| Author: | Lau, Hon-yiu |
| Title: | A study on the factors affecting students dropout in part-time evening courses |
| Degree: | M.Ed. |
| Year: | 2005 |
| Subject: | Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations Dropouts -- China -- Hong Kong Students, Part-time -- China -- Hong Kong |
| Department: | School of Professional Education and Executive Development |
| Pages: | xi, 112 leaves : ill. ; 30 cm |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | The number of dropout students in a Part-time Evening Certificate course of Computer in the Department of Information and Communications Technology at the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education Tuen Mun campus was found to be very high: the dropout rate was 30% in the academic year 2002/03. This is wastage and leads to a number of undesirable consequences to the Institute. The purpose of this study is to identify the factors that affects students dropout in the evening courses before remedial actions and measures can be proposed to reduce the problem. In this study, a quantitative approach by means of a questionnaire survey is adopted to collect data for analysis. The Distance Education Student Progress (DESP) questionnaire in David Kember's "Model of Student Progress in the Open Learning Courses for Adults" is used as guidance or reference to examine the attitude and learning behaviour of the part-time evening students. The population in this survey was all the part-time evening students studying in Tuen Mun campua. The actual survey sample was 182 and they came from six different classes in three different course levels out of 650 students in 23 classes. Factor Analysis is used to group the 48 scale items in the questionnaire into a smaller, more manageable number of factors. After that, the scale scores of these factors together with the variables of the subject's background characteristics are compared for the mean scores between two different groups of people, the persisters and withdrawers to find if there is any significant differerce in their mean values using an independent-samples t-test and logistic regression. Several factors of dropout were found; "attendance" at classes and "academic integration" are the two most significant factors identified. Implications and recommendations were made to reduce the dropout rate as the conclusion at the end of this study. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | restricted access |
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|---|---|---|---|---|
| b18182501.pdf | For All Users (off-campus access for PolyU Staff & Students only) | 3.61 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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