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There has been a growing discourse within higher education to engage with Students as Partners (SaP) and to transform institutional culture by harnessing the strength of students and faculty working together. Engaging with SaP offers benefits to both students and faculty, yet there continues to be less research on SaP practices at the macro-degree level. The purpose of this study was to conduct a faculty-wide investigation of student-faculty partnerships within the Faculty of Science at a mid-sized university in Ontario, Canada. Through a mixed methods approach of surveys (n = 178) and semi-structured interviews (n = 10) with undergraduate students, we examined the types of student partnerships occurring within the Faculty of Science as well as gathered insights into students’ perspectives of the benefits and challenges they experience engaging in these partnerships. Collaborating with faculty on research projects, teaching assistantships, and being a student leader in an organization with faculty guidance were considered the most impactful partnerships among participants. Students also reported several social, personal, academic, and career-related benefits as a result of working in partnership with faculty members, while common challenges included barriers to engaging in activities, social barriers, power imbalances, difficult working environments, and personal challenges. By studying the benefits and challenges experienced by students, we provide advances towards creating an engaged learning environment that supports undergraduate student engagement, collaboration, and enhanced student-faculty relationships that in turn support recruitment and retention efforts.

When properly structured, sport has the capacity to offer athletes numerous positive outcomes. However, the seemingly simple procedure of dividing athletes by chronological age causes relative age disparities which are associated with varying sporting experiences and opportunities for participation. Relative age effects (RAEs) are developmental (dis)advantages associated with an individual’s birthdate and where that falls relative to a pre-determined cut-off date. The objective of this dissertation was to explore differences in positive youth development (PYD) across the relative ages of female ice hockey players, as well as to determine if the mechanisms that contribute to athletes’ acquisition of PYD differed by relative age. This aim was accomplished through three interrelated studies. In Chapter 2, differences in leadership behaviours were examined while accounting for athletes’ relative age. The findings of this study illustrated that the frequency with which female ice hockey players engage in leadership behaviours did not vary by relative age, supporting prior research in male ice hockey. Chapter 3 expanded the investigation of relative age on PYD by exploring how positive and negative developmental experiences differ by athletes’ relative ages. The results of this study showed that relative age was not a differentiating factor in female ice hockey players’ developmental experiences. Thus, the findings from Chapters 2 and 3 suggest that if female ice hockey players can overcome the initial selection bias associated with relative age, then their opportunities for PYD appear to be equitable. Chapter 4 builds on Chapters 2 and 3 by including interviews with relatively older and younger female ice hockey players that sought to gain insight into what mechanisms contributed or hindered their development of PYD outcomes. Secondary aims included determining if PYD outcomes varied by relative age as well as how athletes employed these skills in other contexts. The social features of the sport environment, the structure of female travel/rep ice hockey, and negative ice hockey experiences (e.g., difficult team dynamics, challenges with coaches, playing on boys’ teams) served as the overarching mechanisms that facilitated or hindered athletes’ development of PYD outcomes. Regardless of their relative age, athletes reported developing PYD outcomes in the personal, physical, and social domains as well as using these skills in many contexts outside of hockey. Future research is needed to explore if relative age influences PYD among those who have dropped out of sport. The findings from this dissertation can be used to inform the design of sport programming that aims to achieve PYD.

Relative age effects (RAE) are developmental advantages experienced by those born in the initial months after a predetermined cut-off date over their younger counterparts. Student-athletes are considered to be ‘on-time’ when their current year of athletic eligibility coincides with their expected year of athletic eligibility, based on their year of birth. Conversely, student-athletes are considered ‘delayed’ when their current athletic eligibility year corresponds with a younger cohort. This project examined the RAE and academic timing within nine of the 12 Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) championship sports. A moderate RAE was seen among the entire sample of CIS student- athletes. Males are more likely to be delayed than females, and those student-athletes born in the later months of the year are more frequently delayed compared to their relatively older peers. Based on these results, delaying one’s athletic eligibly may be an effective method to reduce the disadvantages associated with being relatively younger.