The Academic, Social, and Professional Integration Profiles of Information Technology Students

Abstract

Low retention rates in higher education Information Technology (IT) studies have led to an unmet demand for IT specialists. Therefore, universities need to apply interventions to increase retention rates and provide the labor market with more IT graduates. However, students with different characteristics may need different types of interventions. The current study applies a person-oriented approach and identifies the profiles of first-year IT students in order to design group-specific support. Tinto's [13, 14] integration model was used as a framework to analyze questionnaire data from 509 first-year IT students in Estonia. The students’ response profiles were distinguished through latent profile analysis, and the students were divided into four profiles based on their responses to questions about academic integration, professional integration, and graduation-related self-efficacy. The difference in academic integration was smaller among the profiles than the difference in professional integration. Knowing these profiles helps universities to design interventions for each student group and apply the interventions to increase the number of IT graduates.

Undergraduate-Led Survey Class to Improve CS Education for New Students

“…0 3 2 10 18 10 You're more likely to think about the ethical implications of your work in EE/CS after the ethics class. 0 1 13 21 16 11 How difficult is this class if you were taking the first semester EE/CS classes concurrently? 4 12 25 4 3 12 How likely is it for you to recommend this class to a first-year friend?…”

“…Many works have investigated potential solutions to improve retention and success in CS and STEM classes for new students with less technical background than their peers [16]. One approach is to design teaching methodologies and courses that specifically target these students.…”

Impact of students evaluation of teaching: a text analysis of the teachers qualities by gender

“…Several institutions have had to integrate emerging educational technologies in their different activities to maintain or sustain the credibility and quality of their business models or operations in general (Kori, Pedaste, & Must, 2018). Therefore, recent research (Wang & Zhu, 2019;Abu Zohair, 2019, Exter et al, 2019Munro, 2018;Dommett et al, 2019;Alizadeh et al, 2019;Kori et al, 2018) has focused on overcoming some of the challenges within the educational processes to provide opportunities for innovative teaching and learning methods (e.g., through educational data mining).…”

“…They observed that adopting advanced network technologies for teaching can support the transformation and pave the way for in-depth construction of high-quality education (Crues et al, 2018). Also, Abu Zohair (2019) notes that accurate data analysis has not only become essential for improving the students' performance and experience (Crues et al, 2018;Kori et al, 2018;Weston, Dubow, & Kaminsky, 2019) but it also serves as a mechanism for elevating the university's ranking and reputation. The results of the study by Abu Zohair (2019) show that support vector machines or algorithms can be used to train and analyze the readily available datasets to produce acceptable learning-processclassification accuracy and reliability test rates (Liao et al, 2019).…”

“…Accordingly, Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier (2014) note that the datafication of learning, i.e., the integration of information technologies and education, has opened new innovative methods for HEIs and brought about modern educational models. Along these lines, Jones (2019) shows that by tracking, aggregating, and analyzing the student profiles and behaviors recorded in the information systems or databases (Kori et al, 2018), the universities are adopting modern educational methods or strategies. The technologies employed include educational data mining, machine learning, and learning analytics technologies.…”