Retention and motivation are central aspects to educational institutions throughout Europe. According to the Education and Training report 2019, the number for “early school leaving” is 10.6% of the 18 to 24-year-olds in 2018 throughout Europe. Even though the problems can vary from country to country this marginalized group struggle with lower employment rates and lower participation in adult education the rest of their lives.
Traditionally there has been a reactionary approach; when the student has been missing classes for some period of time, the school initiates a plan for “bringing the student back”. What this project consortium proposes is to change this approach from reactive to proactive: Developing a structured way of using data could make it possible to help a given student – maybe even before he or she realizes that they need help. By creating methods and an accompanying app that both “onboards” the students to the given educational environment and creates a possible predicative retention approach to student guidance counseling by having the students themselves easily indicate how they experience going to school, we could help a lot more students before they drop out, instead of trying to bring them back. The objective of the project is therefore to use data proactively to combat the considerable challenge of early school leaving.
The O&SR-project is a Erasmus+ founded project and will be carried out by six consortium partners: Fønix (Norway), a provider of HR services and career guidance counseling for adults; North East Scotland College (Scotland), a college which works with digital tools and education; TAKK (Finland), an adult educational institution; Manzavision (France), a digital product developer; youth culture and youth well-being and VUC Storstrøm (Project manager -Denmark), an adult educational institution, and Center for Ungdomsforskning (CeFU) (Denmark). The Guidebook and the O&SR-app will be developed by testing on approximately 400 students, 24 guidance counselors, 40 teachers and 4 managers at four different European schools.
CeFU’s role in the project will be as expert and provider of knowhow on how to work with marginalized young adults. As such, CeFU will be working with all the partners in the project and participate in transforming research and knowhow into discussions, methods, models, data and processing of results.
Onboarding, student retention and mobile technologies: Existing knowledge and best practices
