This thesis, located within the field of student transition to university, investigates several aspects of the understanding of prospective students about learning and teaching in higher education; it does this within a geographical setting relevant to my own practice, which involves responsibility for students within a faculty of a large English medium-tariff university. The research is prompted partly by developments in higher education public information requirements, particularly those relating to information about the balance of class contact and independent study, and partly by the relative lack of empirical research amongst UK students before they enter university into what they are expecting. The primary research tool was a short questionnaire completed by just over 500 prospective university students in their final year at post-16 institutions in the city region of my university. The questionnaire contained predominantly closed questions relating to expectations about aspects of learning and teaching at university and about the information which they had taken from the website of the university at which they were hoping to study. Subsidiary research tools were a content analysis of a sample of university websites undertaken to assist in the formulation of the questionnaire and a further email exchange with a few of the questionnaire respondents. The main findings suggest that, even within a sample skewed towards traditional and academically high achieving students, there are very varied understandings of the nature of independent learning and a substantial minority of students have inaccurate expectations about university study. The entry tariff for the university which the respondents were hoping to attend and the level of higher education participation of their post-16 institution appeared to be more important variables in terms of levels of understanding than demographic differences. The new public information requirements relating to class time and independent study appeared to have little impact.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:646151 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Tolmie, Fiona Mary |
| Publisher | University College London (University of London) |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10021759/ |
Page generated in 0.018 seconds