THE IMPACT OF SUPPORTIG ACTIVITIES ON STUDENTS' PERFORMANCE IN TECHNICAL UNIVERSITIES

Abstract

Everywhere in the world, education systems seek to provide students with opportunities for their development, in terms of cognitive performance, socio-emotional skills, professional competencies, information on labor market that may facilitate their insertion, and finally the success in transition from the university world to the real life. During this transition, many students, especially from the first year of studies, fail meeting the curriculum and evaluation standards increasing the retention rate at the university level. There are many arguments for explaining this context, starting from those related to the lack of learning motivation and ending to those referring to the patterns of teachers-students relationships. Nowadays, the majority of Romanian universities are coping to these challenges. The risk of dropping out within the first year of university became a major issue increasingly approached by national plans of measures or strategic projects. One of these projects is represented by the Romania Secondary Education Project (the ROSE Project), implemented by the Ministry of Education an co-financed by the Romanian Government and the World Bank. The ROSE Project's main objective is to improve the transition from upper secondary into tertiary education and increase the retention in the first year of tertiary education in project-supported education institutions. University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest is one of the education institutions involved in, developing supporting activities for students in their first year of studies. These support activities are mainly referring to the tutoring, vocational counselling and career guidance, coaching, remedial programs and similar activities. The present paper is aimed to analyse the student's opinions about the impact of the main activities of the Sub-Project SIDPERA Learning Centre ("Learning and personal development strategies for reducing school dropout"), implemented in University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest since 2018. The students' opinions emphasize the impact of tutoring, career counselling and personal development activities on their learning strategies and skills development in order to facilitate the proper integration to the academic environment, after a year of implementation. The data collecting instruments are based on quantitative (questionnaire) and qualitative (focus-group) patterns of research, attempting to find out solutions and new creative perspective of analyses.