Background Students in American and Canadian Studies are currently required to spend the first semester of their second year in an American or Canadian university. [NB from 2000 this will change : students will apply for either a 3 year degree with no compulsory study abroad element, or a 4 year degree with a whole year abroad.] Because of the large number of institutions involved and the range and different levels of courses on offer, it is not practicable for marks gained in America or Canada to count towards the Nottingham degree, although students are required to pass all their courses. Students are thus required to undergo an experience, which they, and the department staff, consider very important, without being given any tangible credit for it.
Before the SAPAR was devised, students were asked to submit one report on their return. The main aim of the SAPAR, which has been, in effect, a two year pilot, was to capitalise on the insights and increase of self-awareness which the students' comments reveal, by encouraging them to use what they had learned more consciously, both in their academic work and in planning their careers or further study.
Phase One, 1997-98
(i) Before departure
After consultations between the staff responsible for Study Abroad, a group of Second Years who had returned from their time abroad and the PADSHE Internal Evaluator, the department devised a Study Abroad Personal and Academic Record (SAPAR). This was an email-based scheme which required students to reflect on the personal and academic aspects of their experiences in the foreign country and to communicate these at key points to the department. The department were careful to explain to students that this was to be a semi-public form of writing which would be useful to students later on when they came to compile a CV, and useful to staff when they were writing references. Any real problems or confidential issues could also be discussed by email, but as a quite separate communication. As usual, a number of meetings were held with the First Years to prepare them for the semester abroad. As well as dealing with practicalities, these meetings were also used to introduce the SAPAR scheme and explain its pilot nature. Students were aware that their emails would be read by the PADSHE Evaluator and that their views on the process would be sought on their return.
(ii) The time abroad.
Before devising the SAPAR the department had always asked students to write a summative report on their time away after their return; the difference between that and the series of emails now required of them was that the SAPAR process offered students the opportunity both to document impressions while they were still fresh and to review and add to these while they were still away from Nottingham.
(iii) Re-entry
On their return to Nottingham in February many students clearly expected that something would happen as a result of the writing they had done. In fact, the member of staff who had always run the Study Abroad programme, including a general debriefing meeting, was ill and away from the department at this time. The person who had been most involved in devising the SAPAR was now on sabbatical, while a third member of staff, deputising for her absent colleague, was concentrating on preparations for next year's SA students. As one student observed later, "It was hard to go and hard to come back." For the 97/98 SA cohort, the situation was particularly acute: the SAPAR process had raised expectations, in that more had been expected of the students while they were away, and, because of staffing problems, less than usual had happened when they returned.
(iv) Evaluation of Phase One of the pilot.
During April and May two evaluation activities took place. Time was provided in a lecture for all SA students to complete a short questionnaire and a group of nine students volunteered to discuss their experiences and reactions in a lunchtime meeting.
In response to the questionnaire, just under two thirds of the students were positive about the gains of going through the SAPAR process. Some of the benefits named were
"time to pause and think"
"a sense that you were experiencing something different"
"an opportunity to share experiences and tell the department about your progress"
"having to write one before I left England helped me to think about what to
expect and avoid a panic later"
"good to consider your experiences on a more coherent level ..... writing brings
up ideas that might otherwise remain in the vagaries of memory"
They were much less positive about the summative usefulness of the scheme. It was still too early for most of them to be interested in reflecting on their own skills and experiences for CV purposes. Since no member of staff had made any reference to anything they had written, there was no real incentive to place any academic importance on the exercise, and the personal gains expressed above seemed less significant now that they were grappling with the demands of a new semester and adjusting to being back in Nottingham. Many were driven to conclude that the main purpose of the entire exercise had been to provide a kind of informal "Rough Guide" for future SA students.
In discussion with the Evaluator several of the students returned to this idea and questioned the frequency of the emails: if the main beneficiaries were next year's students, surely they might have been able to choose when and how often to write; they were not clear about how the writing could be of any use to the writers themselves once the experience was over. Some, however, had enjoyed the opportunity to produce a different kind of writing - but, again, the absence of an audience for this writing was problematic. There is an irony here: the SAPAR was devised in the first place partly to validate an important experience that received no formal credit within the degree, yet its very format now seemed to have reproduced that sense of compulsory yet officially unvalued activity. There was some confusion about whether accounts that were particularly detailed and perceptive might be used by the department in their favour if they were later on a degree borderline, as had been suggested in the pre-SA documentation. Several students would have liked the opportunity to work the accumulated emails up into a piece of extended writing that might count towards their degree in the same way that seminar contributions count in certain modules. [In fact, neither of these suggestions turned out to be viable.]
Lessons from Phase One of the Pilot
Material from the evaluation of the Pilot formed the basis of a full discussion between the Evaluator and those members of the department responsible for Study Abroad. As a result of this discussion the following recommendations were offered to the full department for consideration.
Second year of the SAPAR, 1998-99
Evaluation of this second phase was as follows:
(i) A discussion with four students took place as soon as they returned to Nottingham at the start of the second semester. The tutor and the administrator responsible for SA also attended this meeting.
Much of the discussion, as it had the previous year, centred on practicalities and many of the same points arose again.
The discussion also dealt with the students' perception of their academic development while abroad and an increased interest in learning styles.
(ii) A questionnaire for the Y2 Study Abroad cohort was completed in March 1999 (26 replies). Their responses are summarised below.
What information did you receive about the purposes of the SAPAR before you left?
What further information could have been relevant?
The kind of writing you were asked to do in the SAPAR is unusual in an HE context, i.e. it blurs the borders of academic and personal writing somewhat. How useful/ easy/tiresome did you find it?
Would you have liked more suggestions about what each email should contain?
Logging your thought about the semester abroad was intended to be useful to you during the rest of the course and beyond.
(a) Can you give an example of a way in which you have already found a use for this?
(b) Can you give an example of a way in which you might use it in the future?
Do you have any suggestions for other uses/further modifications for the SAPAR?
(iii) Finally, as part of the overall evaluation of the PADSHE Project at Nottingham, the Y2 students were asked to complete the standard questionnaire used to collect student views on the usefulness of Personal and Academic Records. This was presented to them with the caveat that the SAPAR was more limited in scope than the kind of PAR assumed by this questionnaire, making some questions difficult to answer. The areas they were asked to consider were:
Their responses show how positive the students were about the usefulness of the SAPAR in the majority of these areas. This would seem to suggest that, although it still requires further modifications, the Pilot had met a number of its original objectives and would be a strong basis from which the department could move towards designing a more all-embracing PAR.
In particular, the students seemed capable of making greater use of the study abroad element of their degree in the areas of
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