The First Year - what's it like for students?

Acknowledgement is due to ATTUNE, the academic development newsletter from the University of New England, for source material for this article. The full paper by McInnis & James (1994) is available from the Teaching and Learning Centre.

"For first year university students, orientations towards learning are in a formative stage and inextricably linked to the pursuit of identity and a sense of competence developed in a social context." The above statement is drawn from a summary of a paper titled The First Year Experience in Australian Universities: Patterns of Affiliation and Academic Involvement, presented at the Conference of the Society for Research into Higher Education, York, UK, in 1994. The following information drawn from the summary gives some indication of what we can expect in the soon to be released report from the Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching's commissioned study into The First Year Experience: University Responses to a More Diverse Population. The study was prompted by the belief that the increasingly diverse student population in Australian universities had generated problems for teaching and learning.

A representative stratified sample of first year students was drawn from eight Australian universities. Questionnaire responses from over 5,000 students were analysed.

Responses suggested that students balance goals related to the satisfaction of intrinsic interest, vocational preparation and self-development. In making their decision to go to university, students said the important factors were:

• studying in a field that interests them (94%)
• improving their job prospects (85%); and
• developing their talents and creative abilities (74%).

The results indicated that not as many students as imagined come to university to acquire job-specific knowledge. While 83% of students agreed that they have a strong desire to do well in their subjects, only 17% believed it was important to choose subjects that improved the chance of getting top marks, and 61% said they enjoyed the `intellectual challenge' of their subjects.

With respect to diversity, on academic involvement by age, higher proportions of older students agreed that they got a lot of satisfaction from studying and studied beyond the minimum requirements of the course (Table 1).

Taking gender into account, Table 2 shows a higher proportion of female students getting a lot of satisfaction from studying, and fewer agreeing that they only study the minimum required. The study showed that while the academic involvement of students from homes where a language other than English is spoken was much the same as for the rest of the sample, social involvement of these students was markedly lower. They were more inclined than other students to agree that they had not made close friends at university (24% vs 19%) and that they kept to themselves (27% vs 23 %).

Students who seriously considered deferring university study in the first six months of their course cited the following main reasons:

• emotional health problems (21%)
• disliking study (18%), and
• disliking the course (18%).

The First Year (continued)

In terms of social involvement, a much higher proportion of the potential deferrers (26%) had not made close friends at university, more of this group kept to themselves (29%) and were not interested in extra-curricular activities (29%)

The paper concluded that there was some support in the data for the view that successful learning and a positive view of the university experience does not occur in a social vacuum. "This may strike educators as a remarkably banal observation, but our experience in this study suggests that innovations aimed at enhancing teaching and learning - especially, but not only, the use of technology - too readily overlook the importance of the social context. This is probably more important at the first year level than at any other time."