There is widespread concern that students are increasingly becoming passive consumers of education who primarily attend university to obtain the credentials they need for the labour market. To interrogate this view, a longitudinal qualitative study examined what 47 students in three countries wanted to get out of studying for their degree (their…

Student learning inventories are used by both researchers and educators as tools to identify "at risk" students. This article critically interrogates the results of one of these inventories, the 18-item Approaches to Learning and Studying Inventory. In-depth interviews were held with a purposive sample of 10 first-year engineering…