Student experiences of first-year university: An Australian case study

The impetus for this study was a concern for first-year Bachelor of Education (Primary) students, and whether students experienced or engaged with the university support services offered by the university. My interest also grew from my experiences of teaching first-year Bachelor of Education (Primary) students. Within this context there developed a passion to understand and optimise learning experiences for all students, particularly those who had gained entry to the degree with low scores or through alternative pathway entry.
Entry for students with low entry scores can be traced to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) goals of increasing the percentage of each member country’s population with a university degree. Australia, like all OECD countries, has implemented plans to increase university student numbers, and this can be seen in the large increase in the student population at Australian Catholic University. Even though universities offer many and varied support services, this study seeks to establish if the services provided are used by students and supportive of student needs, in accord with better understanding and enhancing student engagement. With this context in mind, the research question for this study was: How do first-year Bachelor of Education (Primary) students at Australian Catholic University (ACU) on the Brisbane campus engage with supports and experience university life, and can a tool be developed to assess engagement that will benefit the wider higher education community?
The research explored this question by drawing on the perspectives of 93 first-year Bachelor of Education (Primary) students and three non-academic staff at Australian Catholic University on the Brisbane campus, Banyo. This was achieved by adopting an interpretivist study that used symbolic interactionism with two phases of data collection and analysis: Exploration and Inspection. The Exploration Phase was quantitative using the Study Process Questionnaire (SPQ; Biggs, 1987), while the Inspection Phase used a qualitative approach with semi-structured in-depth focus group interviews and semi-structured in-depth individual interviews. Quantitative analysis confirmed Biggs’s (1987) earlier work that there were three main factors influencing student approaches to learning: Surface approaches, Deep approaches, and Achieving approaches. The qualitative analysis indicated that there were three main factors influencing student engagement: Personal transition to university, Social experiences at university, and Academic experiences at university. These findings led to the advancement of three theoretical propositions and the development of the Spectrum of Engagement Framework (SOEF) and the Spectrum of Engagement Self-Assessment Tool (SOESAT), with both representing new contributions to the field and with both having important implications for first-year student engagement.