Moving beyond access: reflective learning commentaries as a WP resource

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Moving beyond access reflective learning
commentaries as a WP resource

• Sally Findlow
• Keele University

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Aims

• Students perceptions of challenge and difficulty
  in the school-university transition
• How they feel about these and strategies they
  have adopted to overcome them
• Their experiences of transformation in
  organisational, cognitive and social terms
• How they construct career and identity
  frameworks around their experiences
• Their thoughts about learning and HE
• And how these things might in certain
  circumstances be different for non-traditional
  students

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School-university transition

• large amounts of unguided reading
• having no expectations
• There was a definite feeling of being bombarded
  with information
• I felt slightly overwhelmed with all this stuff
  I was supposed to be remembering
• I was told that the reading we were set was
  the bare minimum!
• Even when I managed to get some shelf marks for
  possible books, I was unable to find the numbers
  anywhere.

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Transformation

• I have now begun to prevail over this.
• I have become more efficient / confident
• This way my work stayed in order.
• I became more organised and efficient with my
  time.
• I felt more in control with my note taking.
• The short presentation that I had to do made
  me think about techniques to improve myself.

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Roles, identities power

• I feel I have acquired skills in preparation,
  group cooperation in order to meet pre-set
  requirements.
• enabled me to understand the criteria and
  standards expected.
• .
• I left all my family and friends to start my new
  life at Keele.

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So, the questions

1. What difficulties and obstacles are students
   encountering in the school-university transition,
   and what are their strategies for overcoming
   these difficulties?
2. What kinds of transformations do students
   accounts describe cognitive, and social?
3. How far are alternative roles and identities
   being explored?
4. What do students see as the function of HE?
5. To what extent are perceptions of benefit seen in
   cultural and whole person development, as well as
   economic, terms?
6. How do answers differ between different sorts of
   students (including non-traditional students)
   and different universities?
7. What relationships are there between prior
   educational experience and current experience of
   HE in these terms?
8. What evidence is there of the impacts in these
   terms of different policy initiatives and
   pedagogic approaches?