Getting Ready for College
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #140
A couple of posts ago I discussed what university lecturers (should) know about learning, viewing this within the issue of SoTL – the scholarship of teaching and learning in Higher Education settings.
I thought I’d follow this up with an example that is of great interest to me: study skills, and how new students adapt to college and university contexts. This is of notable relevance to school practitioners as well as to lecturers (not to mention parents and the students themselves!).
Unfortunately, it appears that many learners do not cope well with the changed demands and expectations of college courses compared to high school. Depending on the course, such demands may include:
A different level and style of reading material;
Increased independent learning;
More need for note-taking, e.g. during lectures;
A greater emphasis on process, methodology and analysis than on mastering a defined set of content.
As such, the transition to HE can be very challenging and, at times, highly stressful (Worsley et al., 2021). Naturally, in times of stress, people rely on tried and tested strategies, and many may be unaware that the guidance that served them well in the school system can actually undermine their university performance.
Researchers Nel and colleagues, in a study carried out in South Africa, wrote: “students are increasingly underprepared for higher education studies ... particularly learners from disadvantaged backgrounds” (Nel et al, 2009, p. 974). This mirrors findings in the USA and elsewhere.
Current research
I’m looking at this exact issue in some of my own work. I’ve spent time over the past year interviewing our first year students with a view to finding out their study habits, their views on learning, and what they have learned from previous context.
I hope to publish the findings in due course. Initial findings suggest that students vary widely in terms of how well prepared they have been in their earlier studies and in terms of the study strategies they are using now. Many draw heavily on parents and friends for advice on how to study and how to approach assessments – potentially disadvantaging first-generation students.
You can perhaps see in the above example that if practitioners are to carry out research in their own teaching contexts, it really helps to have some familiarity with learning, memory, metacognition, etc. The research I’ve just described is explicitly informed by the work of Kornell & Bjork (2007) on self-regulated learning.
A potential outcome from this research is to feed into advice given to incoming 1st year students next year, thus providing a helpful feedback loop between research and practice.
A related project on which I am working with several faculty colleagues is looking in detail at the way that school assessments here in Scotland are structured, and using this to guide lecturers about incoming students’ likely assumptions and expectations.
If anyone out there would like to find out more, or even to collaborate as this research develops, I’d love to hear from you.
Next time I will return with part 2 of my discussion of areas of confusion in cognitive science. Many thanks to those who commented on the first part!
All the best for the coming week,
Jonathan
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