How do students prepare an application for a place in higher education?

Sources of help used by students when preparing an application for a place in higher education using the UCAS procedure were investigated, including how they may use Records of Achievement (RoAs). 178 sixth‐form students at three mixed comprehensives and one independent girls’ school were surveyed. In general, students consulted a good range of sources of help in preparing their application. Where a specialist careers adviser was available, this service was viewed very favourably. However, regard for the usefulness of RoAs was mixed. The major implications for those involved in student guidance with sixth‐formers are discussed.     

How do students define their roles and responsibilities in online learning group projects?

The goal of this study was to explore the processes of group role formation in online class settings. Qualitative analysis was used to code chat logs and discussion threads in six undergraduate Family and Consumer Sciences online courses that required online group projects. Four themes related to the process of group role formation emerged: testing the waters, apologies as being nice, tag – you’re it, and struggling to find one’s role. Students created roles of leader, wannabe, spoiler, agreeable enabler, coat‐tails, and supportive worker as the group process evolved over the course of the semester. Results lend support for a balance between allowing students to create and experience roles on their own and faculty assignment of roles. Questions are raised related to faculty approaches toward directing and scaffolding the group process.     

How stable is the stratification of higher education in England and Scotland?

This paper asks whether the institutional hierarchies defined by ‘golden triangle’, other Russell Group, other pre-1992 and post-1992 universities in England, and by ancient, old and new universities in Scotland, have become weaker since the 1990s. Using indicators constructed from Universities and Colleges Admissions Service data for 1996–2010, the article finds a stable hierarchical relationship among the sectors within each country, with some indicators showing a slight widening of status differences between sectors towards the end of the period. The main exception was a slight ‘upgrading’ of new (post-1992) universities in Scotland early in the period. There was little change in the association of institutional sector with social class, but in England the association with private secondary schools became slightly stronger and the association with ethnicity weakened.     

How do STEM-interested students pursue multiple interests in their higher educational choice?

Interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) has lately received attention in research due to a gap between the number of STEM students and the needs of the labour market. As interest seems to be one of the most important factors in deciding what to study, we focus in the present study on how STEM-interested students weigh multiple interests in making educational choices. A questionnaire with both open-ended and closed-ended items was administered to 91 STEM-interested students enrolled in a STEM programme of a Dutch University for secondary school students. Results indicate that students find it important that a study programme allows them to pursue multiple interests. Some students pursued multiple interests by choosing to enrol in two programmes at the same time. Most students chose one programme that enabled them to combine multiple interests. Combinations of pursued interests were dependent on the disciplinary range of interests of students. Students who were interested in diverse domains combined interests in an educational programme across academic and non-academic domains, whilst students who were mainly interested in STEM combined only STEM-focused interests. Together these findings stress the importance of taking a multiple interest perspective on interest development and educational choice.     

Technological factors of students’ persistence in online courses in higher education: The moderating role of gender,age and prior online course experience

Education and Information Technologies - The aim of this study was to verify if technological factors have an influence on persistence in online courses. A theoretical model encompassing seven...     

Enrolment choices in Portuguese higher education: do students behave as rational consumers?

As part of a progressive change occurring in the way public sector beneficiaries are conceived, higher education students started to be more and more perceived as clients or consumers. This implies assuming them as rational and conscious actors aware of what to expect from higher education attendance and of its returns. Framed by the metaphor of students as consumers, this paper aims to discuss whether students behave as rational consumers when choosing to enrol in higher education. Based on the findings of a qualitative study analysing Portuguese students’ choices it is possible to conclude that they tend to behave as rational consumers when they decide to attend higher education and when they choose a given institution, but not when they decide on attending a specific study programme. In this last case, instead of comparing the diverse study programmes and collecting information before forming their preference, students first formed this preference and, only then, gathered information. Student socialisation process emerged as a key element in shaping the preference for the study programme and in the vocation to choose it.     

Self-concept of students in higher education: are there differences by faculty and gender?

Many studies examine student self-concept during compulsory schooling but few have explored the self-concept of students in higher educational settings. The current study examined self-concept by faculty and gender among higher education students in New Zealand. Participants were 929 undergraduate students from a large New Zealand university. The results showed some differences in verbal and maths self-concept by faculty. Generally, students in faculties teaching subjects more reliant on maths skills had higher maths self-concept than those in faculties where facility in verbal skills was important. The opposite results were found for verbal self-concept. No overall gender differences were found for general, academic, verbal and maths self-concept although a statistically significant difference was found for problem-solving self-concept. This finding suggests students’ choice of faculty may be based on perceptions of their skills and capabilities in the various fields, irrespective of gender.     

Models of interuniversity collaboration in higher education — How do their features act as barriers and enablers to sustainability?

Tertiary Education and Management - This study combines conceptual and empirical review of the literature around interuniversity collaborations to identify known models and applications, and...     

Aspiration for global cultural capital in the stratified realm of global higher education: why do Korean students go to US graduate schools?

This study aims to understand Korean students’ motivations for studying in US graduate schools. For this purpose, I conducted in‐depth interviews with 50 Korean graduate students who were enrolled in a research‐centered US university at the time of the interview. In these interviews, I sought to understand how their motivations are connected not only with their family, school, and occupational backgrounds, but also with the stratification of global higher education. Theoretically, this paper attempts to combine the concept of global positional competition with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital in the field of global education. By critically examining a push–pull model of transnational higher education choice‐making, this study situates Korean students’ aspirations in the contexts of global power and the hierarchy of knowledge‐degree production and consumption. After analyzing the students’ qualitative interviews, I classify their motivations for earning US degrees within four categories: enhancing their class positions and enlarging their job opportunities; pursuing learning in the global center of learning; escaping the undemocratic system and culture in Korean universities; and fulfilling desires to become cosmopolitan elites armed with English communication skills and connections within the global professional network. Based on this analysis, I argue that Korean students pursue advanced degrees in the United States in order to succeed in the global positional competition within Korea as well as in the global job marketplace. As they pursue advanced US degrees, Korean students internalize US hegemony as it reproduces the global hierarchy of higher education, but at the same time Korean students see US higher education as a means of liberation that resolves some of the inner contradictions of Korean higher education, including gender discrimination, a degree caste system, and an authoritarian learning culture. Therefore, this study links Korean students’ aspiration for global cultural capital to complex and irregular structures and relations of class, gender, nationality, and higher education that extend across local, national, and global dimensions simultaneously.     

Facebook: An online environment for learning of English in institutions of higher education?

Facebook (FB) is currently considered as the most popular platform for online social networking among university students. The purpose of this study is to investigate if university students consider FB as a useful and meaningful learning environment that could support, enhance and/or strengthen their learning of the English language. A survey was carried out with 300 undergraduate students at Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Penang. It was found that the students believed FB could be utilized as an online environment to facilitate the learning of English. Nevertheless, teachers or language instructors have to integrate FB as an educational project with pre-determined learning objectives and outcomes for the learning experience to be meaningful. It is suggested that future research should focus on the meaningfulness of FB to students' language learning experiences.     

Technology use and learning characteristics of students in higher education: Do generational differences exist?

As digital technologies form an inextricable part of young people's everyday lives, some commentators claim that the current generation of learners think and learn differently from their predecessors. This study investigated the validity of this claim by surveying 799 undergraduate and 81 postgraduate students at a large research‐intensive university in New Zealand to document their use of digital technologies on university and social activities and comparing three age groups of students (under 20, 20–30 and over 30) to see whether there were any differences in their learning characteristics. The findings of the study showed that while students spent a large amount of time on digital technologies, the range of digital technologies they used was rather limited. There were also no practical generational differences in the technology use pattern and learning characteristics found in this study. The results of this study suggest that generation is not a determining factor in students' use of digital technologies for learning nor has generation had a radical impact on learning characteristics of higher education students.     

Why do not more prisoners participate in adult education? An analysis of barriers to education in Norwegian prisons

International Review of Education - From a lifelong learning perspective, education during incarceration is crucial for prisoners’ rehabilitation. This article describes the authors’...     

Are local students disadvantaged? Understanding institutional,local and national sense of belonging in higher education

Research on inequality in higher education (HE) is often dominated by class-based assumptions about traditional and non-traditional students. This binary distinction emphasising students’ socio-economic status tends to oversimply the complexity of educational inequality, neglecting crucial factors which affect the perception of social position. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the understanding of inequalities in HE with new data on the meaning of locality, using evidence from comparative studies of institutions. Locality is interpreted as an inclusive concept capturing place identity as well as local attachments based on language, culture and the natural environment. The qualitative and quantitative data were collected from 192 participants in three distinctly different HE institutions, which were deliberately selected according to their socio-economic, cultural, and institutional status. This mixed methods research confirms the importance of different types of belonging at institutional, local and national levels, and their different effects on student groups. The study captures to what extent geographical mobility is associated with social class, by examining students’ sense of belonging and their interpretation of locality in universities across Wales. It challenges the notion of disadvantaged background, and poses a critical question about cultural and geographical familiarity. This study therefore enriches the current debates about the impact of social inequality alongside social class on students’ belonging, success and retention in HE.     

In search of the feeling of ‘belonging’ in higher education: undergraduate students transition into higher education

ABSTRACT

Previous research that evaluated first year students’ transition into university found that the values of ‘being, belonging and becoming’ were important in particular within the first few months and within the first year of university. From our previous work, we reported that three things matter to students: the academic staff they work with, the nature of their academic study and the feeling of belonging. This paper provides a further illumination to our work by reporting on the qualitative data collected in the same study. The study included 530 students from five cohorts over a five-year period. As part of the Student Experience Evaluation instrument, open-ended questions probed students about their early experiences of belonging and transition into university. This original research uses rich data to illuminate the scales and items from previous quantitative data analysis to explore ‘belonging’, triangulated with research from the field. This paper is timely due to increased emphasis placed on learning and teaching with the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework. Student satisfaction is not a simplistic measure and this study articulates the complexity of student belonging in Higher Education.     

Small data,online learning and assessment practices in higher education: a case study of failure?

In this paper, we present an in-depth case study of a single student who failed an online module which formed part of a master’s programme in Professional Education and Leadership. We use this case study to examine assessment practices in higher education in the online environment. In taking this approach, we go against the current predilection for Big Data which has given rise to ‘learning analytics’, a data-intensive approach to monitoring learning. In particular, we draw attention to the model of the learner produced by learning analytics and to issues of ‘dataveillance’ in online learning. We also use the case to examine assessment in higher education more broadly, exploring the tensions between the requirements for certification and the need for learning. We conclude that assessment practices in higher education may have more to do with ‘quality assurance’ and regulatory frameworks than with ‘enhancing the student experience’ and inculcating the qualities that mark out higher education as an ethical project.     

How do teachers interpret and transform entrepreneurship education?

During the last decade, entrepreneurship education has become a central curricular topic in many locations in the world. In Sweden, entrepreneurship education was implemented in the curriculum for the first time in 2011, as something that should be included in all upper secondary school programmes. In this article, we focus on one of these programmes, the handicraft programme, investigating how entrepreneurship education is formulated in the latest curriculum and how teachers understand and transform such content in their teaching. Drawing on Bernstein’s concepts of classification and framing, we illustrate how entrepreneurship education in the Swedish curriculum has a ‘dual definition’, representing very different framing and classification, but still clearly belongs in a ‘market relevance’ discourse. This is expressed through the way in which the concept is transformed by teachers in their teaching. We also find that entrepreneurship education has low legitimacy among teachers, particularly when it is classified weakly. The weak framing and classification, taken together with the low legitimacy among teachers, are likely to lead to very different transformations of entrepreneurship education in different educational contexts. In the long run, this could have a negative effect on the equivalence of teaching at upper secondary school.     

Who aspires to higher education? Axes of inequality,values of education and higher education aspirations in secondary schools in Luxembourg and the Swiss Canton of Bern

This article reports a study that investigated secondary school students’ higher education aspirations (towards university studies, ISCED 6 and above) and how these differ between student groups as well as how these are impacted by values of education. Panel data of more than 300 secondary school students in two countries, Luxembourg and Switzerland (the Swiss Canton of Bern) was analysed. Schools are structured differently in the education systems of Luxembourg and the Swiss Canton of Bern. The results of our analysis show that students in the Luxembourgish sample more often aspire to higher education than in the Swiss sample. Disparities in higher education aspirations were also more pronounced in the Luxembourgish sample, boys and students from families of low socio‐economic status (SES) were less likely to aspire to higher education. While the effects of values of education are generally scarce, stimulation in terms of anticipated enjoyment and interest derived from participation in higher education seems to have a positive effect on higher education aspirations.