Comparative study: expectations and achievements

A comparative study of home and international students' expectations and achievements in sciences, maths and engineering disciplines.

Principal applicant: Dr Judy Hardy, School of Physics & Astronomy

Co-applicants:

  • Professor Colin Pulham, School of Chemistry
  • Professor Graeme Reid, School of Biological Sciences
  • Dr Peter Kirsop, School of Chemistry

Abstract

The increasing diversity in our student population means that students' needs can no longer be adequately met by a system broadly geared to teaching a relatively homogenous student cohort. Learning and teaching approaches as a whole need to be designed to accommodate and reflect a range of educational, linguistics and cultural backgrounds.

The overall aim of this project is to investigate home and international students' achievements in a variety of assessment tasks in courses across Schools in the College of Science and Engineering. The project will focus on representative courses taken by UG and PGT students in their first year of study at Edinburgh.

The main research questions to be addressed are:

  • What are home and international students' prior experiences and expectations of assessment tasks?
  • How does their performance compare for assessment tasks in these courses?
  • What generic skills and abilities do these assessment tasks address?

Final Project Report 

Final Project may be downloaded from here.

Other Project Outcomes

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