups gives them good and frequent feedback on how well they understand the
material as compared to fellow students, and as judged by how well they can contribute
to their group, even though it doesn't directly tell them how well they will do in exams.
Where do these models fit?
How do such theories fit with anything?
Senses of "social"
I really want to integrate Tinto and the Laurillard model of the learning and teaching process
(LTP). It does address the "social" aspects so missing from the Laurillard model, and in so doing
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explain some frequent activities put on that don't fit the Laurillard model e.g. summer schools,
reading parties etc.
Senses of "social":
Piaget / individual learning (with social interaction as an external stimulus to internaldevelopment).
Vygotsky: and a generalised sense that learning content comes from "society" / peers, and
is specifically supported as a process e.g. by scaffolding.
Distributed Cognition and theories of the mechanisms by which a small set of people
interact.
Situativity and idealised micro-communities.
Tinto and specific kinds of integration.
Weber and explanation by gross macro-society variables.
We could ask, and perhaps even find empirical answers to, which of these levels mostdetermines a student's success (i.e. is it external forces like money and social class, individual
taste for learning, or what). However one of the ways in which Tinto's approach may be better than some other ways of talking about this area is that it doesn't align with the simplistic question
of whether the student or the university should be "blamed", despite what Ozga & Sukhnandan
(1998) suggest. The metaphor of integration is about fit; it is not about one party adapting to theother, but about whether they go together well. Even more than that, like other human
relationships (but unlike whether a square peg fits a round hole), integration is clearly the current
outcome of a relationship of sequential interchanges which progressively modify that
relationship: hopefully for the better. As a student has more successful interactions with a tutor,for example, they are likely not just to be learning a few extra facts but to feel more integrated
with positive knock-on effects for instance in how willing they are to ask for further help infuture, and to ask for it in a way that gets results from that individual tutor.
Why is this synthesis, and Tinto's part in it, important?
Tinto is important for a more complete theory of the LTP (Learning & Teaching
Process).
It should explain activities previously omitted from LTP models.
I've been slow to recognise it myself because technology hasn't often been likely toaddress it/replace it; though the stuff on email communities in fact should relate to it.
It might be able to suggest new teaching fixes/modifications.
It suggests new output measures, besides learning gains and learner feelings: lower dropouts.
It will require a major new development of evaluation instruments.
So in the end we should be able to:
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Explain the activities we see.
Understand a wider range of complaints.
Detect the complaints; diagnose them; suggest remedies.
Propose new interventions, or rather a new and wider range of interventions;
Including perhaps new technological interventions?
What practical use could these models be?
These models are basically sociological ones. Do they have any potential for actually improving
things in practice? It won't be easy, because there are so many ways in which a student's
"integration" might be low: or to put it another way, students drop out for diverse reasons, andhaving a general "explanation" doesn't tell you how to do something effective for each student.
However in principle we could imagine first developing a detailed diagnostic instrument e.g.
using the questions above, and using that to determine what the particularly bad issues are in
each situation (each department of each institution); and then select a remediating interventionspecific to that diagnosis (e.g. the possible remedies also listed above in the framework). We're a
long way from demonstrating this, though.
Tinto (1982) has a striking fact illustrated in a graph: that for the last 100 years the dropout rate
for universities in the USA has been constant at 45%, despite big changes in the participationrate and amount of public funding. (Dropout rate was here defined as the ratio of undergraduate
degrees awarded to the first-time enrollment four years before.) The second world war causes the
only big wobble in the flat graph, and yet averaged across 10 years even there the rate is near-
constant (because positive and negative blips cancelled out). In the UK and again in Europe,rates are very different, but perhaps largely constant in each. (Thomas 2002b gives the UK rate
as 13% in 1982/3 and 17% in 1997/8 after great expansion, attributing these figures to a Houseof Commons Select Committee report.) Tinto discusses how that implies that such research is
probably limited to dealing with social and/or local inequalities, rather than to overall change indropout rates.
School-university transition
This section is about the transition from school to university, with particular reference to
computing science. There seems to be a problem.
A related point of view is expressed by Tony Jenkins here.
Prose argument about this
What should the relationship be between what is taught at school and at university? The naive,
but apparently commonsense, relationship is: whatever schools teach, universities don't need toteach but should assume as pre-requisites. Once established in schools, then universities should
a) require it for entry, and b) stop re-teaching it. This content is to be thought of as facts, or
perhaps skills that are directly tested.
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I wanted to suggest that part of the issue may be that that commonsense model of school-
university pre-requisites is actually wrong for most subjects, and perhaps particularly wrong for
computing science. Pre-requisites may be facts, may be specific skills (e.g. integral calculus,debugging a program regardless of language), or they may be still more general: an orientation to
a way of learning that suits a particular subject. Facts are almost entirely useless as a pre-
requisites in computer science, not only individually but also in the big "lumps" of programminglanguages and specific packages such as Excel. Syllabuses [?spelling] written in these terms willfail as worthwhile pre-requisite qualifications (even though assessment within and outwith
university is usually reliant on knowledge of such facts). Actually, I argued, this is also true to a
greater degree than is usually acknowledged in other subjects such as English and Physics. For instance (if you'll accept a decaying memory of how it was a long time ago in England for
physics as any kind of evidence), specific A-level material in physics was hardly ever re-used,
but the maths I'd had to do was almost all vital from early on, but most important probably was
that learning school physics was indeed a good guide to whether I'd enjoy university physicsAND to the kinds of skill and activity involved in learning university physics. Thus the real
function of requiring school physics in order to do university physics may really, contrary to the
commonsense model, not be the explicit curriculum of Newton's law etc. (i.e. of facts) but of getting experience of what learning physics feels like, and so allowing the learner to make an
informed choice of university subject. Insisting on it may possibly exclude some who would
actually have turned out to be able to cope, but because the requirement has existed for a long
time, it disadvantages few.
The main complaint from staff, but more importantly from students, in computing science is thatschool computing does not prepare them for university computing. They do NOT in fact say they
"already have a substantial understanding of the subject matter" (as Kenneth suggests) and that it
is all too easy. That is what the commonsense model predicts, but it doesn't seem to be what is
actually the case. That is why universities feel justified in ignoring school computing science. Onthe other hand, the failure rates mean universities wouldn't mind at all at all if schools found a
way to do useful preparation: but the most useful preparation (I suggest) would be in
expectations, to pre-select students who would turn out to enjoy (and cope with) university
computing science. So from this viewpoint, the challenge is to redesign school computing to do a job comparable to that done implicitly by school physics (say), rather than the apparently
commonsense requirement of learning some facts and skills. In other subjects these overlap
enough not to have to recognise the difference, but in computing science we may just not be ableto get away with the commonsense but wrong idea of the relationship between school and
university learning.
Transition: bullet point summary of my view
This is a summary of my whole theory of school-HE connection.
There is no reason to think one subject (e.g. computing science) is going to be just like any other
in the matter of what is important for teaching, and hence what is important for school fore-runners to university forms of the subject.
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Historically, subjects probably migrate from research down to schools. Part of this is learning
how to teach it better.
Should school and HE forms of a subject be coordinated in any way?
It doesn't matter: in HE you learn far more quantity AND in a different, deeper way, soany overlap is of little matter. This shows up in how seldom it makes sense to offer
exemptions from HE courses on the basis of school qualifications.
HE thus doesn't care about subject content as pre-requisites; though they often care about pre-requisites in adjacent areas e.g. maths for physics.
School doesn't care as most pupils studying subject S at school will not study it in HE.
Their business is to make it interesting and useful for the pupils, not for HE.
However:
The real importance for HE of prior qualifications may be, I hypothesise, giving learners anaccurate feel for what the subject is like in content, what it is like in required study activities, and
whether they would enjoy studying it. Studies and theories of HE dropouts usually show that"match" of student and subject is an important predictor of persistence vs. dropouts.
This probably is what is good about trying to introduce the "scientific method" in primary
schools. This is probably the real way in which school qualifications are useful entryrequirements for many subjects (rather than specific content known).
This is what may be really bad about current mismatch of some school computing studies and
HE computing science.
Covering the "same" topics: may only be damaging in that some learners believe they know itwhen they don't to the new standard required.
So:
Transition is arguably, as far as theory as opposed to implementation detail goes, a) pre-
integration (i.e. a subarea of Tinto). b) How to interest learners in a subject with simpler, smaller,versions of it.
Summer schools
Summer schools are part of transition: pre-integration interventions, done by HE rather than by
school.
Lynn Walker's 1996 thesis says they worked here at University of Glasgow except for science inraising "participation" from deprived areas to that of the average.
Is summer school meant to be better than first year teaching (smaller groups, and take advantage
of this by more interaction and better learning activities) OR should it be realistic and so prepare
them.
Functions of summer schools may be all of these:
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1. Academic, institutional, bureaucratic integration
2. Study skill preparation
3. Subject: get you interested in it4. Subject: get an accurate feel for what it's like studying it.
5. Social integration at least with that group, with those staff.
References
Braxton,J.M. (ed.) (2000/02) Reworking the student departure puzzle (Vanderbilt University
Press)
Tinto,V. (1975) "Dropout from Higher Education: A Theoretical Synthesis of Recent Research" Review of Educational Research vol.45, pp.89-125.
See also:
Tinto,V. (1982) "Limits of theory and practice in student attrition" Journal of Higher Education
vol.53 no.6 pp.687-700
Tinto,V. (1988) "Stages of Student Departure: Reflection on the Longitudinal Character of
Student Leaving" Journal of Higher Education vol.59 no.4 pp.438-455
Ozga,J & Sukhnandan,L. (1998) "Undergraduate non-completion: Developing an explanatory
model" Higher Education Quarterly vol.52 no.3 pp.316-333
Tinto,V. (1987) Leaving College (Chicago,University of Chicago Press).
But for criticism see Brunsden,V. & Davies,M. (2000) "Why do HE Students Drop Out? A test
of Tinto's model" Journal of Further and Higher Education vol.24 no.3 pp.301-310
Bill Patrick (2001) "Students Matter: Student Retention: who stays and who leaves" TheUniversity Newsletter http://www.gla.ac.uk/newsletter/227/html/news15.html This report is
based on a survey of all first year students at the University of Glasgow, and is an example of the
implicit influence of Tinto.
Claire Carney & Sharon McNeish (2001) "Students Matter: Study links part-time work to student
ill-health" The University Newsletter http://www.gla.ac.uk/newsletter/226/html/news29.html
See also Rosanna Breen's PhD at Oxford Brookes.
Breen,R. & Lindsay,R. (1999) "Academic research and student motivation" Studies in Higher Education vol.24 pp.75-93
Tony Jenkins (2002) "On the difficulty of learning to program" LTSN conference
Schuller,T. & Bamford,C. (2000) "A social capital approach to the analysis of continuingeducation: evidence from the UK Learning Society research programme" Oxford Review of
Education vol.26 no.1 pp.5-19
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Thomas,E.A.M. (2002a) "Building social capital to improve student success" BERA conference
Thomas,E.A.M. (2002b) "Student retention in Higher Education: The role of institutionalhabitus" Journal of Educational Policy vol.17 no.4 pp.423-432
Lynn Walker (1996) An evaluation of the pre-university summer school at the University of Glasgow, 1986-1993, and its effects on student performance PhD thesis [Faculty of Arts,
Department of Education], University of Glasgow. [Level 12 Spec Coll Thesis 10493]
Yet more Tinto-related references
Braxton,J.M., Milem,J.F. & Sullivan,A.S. (2000) "The influence of active learning on the college
student departure process: toward a revision of Tinto's theory" Journal of Higher Education
vol.75 no.5 pp.569-590
[Shows stat.sig. positive effect of "active learning" e.g. class discussions on student retention.]
Thomas,S.L. (2000) "Ties that bind: A social network approach to understanding studentintegration and persistence" Journal of Higher Education vol.75 no.5 pp.591-615
Bray,N.J., Braxton,J.M. & Sullivan,A.S. (1999) "The influence of stress-related coping strategieson college student departure decisions" Journal of College Student Development vol.40 no.6
pp.645-657
Elkins,S.A, Braxton,J.M., & James,G.W. (2000) "Tinto's separation stage and its influence on
first-Semester college student persistence" Research in Higher Education vol.41 no.2 pp.251-268
Borglum,K. & Kubala,T. (2000) "Academic and social integration of community collegestudents: a case study" Community College Journal of Research and Practice vol.24 pp.567-576
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