Strategies for Supporting Students on their Transition from School to Higher Education in a STEM Program

Like other institutions around the world, we observe that many first-year students struggle with the transition from school to STEM programs at universities.In this paper, we share our experience of interventions that have helped us to identify reasons for difficulties that our first-year students face, and actions we can take to address and resolve them. Through interviews with current students and alumni who had struggled during their first semesters and through workshops with students and tutors, we identified a number of hurdles at the border between school and higher education. We structure the findings according to an “offer-and-use-model for teaching” from literature, which we adapted to our needs.As well, we suggest interventions that helped us to resolve student difficulties in our context. However, we also experienced that in particular, organizational hurdles may be difficult to overcome, due to the many restrictions in a large organization like a university with several thousand students.