Search

Pre-university enabling programs provide an important pathway to university for underprepared and disadvantaged students. In order to adequately prepare students for their university journey, enabling educators need to understand and respond to the evolving needs of their learners; not only their academic disparity, but also their past learning experiences and perceptions towards particular subjects. In the current study, students entering an Australian enabling program, 'OnTrack', were surveyed on their attitudes, emotions and aspirations towards the study of science and mathematics. Responses were associated with student perceptions of their past science and maths learning experiences. There was incongruity between student expectations of what future study would entail and the realities of their degree choices and career aspirations. This study suggests the need for social and emotional learning and teacher training. Greater attention should be given to both student's affective needs and their understanding of future course content during their enabling education experience to redress negative emotional learning experiences and safeguard student expectations, satisfaction, and retention in the future.

This paper analyzes how knowledge is reproduced as "universal" in contemporary higher education and how this production of universality influences the application of knowledge. Using a case study of clinical psychology, it describes the results of over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a university and professional settings in Singapore with short comparative field studies in Australia and the Netherlands. The results provide critical insights into the cultural effects and knowledge contestations within transnational higher education.

Peer-learning is an effective way to assist students to acquire study skills and content knowledge, especially in university courses that students find difficult, and it is an effective adjunct to improve student retention. In 2014, Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, commenced Peer Assisted Study Sessions (PASS) in two first-year undergraduate subjects: a mathematics (statistics) unit and a business unit. The key finding in this evaluation was that while female mathematics students improved their final marks in response to attending a greater number of sessions per semester, male students achieved lower final marks on average. Although several studies have shown that in PASS-like programs gender tends to not be a significant factor relating to achievement, our results suggest otherwise. In this article we posit the observed differences in achievement attributed to gender arise from complex gender-related issues, including gender stereotypes, student gender ratios in class, the gender of the teacher relative to the gender of the student, and gender-related motivation, engagement, and subject choice. An approach to remediate gender-associated differences in achievement for PASS attendees is proposed.

The rapidly changing workforce of the C21st places increasing demands on higher education institutions to produce graduates who possess sound academic credentials and key skills, and who furthermore demonstrate the ability to transfer knowledge and skills from their studies to the workplace. This paper begins with a definition of key/core skills, followed by a discussion of how they relate to transferable skills. A review of literature regarding the transference of skills from tertiary settings to workplaces in South-East Asia reveals that most literature of the region addresses key competencies rather than the transferable skills that employers value. Transferable skills are further analysed in the context of networked spaces of learning and the theory of connectivist learning. A case study of one networked classroom (NC) of an Australian university in Singapore is presented, highlighting how engagement in problem-based and project-based learning contributes to the development of transferable skills. Results indicate that the spatial and material resources of the NC intersect with practice-based learning experiences assisting students in skills acquisition by providing a teaching and learning space in which to apply transferable skills. Implications of this study point to the need for further research regarding embedding transferable skills within higher education curricula.

University enabling programs, worldwide, generally target high school students who excel at school, or post-secondary students who have underperformed in their university entry examinations. Murdoch University provides an access program for Year/Grade 12 students who are not on a university pathway during their final year of high school. This intervention engages students at a transitional stage of cognitive development to: (a) determine their readiness to move to the next level of their cognitive thinking; (b) facilitate that process through collaborative learning; (c) support and nurture university aspirations and (d) provide a direct transition pathway from secondary to higher education. The influence of Vygotsky's zones of proximal development in the context of this program is discussed, and by comparing the performance of these students in their first year of university with other domestic-entry students, we argue that this enabling program prepares them for successful transition into higher education.