The secret of their success; the role of belonging and psychological contract in the development of student identity

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Routledge in Student Attainment in Higher Education: Issues, controversies and debates on 16/02/2016, available online: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315730325 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.This chapter discusses a critical examination of the place of intellectuality within the modern university and reflections on a practical intervention/experiment that is carried out to determine whether it is possible to raise student attainment by nurturing a sense of intellectuality amongst students. The key changes underpinning these shifts has been the introduction of a consumerist model of education, which heavily promoted by government and some educationalists and encouraged by the use of metrics such as the National Student Survey and league tables in general. The consumerist approach positions the student as a customer and within higher education it is characterized most overtly in the ritualistic module and course evaluations where students are empowered to provide feedback in the form of Lickert scale ratings on aspects such as lecturer performance and curriculum content. Steele's work, in his examination of Black college student performance, took this further and considered the impact of stereotypes on students themselves