Social · Peer Support & Collaboration
Everyday academic collaboration, not the fixed study group, is the lever
EVA's research finds that students who collaborate academically drop out less, score higher and report better wellbeing. The distinctive finding: general collaboration across the programme matters more than any single study group, and institutions set the conditions for it.
The third factor
In 2026, EVA (the Danish Evaluation Institute) set out to find what actually promotes students’ academic outcome, wellbeing and completion at university. It found four factors that institutions can act on: academic engagement, self-efficacy, collaboration and belonging. The third is collaboration.
Collaboration here means how far students discuss the subject, share knowledge and help each other academically. When it is high rather than low, EVA finds a clear pattern across all three outcomes, even after correcting for background factors.
EVA 2026 · high vs low on this factor, corrected for background
Those are EVA’s numbers, not ours. They describe what happens to completion, grades and wellbeing when academic collaboration is high rather than low.
What actually matters is the everyday kind
The distinctive finding sits underneath those numbers. It is not the fixed study group that carries the effect. It is the general academic collaboration that runs across the whole programme: talking through the material with whoever is nearby, comparing notes, helping each other past a hard concept.
That reframes where the lever is. An institution cannot mandate a good study group. It can shape whether everyday academic exchange happens at all, through how teaching is designed and what conditions teachers set around it.
What our data shows
EVA measured collaboration against completion and grades. StudentPulse measures it continuously, through the topics that make it up:
Sector means, 0 to 10
The sector averages are healthy. The story is in the spread. Where collaboration is measured across institutions, the gap between the strongest and the weakest is wide, and that gap is where the lever lives.
Group Work & Collaboration: weakest 10% of institutions against the strongest 10%, scored 0 to 10. A small number of institutions report on this topic, so read the range as indicative, not precise.
On Group Work & Collaboration, the weakest institutions sit around 5.9 while the strongest reach 8.4. Peer Support & Collaboration shows a similar spread, roughly 6.8 to 9.1. Both rest on a small number of reporting institutions, so treat the range as indicative. But the direction is consistent: this is not a fixed trait of a cohort. It is a condition institutions can move.
What works, where collaboration is high
More than six in ten responses on peer support sit in the top band, and the strongest comments trace the collaboration back to something the institution set up. Students describe help as a shared norm rather than a favour, a culture where explaining things to each other is simply how the class works.
The school's focus on the social side created a shared understanding that no one gets through this programme without help from each other. So people are more willing to help, because at some point you will need it yourself.
Student response
Even if they do not understand it either, we reach an understanding by talking it through together.
Student response
What it means for institutions
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Help collaboration form, then help it work. EVA’s advice is to support the formation of study groups and give students the tools to build well-functioning collaboration and handle disagreement when it comes up. A short check-in early in a programme surfaces which cohorts are connecting and which are not, while there is still time to intervene.
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Design teaching that invites academic interaction. Discussions, joint problem-solving and knowledge sharing are what generate the everyday collaboration that carries the effect. When check-ins show interaction thinning in a module, that is a signal to look at how the teaching is set up, not at the students.
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Watch the conditions, not just the groups. EVA points to the conditions teachers set, including for collaboration outside fixed groups. Route a falling collaboration signal to the programme team as a teaching and design conversation, and close the loop with students so they see that answering changed something.
How we measure it
Collaboration is captured through the Peer Support & Collaboration and Group Work & Collaboration topics, alongside Class Size & Interaction, scored 0 to 10 across short check-ins. The institutional spread above compares the weakest and strongest deciles of institutions reporting on the topic; with only a few institutions reporting, the range is indicative rather than precise. Cross-institution aggregate; no single institution identified; minimum group size applied. Student comments are de-identified, translated where needed, and drawn from the highest-scoring responses on the topic. The four factors and their effect sizes are from EVA (the Danish Evaluation Institute), 2026.
Related insights
Students' most reliable source of help is each other
Peer-to-peer help scores 8.4 out of 10, higher than any formal peer-support structure built around it.
Social · Four factorsBelonging is the factor most tied to wellbeing, and it is won early
EVA names belonging the factor most important for student wellbeing, and finds it is formed most in the transition into study life. That makes it measurable and actionable from the first weeks, not something to fix once a student is already drifting.