First-in-family (FiF) students experience significant barriers to university participation and are less likely to seek mental health help. This can contribute to increased dropouts when compared to non-FiF students. Using a mixed methods approach, we aimed to ascertain sources of mental health support and underlying factors for the preferences…

Although philosophers have long claimed that reading fiction has the potential to improve imaginative capacities, empirical evidence on this topic is limited. We report an experiment that aims to conceptually replicate and extend previous work by Djikic and colleagues by testing whether reading literary fiction reduces the need for closure, and by…

Modafinil is a prescription-only drug in most countries. It is mainly used to treat narcolepsy and sleep disorders, but it is also used, without a prescription, as a cognitive enhancer by [approximately 10% of UK University students. Previous research has focused on the prevalence of, and motivations for, these behaviours. Here we focused…

Academic misconduct and academic integrity are issues of importance to Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Phraseologies and practices may conflate unintentional mistakes with attempts to gain illegitimate advantage, with some groups potentially at higher risk. HEIs across the United Kingdom (UK) responded to a Freedom of Information Act (FOI)…

The revamp of the National Student Survey (NSS) has led to the elimination of the final 'overall satisfaction' question for Higher Education Institutions in England. This paper develops an index approach that can effectively summarise student satisfaction, utilising a 'fuzzy poverty' methodology that assigns weights to dissatisfaction outcomes…

How should universities handle cases of student misconduct? While universities cannot make decisions about whether a criminal offence has been committed, they can judge whether there has been a breach of their own code of conduct. This guidance, building on a UUK and Pinsent Mason publication from 2016, sets out principles and practical case…

Although higher education is positioned as a site of opportunity for young women in the UK, not all female applicants experience straightforward pathways into this arena. This paper focuses on a group of 16 high-achieving girls from working-class backgrounds who are striving for academic success, in the form of top grades and places at high-tariff…

We argue that assessment and feedback practices in higher education need to be transformed to better address three purposes: "promoting" learning, "assuring" assessment rigour, and "communicating" students' employability. To address shortcomings in the current assessment and feedback culture, we propose programmatic…

A challenge persists in modern higher education regarding gaining an understanding of the activities and services that facilitate student support, student success, student community and student voice. As modern universities continue to grow in both size and complexity, gaining an understanding of the operations for enhancing and supporting both…

Recent linguistic landscape studies have increasingly underscored an online-offline agenda to understand the entanglement of people's digital and physical lifeworlds. In this light, this study concerns itself with the diasporic space lived online by Chinese overseas students residing in the UK during COVID, taking it as a nexus of their…

Research on international students suggests they have a low sense of belonging at the U.S. institutions they attend. This study examined whether academic advisor's cultural empathy, advisor-advisee rapport, and international students' advising satisfaction influenced international students' perspectives of belonging to the institution. We further…

Reading morphologically complex words requires analysis of their morphemic subunits (e.g., play + er); however, the positional constraints of morphemic processing are still little understood. The current study involved three unprimed lexical decision experiments to directly compare the positional encoding of stems and affixes during reading and to…

The social cure is the concept that strong connections and social bonds are good for wellbeing and physical health. Having strong social support makes hardship easier to cope with. We hypothesize that we could apply the relationship to educational contexts, with a sense of belonging as part of the cohort or community helping students to cope with…

The UK's higher education sector has over half a million students in transnational education (TNE). These are students who study outside the UK for degrees and other awards made by UK providers. In this HEPI Report, David Carter considers what we know about the student experience of transnational education and calls for greater public availability…

Background: Learning Analytics (LA) is an emerging field concerned with measuring, collecting, and analysing data about learners and their contexts to gain insights into learning processes. As the technology of Learning Analytics is evolving, many systems are being implemented. In this context, it is essential to understand stakeholders'…