This study examines differences in university students' approaches to learning when attending tutorials as well as variation in students' perceptions of tutorials as an educational arena. In-depth qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with undergraduates showed how surface and deep approaches to learning were revealed in the…

The purpose of this article is to study how students allocate time to different university and extra-university activities and to identify factors that might explain variability both between and within fields of study. At the heart of this exercise is the question of the time students dedicate to academic activities in competition with a whole…

This study investigated the relationships among approaches to learning, regulation of learning, cognitive and attributional strategies, stress, exhaustion, and study success. University students (N = 437) from three faculties filled in a questionnaire concerning their self-reported study behaviour, cognitive strategies, and well-being. Their…

The central goal of this study is to clarify to what degree former education and students' personal characteristics (the "Big Five personality characteristics", personal orientations on learning and students' study approach) may predict study outcome (required credits and study continuance). Analysis of the data gathered through questionnaires of…

Previous studies of "the Chinese learner" have confounded the effects of culture and context or have used heterogeneous samples of students. In this study, 134 British students and 207 students from mainland China following 1-year postgraduate programmes at six British business schools completed the Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ)…

This paper examines the validity of the "Approaches and Study Skills Inventory for Students--short version" (ASSIST; Tait et al. in "Improving student learning: Improving students as learners", 1998), to be used with Portuguese undergraduate students. The ASSIST was administrated to 566 students, in order to analyse a…

In this article, an alternative for Tinto's integration theory of student persistence is proposed and tested. In the proposed theory, time available for individual study is considered a major determinant of both study duration and graduation rate of students in a particular curriculum. In this view, other activities in the curriculum, in…

The number of contact hours, one of the important institutional context factors, was examined and compared between Dutch and Vietnamese higher education at institute and student levels in Psychology and Business and/or Economics specializations. The quantity of contact hours per credit point given by institutions was investigated in a number of…

This study investigated the relationships between demographic characteristics, motives and attitudes to studying, self-reported study behaviour and measures of outcome. Students taking courses by distance learning received a postal survey containing a short form of the Motivated Strategies and Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) and the Revised…

Findings are presented from a study of undergraduate students' experiences of understanding in first-year engineering. At the end of their first year of study 86 Swedish students of electrical engineering and computer science were asked to reflect in writing on their experiences of studying and learning. Fifteen of them also took part in…

Conceptions of learning and strategies used by 15 indigenous students in three Australian universities were studied longitudinally over three years. Their academic achievements were good, but at a high cost in terms of time and effort. In spite of the fact that almost half of the students expressed higher-order (qualitative) conceptions of…

Previous research has generally failed to find a relation between the way students approach the task of studying and their exam grades. The present study investigated why it is that a deep approach to studying, which has been shown to result in a higher quality of learning, does not consistently result in higher exam grades. The participants in…

It has been shown earlier that while some high school students (younger on the average) do not differentiate between memorization and understanding, others (older on the average) do so (Marton, Watkins and Tang, Learning and Instruction 7, 21-48, 1997). Those who do differentiate impose a sequential ordering on the two: "When you learn you…

This study examines the out-of-class learning activities undertaken, at the students' volition, by groups of students. Data were gathered through 57 individual and 15 focus group interviews with university students in Hong Kong. Group activities reported included: copying, sharing material, consulting peers, consulting teachers, studying and…