Re-inventing the ‘gap year’: Establishing new forms of supportive communications between universities, regional students and parents.

We are proposing development, delivery and evaluation of a non-university branded, personalized, interactive, online direct-communication resource to ‘correct’ common misconceptions held by regional students and their families about ‘the gap year’. The challenge of addressing the ‘gap year’ effect requires a dual focus responsive to the two key regional student cohorts (and their families) who are impacted by it: (i) senior school students with the intention of attending university; and (ii) post-school students who have deferred first-year university study and commenced their ‘gap year’. The different information needs of these two cohorts’ warrants significant variations in the content of the resource and the research design has two arms to accommodate this.