1. Disparities in Student Attainment: A Tale of Two (City) Universities
Professor Glynis Cousin
Dr Debra Cureton

2. Overview Context General Findings Conceptual Issues
Working with Sensitive Issues
Interventions, Impacts and Outputs

3. Context
Collaborative project between the University of Wolverhampton and Coventry University and funded by the HEA
2. Looks at the attainment gap between white and BME students. It is also important to mention here that all our research has been based around the HESA categorisation of ethnicity, so we recognise that this isn’t ideal but we had to work with data the way it was collected institutionally and be consistent with our categorisation of further data.
3. Projects investigates
Institutional data
Student and lecture perception
Practical intervention
4. The project is exploring the issues from a number of perspectives
Practice –
Exploration of issues
Learning and Teaching/ Pedagogic interventions
Theoretical – Pygmalion Effect, categories vs beyond categories, self identified categorisation
Methodological – Consensus Oriented Research Approach & Related tools.
5. Disparate data – some inductive, some deductive, some hunches, some quantitative, others qualitative, some large scale explorations other small studies.
6. Also the we are aware that this is a complex issue – one single solution to the issue is unlikely – if there was, we would have found it by now.
Funded by

4. Data Collection
Data Findings

5. General Findings Pedagogy Relationship Cultural and Social Capital
The findings tell us what academic staff and students believe are barriers to academic success.
There were four main areas that our finding fell into:
Relationships,
Academe factors,
Psychological factors
Cultural and Social issues.
Relationships
Both lectures and students tell us that the quality of the relationship between students and lecturers is important in student attainment. Relationships might not be equal and can effect the disparity between student attainment. The most important findings from this aspect of the research are:
that student and lecturers perceive their relationship differently, which suggests that both violate each others’ perceptions of what the other should be doing within the relationship.
The lecture can act as an Interlocutor in the student learning process – engaging the student with an academic discourse through what they do, what they say and who they are (role model)
Cultural Capital
Staff made no comment about this.
Institutional data suggests that this is a major issue – which I will now hand over to Ruth Fairclough to explain to you this data.
An example of this is
Students told us that they didn’t really understand degree classifications and why a good degree is important.
More importantly, they revealed that they and their parents do not understand degree classification,
Parents/families also don’t understand what is required of a student at university
Parents and families do not understand the implications of getting/not getting a good degree on employability/future study.
Psychological process
Unconscious processes, such as stereotyping & biases, that can affect attainment or cause disparities in attainment.
They stem from misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the lack of social capital and
impact on the relationship between student and lecture – students don’t trust/like lecturers they perceive to be biased against them
Academic Issues
Academic system issues that might affect student attainment. The most important findings are from this aspect of the research
the link between assignment brief quality and attainment
Fit to submit (dictionaries)
Psycho-social
Processes

6. Conceptual Issues
Conceptual Developments
Categorisation and post-race approaches
The Pygmalion effect & folk pedagogies (Bruner, 1996)
Empowering student partners
The impact of the affective domain to learning and attainment
The psychological contract (Rousseau, 2000)
The lecturer interlocutor (Cousin, 2011)

7. Working with Sensitive Issues
Empowering Methodologies
Playful Reflection

8. Interventions, Impacts and Outputs
Action Research
Assessment Choice/ Type
Peer monitoring
Blind marking
Aspiration raising
The Advantage Module
Outputs
Information for parents website
How to guides: lecturers
How to videos: students
Impacts
Accessible assignment briefs
Fit to submit criteria
Annual monitoring
Reduction of the attainment gap

9. Contact Details Professor Glynis Cousin Dr Debra Cureton Website
Dr Debra Cureton
Website