Betwixt spaces: Students’ accounts of turning point experiences in first-year transitions

'Not belonging' is becoming a prevalent theme within accounts of the first-year student experience at university. In this study the notion of not belonging is extended by assuming a more active role for the idea of liminality in a student's transition into the university environments of academic and student life. In doing so, the article suggests that the transition between one place (home) and another (university) can result in an 'in-between-ness' - a betwixt space. Through an interpretative methodology, the study explores how students begin to move from this betwixt space into feeling like fully-fledged members of university life. It is concluded that there is a wide range of turning points associated with the students' betwixt transition, which shapes, alters or indeed accentuates the ways in which they make meaningful connections with university life. Moreover, transitional turning point experiences reveal a cast of characters and symbolic objects; capture contrasting motivations and evolving relationships; display multiple trajectories of interpersonal tensions and conflicts; highlight discontinuities as well as continuities; and together, simultaneously liberate and constrain the students' transition into university life.

Creating Questions Using Turning Point

This 7-minute video describes the range of question types and shows you how to create and test them.

Using Turning Point to create zapper questions that assess confidence levels in the answers given

This 5-minute video describes how you can assess how confident your students were with their answer choices so you can adapt your teaching appropriately.

Using the Turning Point Showbar during zapper quizzes

This 7-minute video describes how Turning Point's Showbar can be used to manage questions during a presentation and includes useful techniques such as peer instruction and data slicing.

Using Turning Point to Analyse Data from a Zapper Session

This short video shows how you can save the date at the end of a Turning Point quiz, then view that data as an Excel spreadsheet.

Using the Turning Point Participant Monitor During Zapper Quizzes

This 4-minute video describes how to use the Turning Point Participant Monitor to review the performance of the whole group and individual students during a lecture.

Turning Point zapper test of moment by moment voting

This short 3 min video shows how Camtasia Studio can be used to record the audio of a lecture alongside the moment-by-moment votes recorded using Turning Point.

Turning Point (zappers) quick guide (Windows 7)

This single page PowerPoint can be printed out and provides brief instructions on how to use zappers ina Windows 7 teaching space.

Using Participant Lists with Turning Point Zappers

This 11-minute video shows you how to create a participant list that will enable you to record the scores of individual students as they answer a series of questions in a Tuning Point presentation. It shows you how those students can register their handsets in-class, so that you can distribute the handsets quickly at the start of the session.

Fixing Issues with Turning Point (Zapper) Presentations

This video offers advice about problems that might be encountered when running a presentation that was developed in Turning Point 4.0 on a computer with version 4.2 installed. NOTE: With the upgrade to version 4.3, Turning Point now automatically fixes these issues when you load an older presentation. Hurrah!

Using a PresenterCard with Turning Point zappers

This 2-minute video shows you how to pair a PresenterCard so you can remotely control your presentation.

How to use Turning Point in a Common Learning Space

This is a quick guide based on screenshots which shows you how get started with Turning Point 5 and Office 2013 in Common Learning Spaces.

Quick printed guide to zappers (Turning Point 5)

One side of A4 which provides step-by-step instructions to help you use Tunring Point 5 in Common Learning Spaces. Includes advice about dealing with technical glitches.