Editorial

As one academic year draws to a close and another begins, as educators we once more turn attention to our preparations for the courses that we run for those students who are returning, fresh we hope, from their break in order to continue with their studies. We must also plan the activities that we design for those who are coming into higher education for the first time, at undergraduate level, and for whom the transition is, as the literature and our own experience tells us, not without its difficulties and challenges. It is, for these students, an exciting time as, often, they are living away from home for the first time and, both at home and in their studies at university, need to rely far more on their own resourcefulness and capabilities than was the case while living at home and attending pre-university-level education. No wonder, then, that the literature on ‘transition’ is both extensive and ongoing, given the focus that must necessarily be placed on this vital aspect of learning in higher education. It is from day 1, their first day at university, that our future graduates begin to learn and/or further develop the competencies, skills and abilities that comprise ‘graduateness’. Quite what comprises ‘graduateness’ is not easy to define, and even less easy to measure, but they are the higher level aspects of thinking that, the word assumes, are somehow different from those of a non-graduate. These include, for example, suitable criticality, independence of thought and taking responsibility for our own learning and development.

That said, learning and developing such competencies, skills and abilities cannot solely be attributed to having ‘gone to university’ or, more accurately, to having completed an undergraduate degree programme. Many well-known (and not so well-known) people have not only managed to achieve what they want in their personal lives and also their careers by not going to university, with Bill Gates, of Microsoft fame, springing to mind, but who consider themselves to be happy (and it is happiness that must, surely, be more important than ‘just’ a job or career that someone has deemed to be ‘a graduate-level job or career’). While having a degree from a university is certainly an achievement, and one for which graduates should be congratulated, the question to be asked is not so much ‘what graduate-level job or career are you going to pursue with this qualification now that you have graduated’ but instead ‘what is it that, in your personal and work life, will make you happy in life, more generally’. That may or may not be a graduate-level job or career, but even if it is, it might perhaps be in another field altogether. The media is awash with stories of people who, having graduated in, say, geography find themselves running their country’s most successful advertising agency, or something equally as far away from geography as it is possible to be. Our role, as educators, is, certainly, to help our students to learn or develop suitable criticality, independence of thought and the rest, but we must think more widely than just ‘preparing them for a job/career closely related to the discipline within which they found themselves at university’. It is, to coin a phrase, about lifelong learning, perhaps formal but more likely informal, and about learning far more than just that which is related to the necessary narrowness afforded by a particular discipline.

We are talking (or should be talking) about the whole person here, and this goes far beyond merely a job or career, even for those whose career and ‘success’ in such is central to their enjoyment of life. It is not too difficult a task, I would argue, to help an undergraduate to prepare for the world of work, and all universities have designed programmes that foster development of work-related competencies, skills and abilities. Even in a recession, as is currently the case, our graduates usually manage to find work, even if it is more difficult than is the case when the economy is buoyant. Yes, a minority of graduates will, in a recession, have to take a first job that, perhaps, is not that which is considered to be a graduate-level job, but this is a consequence of a recession and not due to some innate ‘lack’ on the part of the graduate or our own programmes. Instead, like us all, graduates in a recession have to think more ‘big picture’, that is, long term, difficult though this is (and no one underestimates the anxiety that is associated with getting our foot on the first rung of the job ladder). Together with what are usually well-designed programmes we would hope, all universities have a raft of additional services and support, such as career offices, to help our learners to make the transition from university to the world of work, although in a recession this is, naturally, a more difficult task than when the economy is in good or great shape. Far more difficult than helping our graduates to get their first job after graduation is to assist them in the task of thinking far beyond both their first job and to think about their lives in a wider, psychological and more social sense. I suspect that most of us, as educators, who ‘could do better’ applies here, despite the efforts we put in when it comes to helping our learners to think about themselves as individuals, holistically (rather than as ‘graduates’ or ‘students’). We begin that task as our students enter university on day 1, and the first article of this issue recognises that the transition to university-level study is in part about getting to grips with a learning environment in which much more emphasis is placed upon the student/learner to both understand themselves, as learners, and to self-direct their efforts towards their learning goals. Entitled ‘Enhancing self-directed learning through a content quiz group learning assignment’, authors Natalie Warburton and Simone Volet, at Murdoch University, Australia, cite literature supporting the view that self-directed and self-regulated learning is widely accepted as being central to whatever ‘success’ might mean at university. And, although they did not say so, to anything that they, or we, do outside of the four walls of the university.

Providing a useful overview of the literature on self-directed and self-regulated learning, including as it does metacognitive strategies and reflection, the authors rightly say that we, as educators, need to help many of our learners to develop such skills, hence the need to design what is called ‘structured “powerful” learning environments’, which, literature tells us, ‘is more effective than minimally guided instruction’. While many if not all of us either implicitly or explicitly attempt to foster the development of such skills during the first year (and we hope the remaining years), it is the case, say the authors, that there are few studies that have shed light on the development of self-regulated learning skills as they are embedded in the teaching of the theories and related to the discipline itself. Describing their use of a ‘content quiz group assignment’ with their students, results reported in their article demonstrate that this helped students to direct their attention to identifying and using key learning resources, which, in this case, meant lecture summaries, something that, perhaps, not many of us use as a ‘tool’. The use of this ‘content quiz group assignment’ also allowed them to make better connections between different activities (e.g. lectures and labs) and also develop skills of criticality when it came to evaluating sources of information and also citing/referencing those sources. The authors conclude by reiterating the important point, namely, that ‘structured support’ at this particular time at university is, somewhat paradoxically, central to our learners becoming the autonomous self-directed learners that they need to be both within and beyond university. Adapting to university-level study is also the subject of the second article in this issue. Its authors, David Kember, Celina Hong and Amaly Ho, at the University of Hong Kong, look at transition from the perspective of how, when students encounter difficulties this may be attributed in part or in whole to the mismatch between what they expected to find and what they actually found, that is, reality did not match expectation (or the other way around, however you look at it).

Entitled ‘From model answers to multiple perspectives: Adapting study approaches to suit university study’, the authors say that when looking at transition we should not forget that this may vary not only from institution to institution but also from one country/culture to another and that although we have made much effort to do bridge the gap between school and university, our students are still saying that they feel ill-prepared for university study. Part of our task, as educators, is to help our learners to integrate into what the authors call ‘learning communities’, which, if well designed, cater for the interaction and collaboration needed. In their article, the authors discuss social and academic affiliation, drawing on the well-known work of both Tinto and Durkheim. When applied to higher education, integration, say the authors, takes place when students hold beliefs consistent with the demands placed upon them and they follow the social conventions set by the community that they are becoming integrated into. The extent to which they collaborate (or not) is, say the authors, linked to deep and surface learning approaches and, if there is an appropriate learning environment within the university, it fosters the development of relationships outside of the classroom, all of which makes its contribution to students and their learning in some way. The beliefs that students (or anyone else) hold about something affect their/our behaviours. It is said that ‘epistemological beliefs’, that is, beliefs about what knowledge is and is not and related is important to understand if we are to bridge the gap between that which our incoming undergraduates expect will happen and what they actually encounter when they find themselves at university, and adapting to the new environment in which they find themselves. Drawing on seminal work in the field, the authors look at the ‘developmental positions’ that are involved, including basic duality, multiple theories or opinions, relativism and degrees of commitment to positions and beliefs. The authors sum up the literature by saying that we have come to understand that there are two broad categories of belief, namely, naïve and sophisticated, and that knowledge is itself divided into categories. Citing research that suggests that many of our graduates, at the end of their studies, ‘graduate still holding pre-reflective beliefs’, it is clear that we have much to do with regard to both understanding beliefs per se and to helping our learners to reflect on their beliefs and to determine whether adjustment is to be made (should such decisions be conscious).

The review of the literature in the article suggests that the issue of difficulties facing students in adapting to university study is worthy of further investigation and that there is a need to so in terms of the culture in which such students learn. ‘Un-learning’ is as difficult (some might say more difficult in some ways) yet as important as ‘learning’, as is the case with so much in life; something that we have all experienced at some point or another. Integrating into the culture/environment in which our learners find themselves involves working together, both within and often outside the classroom. While working in groups is most definitely a good thing, and a necessary thing (human beings are social beings by nature, so it is inbuilt that we do so), when it comes to ‘helping others’, the matter is complicated when it is bound up with learning and, importantly, assessment of that learning, something explored in the third article comprising this issue. The title says it all, in a way, namely, ‘The problem of free-riding in group projects: Looking beyond social loafing as reason for non-contribution’. Its authors, David Hall and Simone Buzwell, from Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, describe the known benefits of working in groups to our future graduates while at university and thus why we all ask our students to undertake such activity. These include the skills of communication, teamwork and leadership, which, as they rightly say, are those that employers are saying that our current graduates lack and which, it seems, employers believe that it is the job of the universities (rather than employers themselves) to help their future workers to develop. This is a tricky one as, whereas higher education is in part about development of self, universities need to ensure that university education is not merely ‘a training course’.

‘Education’ and ‘training’ overlap but are, at heart, different things. That aside, group work gives students the opportunity to work alongside others, on often complex tasks, and to produce whatever is to be produced as a result of that endeavour. However, unlike in the work situation, the results of such effort at university usually have marks attached to it, and so it is no easy task to deal with the assessment side of this activity. We award degrees not to groups but to individuals, and so if we award marks, we need to be able to account for why each individual student is deserving of a particular mark. As working in groups is for the most part done outside the classroom, where activity is not visible to us, the markers, we are therefore marking not their ability to work in a group (which we did not see and cannot see and have little or no evidence of) but instead the product of that work, for example, a report (which we have in front of us). It is straightforward to justify why we award a particular mark to, say, a report, and it is open to others to look at that same report/evidence and to subject it to suitable scrutiny and treatment (by a moderator, another examiner or anyone else). ‘Work done in a group, outside the classroom’ is entirely different and is not open to such scrutiny, either by the marker or by anyone else. It does, however, reduce our workload, as markers but this is no reason at all to set an assessment task for a group, say, one report, rather than to set an assessment task to be done by each individual within that group. As the authors of this article say, citing literature to support this claim, while there are benefits to students to work in groups, when there are problems, these can be a major issue. Indeed, any educator with any experience of having set a task to be done by students within a groupwork setting can tell you that whatever saving of time spent on marking, say, one report for a group of five students (rather than marking five reports), can easily turn into double that amount of time in dealing with the complaints and issues that one or more students within that group face!

Issues are fully detailed in this article when talking about ‘dysfunctional groups’ and which we, as educators, have all experienced and which, more pertinently, our students have all experienced. As the authors say, it is not that there is a problem or issue with the task itself but instead that an individual (or individuals) encounters a problem or issue with one or more of the other members of the group. Not least of these issues or problems is ‘freeriding’, the subject of this article and the study within it. ‘Freeriding’ raises the thorny matter of what is ‘fair’. If you choose (and we have a choice) to award one single mark to a group of, say, five students, then if there is actual or perceived difference of effort/contribution, yet all five get exactly the same mark, then it is no surprise that those students who believe that they have made the greater effort/contribution are going to say that it is ‘unfair’. It is. To somehow shrug this off, as some do, by saying ‘well, that is what happens in the workplace, so students have to learn this hard lesson (and accept it)’ is unacceptable as a response. We are not ‘the workplace’, and it bears repeating that we award degrees not to groups but to individuals and we need to be able to account for, and justify, every single mark. Also called ‘social loafing’, say the authors, not only can this affect students’ enjoyment of the task but, one can imagine, it may negatively affect how they feel about themselves and others. However, as the authors rightly say, we must be wary of thinking of ‘freeriding’ as merely about ‘difficult students’ and how we might manage them. Instead, why they behave in the way that they do may well be due to complex reasons, which are fully detailed in the article, as is how this might be combatted. Is freeriding common practice and, whether it is or not, why does it happen and what impact does it have on the group? The study described in this article sought to find this out. Their article tells us that, regardless of discipline, ‘freeriding is a major concern for students’. Unsurprisingly, it is the ‘perceived inequality’ that looms large here, something that, say the authors, may perhaps be addressed by the application of peer assessment.

The matter of assessment is never far away and this is a subject addressed in the fourth article. As the authors Maddalena Taras and Mark S Davies rightly say, like everything else in life, assessment is as much affected by our ‘perceptions and prejudices’. Entitled ‘Perceptions and realities in the functions and processes of assessment’, the article details how, over the last five decades, our views on all aspects of assessment, as well as learning and teaching, have changed enormously. Claiming that there is a lack of alignment between the ‘process of assessment’ and the ‘function of assessment’, both of which are explained in detail in the article, what is explored here is the tensions between what is known as ‘assessment for learning’ and ‘assessment of learning’ concerning formative and summative assessment. While no one could disagree that it is important to ensure that whatever we do with regard to assessment is ‘ethical, transparent and communicated’, one person’s ‘transparent’ is another’s ‘not transparent at all’, hence back to the matter of perceptions. The study described in the article explores whether what we, educators, understand about assessment is ‘clear, cogent, coherent and shared’. Unsurprisingly perhaps, results from the study demonstrate that perceptions of each are varied and that this might well be attributed to ‘a general lack of understanding of the terms used’. And, say the authors, if educators themselves do not fully understand either the terms or summative and formative assessment itself, then it is perhaps no surprise that they report that students themselves do not understand them either. There is, they say, ‘confusion at a fundamental level’, despite much literature and activity about assessment over the years about something which is by no means new (summative and formative assessment is not new). The authors posit why this might be and call for further investigation into this, a central part, of our work in higher education.

Linked to assessment is the feedback that we, markers, provide to our learners, which is the subject of the fifth article. In this article, its author, Anders Jonsson, from Malmö University, Sweden, looks not at the feedback that we, markers, provide but instead what our learners do, or perhaps more pertinently, do not do with it. Entitled ‘Facilitating productive use of feedback in higher education’, the article begins by looking at what is and is not feedback, saying that while we might write (or perhaps convey, orally) some comments for the student about, say, an item of coursework that is formative in nature, is it actually ‘feedback’? Perhaps not. Sadler (1989) says that it should be called ‘feedback’ only if it is actually used, by the student, to take action of some sort that is designed to directly improve their future performance. If not, says Sadler, it is just ‘dangling data’. If we are honest, much of what we might call ‘feedback’ is instead ‘justification for why this piece of assessment got the mark that it did’. However, this is perhaps not unsurprising as, in addition to providing feedback to students on their performance, we, markers, also have to provide evidence of robust quality assurance of the marks awarded and also of the marking process, and providing justification of our marks makes its contribution towards this necessary function. Providing feedback that serves both as ‘proper’ feedback to the student and serves to demonstrate assurance of quality of marking is a pretty big an ask here and we should perhaps instead ‘un-bundle’ these two different functions in some way. Regardless of the complexities of doing this, even if it is necessary or justified, the article reports on literature, backed up by our own experience, that ‘a number’ of students do not use the ‘feedback’ (if it is ‘feedback’) that we provide. Of those who actually read the comments, only a small minority of these actually used them in order to make changes to their future behaviour(s). As the author says, it is easy to say (and students often say it) that ‘the feedback that we write is not good enough’ and there is ample evidence to support this claim. However, there are clearly plenty of markers/educators who, in contrast, provide ‘extensive, positive, and supportive feedback’, as the literature attests, so why, as this is the case, do students not make use of it? The article tells us why not.

Feedback is in part bound up with our dialogue with our learners and, these days, that dialogue is not merely in the classroom, face to face. As in the non-classroom situation, and regardless of country or culture, we have all witnessed the phenomenal growth and use of mobile phones in our lives, and so it is no surprise that there are many educators who, these days, have brought ‘the outside’ (use of mobile phones in our personal lives) into ‘the inside’ (our classrooms). The review of the literature in the sixth and final article of this issue tells us just how much mobile phones are used these days and cites literature that suggests that using our mobile phones will, in the not too distant future, do away with the need for computers. Whether this is the case or not, no one can disagree that along with the increase in the use of mobile phones, their use in the classroom has also increased significantly. In their article entitled ‘Investigating the use of text messages in mobile learning’, its author Gretchen Geng, from Charles Darwin University, Australia, tells us that what is called ‘m-learning’ (‘mobile learning’) supports what is most certainly the case, namely, that much (if not all) of the learning that our learners do is outside, not inside, the classroom. As the author notes, however, the use of mobile phones does not have to be solely limited to outside the classroom; mobile phones can be used, and are being used, within the ‘traditional’ classroom, too. In the article, the author looks at text messaging via this channel of communication. As our new, incoming undergraduate students are, for the most part, extremely adept at texting and use their mobile phones what seems to be all day every day (walk down any street or sit anywhere and most young people are on their mobile phones for one thing or another), these ‘digital natives’, as they are termed, are perhaps pretty taken aback to find that most of our classrooms in higher education do not make use of texting/mobile phones.

Cited in the article is a study that says that the use of texting ‘provide[s] students with connection and community between themselves and their lecturers and [has] a positive influence on persistence’ which, given that students are most likely to drop out of university in their first year, anything that encourages ‘persistence’ has got to be a good thing. Associated with being a ‘digital native’ is what in the article is termed being a speaker of the ‘digital language’ that goes with it, for example, writing ‘LOL’ instead of ‘laugh out loud’. Using texting and/or encouraging its use might have some of us holding up our hands in horror, believing that this will lead to a decline in the ability of students to write ‘properly’, that is, their levels of literacy will be negatively affected. Not so, it seems from this article. Or, not from evidence from texting at pre-university level, anyway, where it has been found that the use of text messaging may be positively rather than negatively associated with reading and writing attainment. However, does the use of text messaging positively or negatively influence the level of literacy of students within higher education when it comes to their reading and writing abilities? The study described in this article sought to find this out, and also whether the use of texting increases motivation and engagement. The results and conclusions from this study make for very interesting reading (whether you are reading this from a ‘traditional’ source, namely, a hard copy of this journal article, or from your mobile phone!). Whether we like them, or use them, the use of mobile phones is set to increase, and so if we are keen to do whatever we can to keep up or improve our students’ motivation and/or engagement, the sooner we ‘design in’ the use of mobile technology within our learning environments, whether within our or outside the classroom, it could be argued, the more our students will appreciate it. And, on that note, I very much hope that you will enjoy reading this and other articles that comprise this issue.