Neurodidactic factors in the prediction of academic dropout in Andalusian university students: preventive actions based on ICT

Fatores neurodidáticos na previsão de abandono acadêmico em estudantes universitários andaluzes: ações preventivas baseadas em TIC

Daniel Álvarez Ferrándiz^* dalferrandiz@ugr.es

Universidad de Granada, España

María Arias Corona^† mawi46@gmail.com

Universidad de Granada, España

Esther González Castellón^‡ esthergonzalez@ugr.es

Universidad de Granada, España

Manuel Fernández Cruz^§ manuelfernandezcruz@ugr.es

Universidad de Granada, España

Persistence and dropout are two sides of the same coin in the quality of university systems. Together with personal and social aspects, the factors associated with the quality of the teaching provided by universities determine students’ ability to persist in achieving their academic degree or, on the contrary, to drop out of their university studies (HENRÍQUEZ, 2007). Our working hypothesis is that the impact on improving the quality of teaching by taking neurodidactic factors into account can improve the overall persistence rate by decreasing the dropout rate. This is currently being researched and experimented with in practice.

Dropping out of studies is a problem of a global nature with pernicious personal, social and economic effects which we have investigated from different perspectives in recent years, including the perspective of the COVID pandemic effect in the student population (FERNÁNDEZ CRUZ; ÁLVAREZ RODRÍGUEZ, et al., 2020; LIZARTE SIMÓN, 2020, 2019). The different university systems in developed countries, in their national reports, account for the seriousness of the issue. This is done in Spain, for example, through the annual reports of Data and Figures of the Spanish University System published by the government, which indicates that, in the 2021 academic year, the phenomenon affected 21.2% of new undergraduate students (MINISTERIO DE UNIVERSIDADES, 2021). Successive reports by the OECD and the EU through Eurostat deal with the situation of Spain in the group of developed countries with a comparative perspective and the global dimension of the problem. All the reports coincide in pointing out that, in general, the problem of dropout affects almost 20% of the student population in Higher Education. In view of this, scholars are calling for the pooling of academic and scientific efforts to find solutions (FEIXAS CONDOM et al., 2015). Studies such as that by Cabrera, Pérez, and López (2014) report the concern of Spanish universities about the increase in the number of students who drop out of their studies. These studies coincide with international studies, such as that by Tinto (2017), which corroborates that approximately one third of first-year university students in advanced countries consider dropping out.

In Spain, three different rates are used to measure university dropout: (a) the system dropout rate; (b) the degree dropout rate; and (c) the change of university studies rate. The system dropout rate is defined as the percentage of students from a cohort of new enrolments in year X who do not enrol in any university degree at any university in the Spanish University System -SUE- for two consecutive years and have not graduated. The degree dropout rate is defined as the percentage ratio between the total number of students in a new enrolment cohort who should have obtained the degree in the previous academic year and who have not enrolled either in that academic year or in the previous one, and the total number of students in that degree in the reference academic year. The degree change rate is established from the difference between the sum of the dropout rates of each degree and the SUE dropout rate. Our work focuses on the former, i.e., the system dropout rate.

We work on dropout as a definitive cause of absence or weakness in the factors that encourage persistence. Therefore, we understand that weakness in factors whose strength causes persistence leads to dropout. From this perspective, the prediction of dropout and delimitation of risk groups focuses on the diagnosis of the weakness of persistence factors. At the same time, the preventive or corrective measures to be applied in the at-risk population will focus on reversing the orientation of those same factors which, we have already proven, generate persistence.

However, in addition to all the above, the implication of neurodidactic factors in success or, on the contrary, in academic failure and dropout in Higher Education, is emerging more strongly (JORDÁ; PARRA; CASANOVA, 2018). To focus on these, dropout or the attitude of persistence depend on successful or unsuccessful strategies for coping with study, the effectiveness of the academic guidance received for the choice of studies, the mastery or lack of command of basic study skills, self-concept and optimism versus a pessimistic attitude, the degree of motivation or social adaptation in the university institution, or others related to emotional regulation and the styles of coping with the difficulties that the individual adopts (MUCHIUT et al., 2018).

Neurodidactics is an educational discipline that studies the application of advances in neuroscience to teaching (HERNÁNDEZ FERNÁNDEZ, 2020). The optimisation of learning processes in higher education requires effective management of information and academic knowledge, the regulation of emotions and the acquisition of the competences that configure the professional profile of a degree. University didactics must offer new teaching models that integrate these three learning requirements (cognitive, emotional, and executive) and adapt to the new social realities in which successive generations of students develop and to the changing social needs for which they are being trained.

Advances in neuroscience provide university didactics with a theoretical basis from which to experiment with teaching models that favour metacognitive processes (motivation, attention, memory) in learning, the development of emotional intelligence and the facilitation of brain reorganisation applied to the resolution of academic and professional problems specific to higher education (MARINA, 2012). These teaching models should be based on activities that promote social participation, creativity, and the transfer of knowledge between subjects and disciplines and between classrooms, laboratories or workshops and companies and institutions in the world of practice.

With its modest advances, neurodidactics is providing the basis for innovative teaching projects (HNOIEVSKA et al., 2021) whose results can be transferred between classrooms, training and university institutions, to achieve effective learning models that reduce academic failure and its most dreaded effect: dropping out of university studies.

Over the last 15 years, various international funding agencies (World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, OECD, UNESCO and others) together with the most prestigious universities in the world have co-financed initiatives of Technological Training Centres, Professional Institutes, Higher Education and the Universities themselves, to design, experiment and, where appropriate, implement some type of preventive, even remedial, training that manages to avoid students leaving the system by influencing the factors that improve persistence in their studies.

The co-financed projects have been aimed at developing detailed strategic diagnoses, setting up curriculum articulation commissions, defining matrices and creating competence assessment descriptors, designing instruments, carrying out pilots, and building systems for monitoring and assessing competence achievement, training teachers to carry out preventive actions and remedial training, and trying to implement and institutionalise the training designed in such a way that it is supported by curricular, administrative, financial, organisational and didactic modifications that make it possible to achieve the desirable objectives and ensure the maintenance, sustainability and replicability of these actions over time (FERNÁNDEZ CRUZ, 2015). As an example, the projects that stand out among them are those that have been called ”Transition Programmes between Secondary and Higher Education” in Europe and ”Remedial Training Programmes” in the United States and the rest of America. Whatever they are called, they aim at the levelling of competences through the design and delivery of specific courses aimed at students diagnosed with low levels of basic skills on arrival at higher education institutions. It is generally considered that almost 40% of students entering higher education would need some form of remedial intervention.

Reviews on the effectiveness of dropout prevention have allowed us to find factors associated with the success of remedial or competency-based programme designs (RIENTIES et al., 2008):

• Introduction of guidance and counselling actions for students.

• Clarification of the objectives pursued in each course, workshop, or training action.

• Implementation of good adult learning models.

• Strengthening of good didactic structuring of the programme.

• Increasing and strengthening academic coordination mechanisms.

• Combination of sanctioning assessment strategies with elements of supplementary instruction for those students who fail the assessment.

• Consideration of social and emotional aspects of student development and learning.

• Inclusion of vocational components.

• ICT support for online remedial training.

Now that these types of actions have been institutionalised and the situation of students who lack sufficient academic resources to successfully pursue university education has been overcome, we are left with the intervention in neurodidactic factors that would lessen the causes of dropout and strengthen the conditions for successful persistence in studies.

As reflected in the results of our study, the neurodidactic factors that should be integrated into preventive actions for the entire population of students in Andalusia are the following ten (Table 2):

• My instructors use assessment strategies that favour my creativity (Table 2);

• I do not consider my degree programme to be excessively difficult (Table 2);

• My instructors are concerned about my work in class (Table 2);

• In general, I feel motivated by my instructors (Table 2);

• I feel that my effort is recognised by my instructors (Table 2);

• I participate actively in class (Table 2);

• I feel that my effort is recognised by my instructors (Table 2);

• I actively participate in class (Table 2);

• I consider that the tutorial activity has had a positive impact on my academic performance (Table 6);

• I have a tutor in my faculty (Table 6);

• I feel fully integrated in my group of fellow students in the faculty (Table 6);

• I feel accepted and valued by my peers (Table 6).

In other words, preventive measures should focus on the transformation of the teaching methodology that favours creative (a) and participative (f) activities that favour social integration in the classroom (i) and total acceptance by classmates (j). In addition, teachers should seek to work on motivation for learning as an integral part of teaching (d), express their concern for the personal work of each student (c) and the effort dedicated to training (e), as well as strengthening the mechanisms for tutorial action (g) and personal monitoring of specifically assigned students (h). In other words: improving teaching methodology and tutorial action from the perspective of the contributions of neurodidactics. Together with the above, helping the student to understand the real degree of difficulty of the studies (b) and the real possibilities of overcoming the difficulty with the help of the teacher and the provision of the necessary training resources, is another neurodidactic function that university teaching must integrate.

The experience gained in recent years in supporting teaching with technological devices has shown us that there are many and varied ways of achieving a methodological renovation of higher education that includes tutorial action and student support and monitoring as an integral part of it. In any case, the explosion in the availability of technological devices as a teaching resource, the technification of today’s society and the ever-increasing support of online and networked relational and communicative processes generate new learning scenarios from which the higher education teacher cannot escape. In terms of Barroso-Osuna, Cabero-Almenara, and Valencia Ortiz (2020), it is a matter of achieving ubiquitous, decontextualized, instantaneous learning, close to the learner, contextualized and globally connected, providing temporal and spatial responses adapted to the characteristics and needs of the university student. The technological devices available, as well as those that are appearing successively and rapidly over time, not only provide new, more powerful, and more adjusted ways of accessing knowledge, but also new means of representing knowledge and interacting with one’s own thinking and that of others, which favour different cognitive, emotional, and executive functions. What is certain is that teachers cannot remain immovable in the face of this unstoppable wave of continuous change but must equip themselves with broad methodological patterns that allow them to incorporate all the richness that ICTs are adding to the didactic processes (CHÁVEZ; CHÁVEZ BACA, 2020). In concrete terms, teachers must be able to generate new learning environments that allow for innovation, personalization, student monitoring and continuous support for ongoing training.

The prevention of academic dropout entails the use of tools for predicting and diagnosing risk groups; it requires the transformation of teaching from the perspective of advances in neurodidactics; it requires the integration of all the new technological devices linked to teaching innovation for all students; and the planning of tutorial action plans and specific corrective activities for students at risk which, together with the use of general improvements in teaching, allow for an in-depth knowledge of the rest of the personal, family, social and economic causes involved in the difficulty in studying and the provision of teaching advice or referral to specialised services to overcome the disadvantages detected.

This article comes from the research with reference B-SEJ-516-UGR18 approved in the call for projects I+D+i FEDER Andalucía 2014-20.

This research has been approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the University of Granada with registration number 2778/CEIH/2022.