Connecting students’ confidence, engagement and academic performance: One year on

Academic skills units (ASUs) and their interventions play a crucial role in enhancing student satisfaction and academic performance, which are considered parameters of student success (Kakada et al., 2019; Glew et al., 2019). We sought to evaluate this locally through our provision of academic skills support sessions [interventions] and consider to what extent these might impact on student performance.

To this end, we asked students to rate their academic confidence before and after one-to-one student support sessions. For student engagement, we evaluated two categories of students: (A) students who attended three or more one-to-one sessions and (B) students who attended three or more one-to-one sessions and at least one monthly academic skills workshop.

Our initial findings found that students reported a 2-fold increase in their academic confidence following a one-to-one session. Moreover, students in category A had an average increase of 4.4% in their overall grade compared to the year prior to ASU intervention. Lastly, we found that students in category B had an average increase of 7% in their overall grade.

In this session we will provide an additional 'one-year-on' update to these stats, and consider wider implications and aspirations relating to these initial findings.

Overall, these findings suggest ASU interventions contribute to enhancing student success through increased confidence and higher student engagement, resulting in better overall achievement. We have used this initial study as a basis on which to conduct additional evaluation between student satisfaction, academic performance and engagement, and as a means to promote the value of academic skills engagement to our students.