Essential Skills for At-risk Students? Advising: Activity Theory Based Analysis of a Pilot Study

First year bachelor students have a much higher level of responsibility than they experienced in foundations or high school. Students who do not manage their responsibilities well may experience failure in classes that can lower their self-concept and cause them to drop out of college altogether. For many of these students, the academic difficulty of the bachelor courses was compounded by a lack of student skills. To address this issue, the Academic Success Program (ASP) Coordinators at one of the tertiary level institutions in the United Arab Emirates presented an initiative to the management team to help codify the procedures for dealing with at-risk students. In this initiative, the ASP personnel met individually with the identified students twice with a two week interval, discussed the Essential Skills for College Students and worked with them to create individual learning plans to improve their skills. To keep the learning plan in focus, the students kept daily reflective journals for two weeks identifying the actions they took to improve their skills and met again the ASP personnel to discuss successes and further challenges that needed to be addressed. The analysis showed that when students reflect, the value of reflections stem from the ways through which learning is achieved, whether students are able to develop study skills through growth mind set and whether they are able to control the learning speed and style of interaction. So, from the ASP perspective in learning, control of learning can be achieved based on learner characteristics such as self-efficacy and self-regulation, which, as students? reflections showed, can successfully result in motivation and active learning.