South Africa strives to become a knowledge-based economy. To further this aim, the steady delivery of well trained professionals through quality tertiary education remains a high priority. However, unsatisfactory academic throughput rates of students remains a challenge that poses a risk to the sustainability of our universities and ultimately of our economy.
Previous research has highlighted the importance of well-being or flourishing for academic performance. Specifically, happy and flourishing students seem to perform better academically than their languishing counterparts. Unfortunately, no clear theoretical or empirical framework exists which consolidates the factors which may influence the Flourishing-Performance dynamic of students. Our qualitative study addresses the conceptualization of such a model by focusing on intra-psychic, interpersonal and contextual factors that may support or alternatively hinder students at a large SA university to flourish.
In this Round Table presentation, we want to share our research on postgraduate student well-being. We want to discuss our work with people from both academia and practice who are working with students or doing research on topics related to student well-being. We want to discuss challenges and resources, existing interventions or programs /applications that are being developed in universities and talk about cultural similarities or differences.