New project: Office for Students’ Equality in Higher Education Innovation Fund
An update on our metacognition project with Primary school students with Anglia Ruskin University, supported by the Office for Students’ Equality in Higher Education Fund.
IntoUniversity has recently secured support from the Office for Students’ Equality in Higher Education Fund for our metacognition project with Primary school students.
We will be working with Anglia Ruskin University to explore how Primary school students’ development of skills in metacognition and self-regulation can support their self-regulated learning and related educational achievement. We will deliver this original project with our students attending our Primary Academic Support after-school programme.
Improving students’ metacognitive and self-regulatory skills are effective ways of improving attainment (EEF). We aim to assess the effectiveness of the development of these skills in early intervention measures in out-of-school contexts, both to support primary students’ attainment and to build knowledge and understanding of HE. We will address the gap identified by TASO regarding lack of knowledge of what works for developing metacognition in a WP context, particularly in primary and community-based settings.
The project has three main phases:
- From now until autumn 2025, we will review the current Academic Support curriculum and students’ understanding of metacognition and self-regulation. We will select IntoUniversity centres to participate in the pilot study. Because this is a collaboration with ARU, one of these will be IntoUniversity Peterborough.
- Between autumn 2025 and summer 2026, we will deliver an adapted Academic Support curriculum. This will support the direct teaching of metacognition and self-regulation skills as well as transference between contexts. Working with ARU, we will reflect on our learnings from the pilot in summer 2026 to decide what to implement. Insights will be used in designing the intervention and evaluation.
- In autumn 2026, all IntoUniversity centres’ Primary Academic Support sessions will be run using the adapted curriculum. In summer 2027, we will review the project, gather data using a mixed-methods approach for the evaluation, and report on the intervention’s impact for the young people who have attended Primary Academic Support.