Bridging the gap between student expectation and experience: The Lived Experience of Transition to Higher Education

HEA STEM 2014 ConferenceDr Martina CrehanHealth Professions Education Centre

RCSI Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland Coláiste Ríoga na Máinleá in Éirinn

Research Questions

How do students narrate their decisions about entering and participating in higher education?

What factors do students perceive as influencing their educational decision–making process?

How do students perceive and experience the transition process to higher education?

How do students narrate their perceptions of tertiary education and their own learning over the course of the first year of study?

Defining Transition

A period during which students must adapt to:

 

- A higher education institution as an academic community; their campus as a distinctive social organisation and centrally based support services; their Faculty as an organisational unit; their programme of study and the academic framework in which they will learn; the academic staff who will deliver the course and assess their performance; and their peer group.

STAR (Student Transition & Retention Project), University of Ulster, 2005

Theoretical Perspectives

Academic Tribes and their Territories

How those working in different disciplines could be understood as belonging to different ‘tribes’, having distinctly different cultures and ways of knowing….

How academic communities

organise and deliver their teaching and research

(Becher & Trowler 2001)

Actor Network Theory

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Main thematic strands Sub-ordinate Themes

“There really wasn’t a choice” – the structure and process of decision making 

Ø      Familial influence and shaping Ø      The School as a site of influenceØ      Information search strategies - active and passive

“We really didn’t know what to expect” - Transition Process 

Ø      Sense of acclimatisationØ      Importance of social relationsØ      New modes of learning 

“It’s a bit more like school than I thought it would be” - Sense of disciplinary time and space

Ø      Sense of placeØ      Sense of developing/changing selfØ      Sense of freedom/independenceØ      Disciplinary impacts

“Why would everybody have to go to college anyway? – Evolving Perceptions of Education 

Ø      Reappraisal of purpose of educationØ      Sense of developing/changing selfØ      Looking to the future

Moving through the gap – the transition process I thought that my parents had told me lots about college, what to expect, that I would

have to study on my own, and I had read the prospectus, and come to an open day, but when I came here, I wasn’t prepared at all! I did not know what to expect. It was completely different in some ways; the amount of work took a long time to get used to. I think I thought at the beginning that the first few months would be really easy, more social stuff than work, but it was a lot more work from the very beginning than I had expected (Mary)

You get dumped in college, and you’re expected to know what to do…and it’s completely different. In school, you knew everyone, and you’ve been there for years, and then you move to college where you don’t really know that many people, and you have to re-explain yourself, and you have to like establish new relationships, and, you know, it’s like starting over. (Sarah)

If someone had said, specifically, this is what it’s going to be like. It’s going to be confusing, and there’s going to be lots of things you don’t understand and you’re going to feel out of place and a bit nervous, then I think it would have felt more normal. All I heard was that it was going to be so great and exciting (Amy)

Workload Adjustment The workload adjustment was probably one of the hardest adjustments

there was. Everyone says that the Leaving Cert is the hardest thing you will ever do, but they’re wrong, this is so much harder (Ashling)

I find science, compared to something like business , seems to be a lot more work cause I feel like I am doing work all the time and they are just always out doing other things. Seeing them be able to not have to spend so much time on reports, and things is a bit weird, as I wouldn’t have thought there would be that much of a difference (Amy)

It’s more like school than I thought it would be. You’ve got a long timetable for every day, and there’s not much time to do other things. I don’t know - it even looks a bit like school. I didn’t expect that (Liz)

A new Mode of learning It seems like there’s a lot more reading than I thought there would be. I

expected the labs, but thought that there would be more emphasis on that practical side of things. We do spend time reading papers, (journal articles) and writing about them too and being asked to review them. They (lecturers) really push you to have the reading done, and to be good at writing. (Amy)  

There’s so much more work than I thought. And labs are a lot bigger deal. And you just don’t do everything in class or in the lab. You have to read up on experiments before and after, and there’s exercises you have to do on webcourses (the vle), and it feels like you’ve just done that for one theory or concept and then it’s onto the next one. Time just seems to go much faster – too fast to get to grips with some things. (Mary)

 

But ……. I actually use the exact same approach as school. Write notes, need it to be

in my own style and I go from there… I learn everything off by heart. I can’t just get into a thing and talk about it. I have to learn it off by heart....I write it and write it again, and just keep repeating in my head and not look at it. (Barry) 

  We didn't really know what to expect. The courses when I first started were

not what I expected. Some modules make you think, which is good; I love stuff like that. That really, you have to get your head around it and look at it in a different way? Um, I think in school., you look at things but you don't look at why they're saying what they're saying. Like last night I typed up my lecture notes, which has really been helping me. Because you accept it in your mind and it makes you think about it again before you put them to one side. It's hard, though. (Ashling)

Reason et al (2006) first year as foundational learning

Sense of disciplinary time and space

They (lecturers) speak a lot to us about being careful in our work, getting the details right and spending a lot of time researching something properly. You really don’t get away with handing anything in late. They expect you to have everything done on time, and keep telling us that that’s an important thing to learn for when we’re working (Tom, social science)

  We’re expected to ask questions in class. At the start, they would ask us

questions, and we’d have to team up someone else and come up with an answer. Then after a while, we were expected to come up with questions at the end of a lecture. Also, they make us do it on webcourses (college virtual learning environment) and we have to ask questions about the next topic (Ashling, Chemical Sciences)

  We are asked to work on problems a lot, and come up with our own

answers, and explain why we think that way. You can’t just give an answer; it has to be ok, here’s the reason why I think that and what will happen if the company makes that decision, and there might be disadvantages (Lucy, Business)

You’re mostly friends with your lab group and that’s pretty much it. (John)

It’s good that we have a small class, and everyone can socialise, because there’s not much time to join clubs, and things. I haven't really had any chance to ... socialise with ... people outside the courses much at all... .. It's a shame that I don't really have the opportunity to socialize as much as I'd like, but it's um - if I'm not in class, I'm in a lab, and if I'm not there, I’m in the library, then I need to be doing my reading... I don't think a lot of the people in other courses - appreciate um how much spare time they've got... (Ashling)

We have a class each week where we have to read an article about how a scientific discovery has been used in medicine, or industry. So, this week it was about how drugs can interact with each other, and how it caused problems when doctors prescribed certain medicines. The article is not really scientific, well it is, but it’s not about the chemical elements and things, we learn that in class and labs and the textbooks, but how the science is used. Then we come to class, and discuss it. (Claire)

We do a lot of work in groups – working out a formula, or thinking about how one chemical would react with another. We’re told that we have to co-operate with each other. So, sometimes each person in the group will be given a different piece of information to solve something, and we all have to share the bits of information. So, if you don’t help each other, then you won’t be able to find the answer. It’s fun working like that in a team, and because everyone has something to contribute, everyone has to do some of the work (Clodagh, Chemical Sciences student)

Barnett & Coate (2005) “knowing” & “acting”

Assessment of/for learning 

We've got logbooks to do as well, which I'm quite enjoying. I mean, each -it's every two weeks we get given an exercise to do...He (lab tutor) just looks at them and gives you his views; he doesn't mark them, he just gives them back. That's a lot less daunting, because you don't have a mark to get. You see where you went right or wrong, and then you can correct that in the next one. You learn the correct way to do it, which you will have to do in every lab experiment. (Ashling)

‘There’s one lecturer particularly who makes the subject really interesting, and I feel I learn the most in her class. She always has lots of stories of how an experiment was used, or how something was discovered, so it really makes you listen, and brings things alive. She also has these little mini tests using clickers (Personal Response Systems) and that’s really fun, and makes you want to learn (Emma)  

 

Assessment discourse (Williams 2005)

Implications for Practice The strength of previously acquired learning habits and approaches

for the students or the “evoked prior experience” (Ashwin&Trigwell2012)

The development of generic skills in harmony with subject-matter learning so that generic skills provide the means to combine theoretical and practical knowledge (Wingate, 2006; Durkin & Main 2002)

Formative assessment and the structure of the first year of study Socio-emotional readiness The academic and social systems as two nested spheres. Creation of a community of practice

The world is constituted through multiple refracted perspectives: it is indeed a ‘plural world’, one that is constantly changing and never fixed, and one where meanings are always being negotiated. In such a world, meanings and truth never arrive simply.

Plummer (2001, p.xi)