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Swedish first-year students’ experiences of studying and learning were investigated with a focus on their interpretations of aspects of the teaching-learning environment they considered to have been important and/or problematic during the year. Data from 86 written student accounts and 15 semi-structured interviews were qualitatively analysed exploring the students’ narratives in terms of personal contextualisations of studying in first-year engineering. The different contextualisations identified among the students’ narratives could be most appropriately captured by the terms exertion, remediation, and autonomy, referring to the disparate ways that the students had understood and set about their studies in relation to perceived constraints of the learning environment. The investigation offers analyses of student learning in higher education derived from an alternative conceptualisation to those typically followed in research in this area.

The thesis describes and discusses an intentional perspective on learning in formal settings. An empirical study is presented where two groups of 4-6 undergraduate students of education discuss a task confronting them with the concept of probability. The group-discussions were recorded, transcribed, and analysed from an intentional perspective, i.e. a perspective focussing on the meaning-making process in which students ascribe meaning to the task. The study is a critical replication of a study by Kahneman & Tversky (1982) who presented college-students with the same task. It was found that 50% of the students failed to solve the task in accordance with the rules of probability, a fallacy that was explained in terms of "errors of understanding" or "errors of application" committed by the students in their problem-solving. In this study an alternative interpretation of the outcome is offered. It is shown how different ways of contextualising the task yield different interpretations of the concept of probability, and hence of the task as a problem: a set-theoretical contextualisation where the task is handled as a logical problem, a 'good-reason-assay contextualisation' where the task is solved as an everyday-problem of the likelihood of events, and a 'survey contextualisation' where the task is dealt with as a statistical problem. Against this background, it is proposed that the 'fallacy' observed by Kahneman & Tversky (1982) can be seen, not necessarily as a result of the students' lack of understanding of elementary probability, but as difficulties in contextualising the task as a problem of probability.