Key Findings

The findings from the project revealed an improvement in all well-being measures, but not an increase in students’ academic performance. The findings included:

• High-performing Trimester 1 students generally performed more poorly in Trimester 2. The effect measured is the opposite of the expected effect – the literature suggested there should be an increase in academic performance. There is a small amount of anecdotal evidence that a decrease in performance from Trimester 1 to Trimester 2 may be the case for Open Polytechnic students in general. However, there is no empirical data available to either support or refute such a position.
• While results showed a decrease in students’ academic performance there was an increase in their levels of well-being. The five students who were interviewed believed that their participation in The Tuesday Programme had a positive impact on their well-being. They identified communication skills, relaxation techniques and being thankful as the most useful tools in this regard, and all but one student continued to use these skills and techniques after they had finished the programme.
• Despite the fact that the quantitative data suggested unexpected negative results in relation to academic achievement, the qualitative data provided positive accounts of the impact of The Tuesday Programme on students’ learning behaviour and study engagement. In these accounts students described an increase in confidence in their own ability, which also gave them confidence to ask for help from teachers and peers and participate in the online classroom.

Key Recommendations

The key recommendations from the project were:

Increasing availability of the programme | Making ‘The Tuesday Programme’ available to first-year Open Polytechnic students in 2013, and gathering data through the programme’s feedback processes, would be a useful approach to inform future practice. In particular, more detailed measures of engagement with and completion of the programme are needed.

Encouraging students to engage with the programme | The authors believe the programme could be made more effective by having mechanisms in place which encourage students to engage and comply fully with it. The Tuesday Programme developers consider that there are no issues with the programme content. Therefore, developing mechanisms through which students can be encouraged to complete all aspects of the programme would be useful, for example, installing automated email or text prompts.

Working with a ‘study buddy’ | Encouraging students to complete The Tuesday Programme with a ‘study buddy’. The polytechnic could take a proactive role in setting students up with a ‘buddy’ or helping to organise small groups of buddies who would work through the programme together.

Establishing a dedicated LMS site | Establishing a dedicated site on the polytechnic’s Learning Management System (Moodle) from which students could access ‘The Tuesday Programme’. Forums could be created to encourage students to form informal learning groups to discuss the topics with others and monitor their progress through the programme if they wish to. Programme completion could be acknowledged/celebrated in an appropriate way.