Conference and seminar sessions in Student support
Teaching Innovations in Place and Time
Keynote at DEE 2025,Student perspectives on engaging with economics content support schemes
Presentation at DEE 2025,Determinants of students’ engagement with programming tools in economics education and their usefulness
Presentation at DEE 2025,Through Student Eyes: Graduate Attributes in the Economics and Finance Curriculum
Presentation at DEE 2025,Enhancing Student Experience through Structured Academic Advising
Presentation at SWEETS Workshop 2025: The Future of the Economics Degree: Who? What? How?,Economics students’ perception of academic challenge and its relationship to student wellbeing
Presentation at DEE 2023,Mental wellbeing of first-year economics students: The effect of a game-based orientation day
Presentation at DEE 2021,Understanding, supporting and teaching Generation Z
Presentation at DEE 2019,What characterises Generation Z is vastly different from what shapes Generations X and Y and miles away from what shapes baby boomers. What happens then, when Generation Z is being taught by Millennials, Generation X or even baby boomers? Traditional ways of teaching economics are becoming more and more challenging to sustain in a generation that has experiential and intrapersonal learning preferences, that has great expectations and that most of their social life takes place online. A great challenge for academics and for faculty is to understand what is different about them and adjust teaching but also pastoral care appropriately. Embracing personal devices, personalising their learning and ‘meeting’ online, are some of the methods we could use to improve our communication with this generation not only to support them but also to clarify the expectations with which they enter University life.
Birds of a feather – social interactions of university students in a classroom
Presentation at DEE 2017,Social networks can facilitate the communication among students and help them in learning. However, there are rare studies combining observation of students’ behaviour in groups with their academic performance. Academic performance can boost one’s reputation among peers, giving them a significant degree of social influence. Even if the process of building reputation in a network is usually slow, compared to the spread of deviant behaviour, it gives a potentiality for various effort making strategies. For example, Sacerdote (2000) shows that an increase in average peer achievement may lead to an increase of a student’s own achievements. While obtaining new knowledge and developing social capital are definitely good sides of peer effect, reputation may also have drawbacks. For example the significant differences in reputation may arise possibilities of ‘moral hazard’ and free-riding strategies. Students with lower academic performance may be willing to stay close to high performing ones, wishing for their help or just treating them as “additional information assets”. In turn, students with high academic performance may be reluctant to keep such ties, considering them abusive. In this study we want to investigate the patterns of social interaction among students during a semester. We analyse the spontaneous social networks closely related to the final evaluation of students: the peer selection for team work and the neighbourhood selection on the ‘test days’.
