Higher Education Transitions

Theory and Research

Eva Kyndt, Vincent Donche, Keith Trigwell, Sari Lindblom-Ylänne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317207726
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In the current era where lifelong learning is brought to the fore, higher education can no longer be regarded as an isolated trajectory within one's educational career as many students face substantial challenges in crafting their professional future. More specifically, the transition from school to higher education and continuing to the labour market are often a difficult hurdles for many students. Almost half of students do not succeed in the first year and often withdraw from education, students are faced with a variety of contexts and may choose to study in a different (international) context, and they are then confronted with structural barriers in finding a (high-quality) job, as evidenced by increasing levels of youth unemployment and underemployment.

Higher Education Transitions aims to deepen our understanding of the transitions taking place when students enter, progress and leave higher education to enter the labour market. Drawing on an international team of contributors, this guide includes three conceptual and fifteen empirical studies which include a range of quantitative, qualitative, cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. Divided into three sections to reflect each important transition phase, topics include:

• transitions from secondary to higher education;
• transitions within higher education;
• transitions from higher education to the labour market.

By considering transitions across different phases as a broad and interrelated process, this guide will be essential reading for higher education researchers, policy stakeholders and all those interested in the transitions into higher education and the labour market.

Section II

Transitions within higher education

7

TRANSITIONS WITHIN THE UNIVERSITY

Concepts and cases

Keith Trigwell

Introduction

What sorts of transitions do students experience during their university studies? There are many and they vary from the seemingly insignificant (transitions from one year to the next in the same discipline) to those with potentially severe implications for progress (transition from undergraduate coursework into postgraduate research, or a switch in disciplines – for example from an arts degree into graduate entry medicine). With most of the research focus on the more tangible transitions into and out of university (as presented in Sections I and III of this book), these internal shifts within higher education have received less attention. However, as the five chapters in this section illustrate, significant effects on learning are found to be associated with this wide range of transitions within higher education. Some of these effects have been studied previously as part of student progression and outcomes research (e.g. Donche et al., 2014) and some are new, but all of them, when seen through the lens of a student transition, provide additional insight into student learning in higher education. If the purpose of studying the effects of transitions is to provide institutions with planning information, then the study of transitions within higher education is important.

This introductory chapter provides an overview and summary of the five chapters that follow in Section II, with the aim of describing similarities and differences, and articulating a conceptual framework for transitions within the university. The five chapters each contain a report of the results of empirically based studies in one or more institutions of higher education. Four focus on the European undergraduate student experience, and the last (Chapter 12) looks at the experience of mainland Chinese graduates who have enrolled in a UK-based Master’s degree programme and how they negotiate an intricate web of transitions. The five chapters are presented in order of year of study focus, from first to second year in Chapter 8, from first to final year in Chapter 9–11, and into the first year of a Master’s degree in Chapter 12. There is also, to some extent, an increasing complexity of what changes in the transitions from Chapter 8 through 12, from student engagement and learning strategies, to factors associated with stress and finally to the combination of transitions in autonomy, subject matter discourse, critical thinking, and interaction with peers/teacher experienced by Chinese graduates in postgraduate study in a Western university.

Transitions within higher education: the five cases

Transitions likely to create barriers to progress or periods of student anxiety abound within the higher education experience. Students graduating from coursework elements to research projects may require different sets of skills and different ways of thinking in order to succeed. Similarly, changes are needed in switching from liberal to vocational programmes, from undergraduate to Master’s or from pre-clinical to clinical study, and also when crossing between cultures, taking on a new subject area and studying in a language other than one’s mother tongue. The magnitude of these more obvious changes, for some students, is freely acknowledged. But as noted by Perry (1970), even shifting from one year to another in a multi-year degree can also be an identity changing experience for students, as reading expectations increase, greater learning independence is required, assessment tasks become more complex, and critical thinking becomes a more highly desired attribute.

This part of Chapter 7 contains a brief summary of the case studies in each of Chapters 8–12. Each summary includes a description of the types of transition explored and implications of the outcomes of the research. While the five cases are comprehensive empirical studies in their own right, they do not begin to address the full range of transitions mentioned in the paragraph above. The gaps constitute topics rich in potential for future research.

Chapter 8 (Korhonen, Inkinen, Mattsson & Toom) explores the changes in learning engagement of Finnish university students as they move from their first year of university study to their second. Student learning engagement has been related to better general learning outcomes, positive learning experiences, deep approaches to learning, general satisfaction, well-being and persistence. In this chapter, the authors introduce the Engagement Evaluation Questionnaire (EEQ) used to monitor the students’ learning experience. In their results, the intensity of engagement was found to decrease during the second year of study, and the importance of some individual elements of engagement, especially academic skills, was found to increase. Weak engagement was more likely to be found in the generalist fields of study than in professional fields. Of concern for university planning is the result that students found in the first year to be in the weakly engaging group seem to remain in the group into and throughout the second academic year.

In Chapter 9, Vanthournout, Catrysse, Gijbels, Donche, and Coertjens investigate the question of the degree to which higher education actually succeeds in promoting deep and self-regulated learning strategies in students and how it is influenced by prior learning and gender. Beginning from the accepted premise that deep approaches are needed in order to critically process information, relate ideas from different sources and monitor how learning is progressing, they ask: ‘To what extent do students undergo transitions towards this approach in the context of higher education?’ The chapter reports the results of the investigation into the development of learning strategies for a cohort of students for the entire three years of their professional bachelor degree. The higher education system is found to foster appropriate cognitive and metacognitive skills in successful students. The use of reproduction-oriented learning strategies decreases but a moderate use of these strategies remains and is associated with learning success. In terms of university planning, the most significant result found is that students who begin at a disadvantage, based on their prior education or gender, remain so during their continuing studies, indicating that the system is failing to address within-class differentiation.

Chapter 10 (Laakkonen & Nevgi) focuses on transitions in veterinary education, and how learning strategies, time management and stress influence the educational transitions within the preclinical context of veterinary students. The aim of the study was to deepen understanding of the transitions taking place during the veterinary programme by pinpointing the learning strategies, skills and factors related to well-being that help students successfully move through the transition phases. Building on an earlier study that showed that first-year veterinary students who had previously gained university credits achieved the learning goals with significantly less stress than other participants, they explored the well-being of students as they progressed beyond the first year from basic into clinical studies. They found that stress in the third-year students still correlated significantly with demanding learning goals and new subject matter. Their concluding message is that while most (mature) students were able to adapt to the changing learning goals, and become less concerned with their grades, they continued to experience stress in time management conflicts caused by non-academic factors and concurrent courses. They provide suggestions as to how universities might use this information in both curriculum design and teaching.

The third longitudinal study in Section II (Mortelmans & Spooren – Chapter 11) involved following the progress towards successful degree completion of more than 20,000 students entering their first year at one university in Belgium. In so doing they look at the transition into and within the whole degree, and find five effects influencing student dropout or graduation timing: field of study, some secondary school preparation, gender, and effects related to students with disability and/or an engagement with the world of work. As their study period incorporated the period of the implementation of the Bologna declaration in Europe, a comparison of survival curves until graduation before and after implementation is presented. The message for universities from this study is in the selection of students for entry into higher education.

Chapter 12 by Zhao, Sangster and Hounsell presents the reader with a withering array of barriers to be overcome by first-degree graduates who are studying for a Master’s degree in another country. The transitions include moving from undergraduate to postgraduate-level learning, from being at home to living abroad, and from a familiar teaching-learning culture to one that is new and unsettling. They may also be expected to cope with changes in the main subject of their studies and in the preferred language of teaching, learning and assessment. In results from their grounded theory-based qualitative approach, the authors identify four academic literacy practices as barriers to the achievement of Master’s literacies: autonomy in learning, acquiring expertise in subject discourses, critical and analytical thinking and interaction with teachers and students. They describe three ways that the higher education system might use their research: to seek ways of enhancing interaction with peers and teachers; to provide more time for non-native speakers to demonstrate their learning; and to advise on the provision of better preparation by institutions that provide first degrees.

Transitions within higher education: conceptual frameworks

Transition models focusing on transitions within higher education have had limited exploration, and substantive models describing and explaining areas such as growth and progress and study pace have not yet caught the attention of the research community when compared with transitions into the first year, and from higher education into the labour market. In fact no formal conceptual frameworks focused specifically on transitions within higher education are known to exist. It may also be the case that this aspect of student transitions is seen as being of less importance than transitions into and out of higher education. Using the Hussey and Smith (2010, p. 156) definition of transition (‘a significant change in a students’ life, self concept and learning: a shift from one state of understanding, development and maturity to another’), shifts in learning engagement or critical thinking may not be seen as significant. The results reported in these five chapters suggest otherwise, so the framework provided by Hussey and Smith is extended below to include examples within and beyond the five broad categories (knowledge, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• SECTION I: TRANSITIONS FROM SECONDARY TO HIGHER EDUCATION
• SECTION II: TRANSITIONS WITHIN HIGHER EDUCATION
• SECTION III: TRANSITIONS FROM HIGHER EDUCATION TO THE LABOUR MARKET
• Conclusion: Understanding higher education transitions: why theory, research and practice matter
• Index