Professor Wendy Garnham (Professor of Psychology) 

When it came to sharing my findings on transition with our Foundation Year team, I decided against the usual parade of bar charts. Instead we played “Play Your Cards Right”. I’d reveal one challenge our students had reported and colleagues had to guess whether the percentage reporting that challenge was ranked higher or lower than for the previous one. If the percentage was the same? Well, nothing for a pair, not in this game. It got a few laughs, but it also got people talking about a question I keep coming back to: are we designing the transition into university for the students we actually have, or for the ones we like to imagine? 

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because it’s no longer just a local question. This year I have been involved in a national Pre-Arrival Academic Questionnaire (PAQ) pilot as a member of the working group. In a HEPI blog I wrote with Debbie Holley and Sue Beckingham, Stop inducting students into a system that doesn’t fit them, we shared our reflections on phase one of the pilot. Led by Dr Michelle Morgan at University of East London with Advance HE and Jisc and funded by the Office for Students, the pilot gathered data from fifteen institutions across England before students had even set foot on campus. 

The national picture 

What makes the PAQ so valuable is its timing. It asks students about their expectations and prior learning before university. So much of our induction assumes a smooth, linear journey towards graduation. In reality, students turn up with wildly different prior experiences, different expectations of contact and support, and lives juggled around work, family and wellbeing. There is no common starting point, however convenient it would be for our planning if there were. 

Then there’s the digital native myth. Yes, our students rely on their phones, but their learning has mostly happened through handwritten notes, textbooks and a teacher who knew them well and gave feedback there and then, face to face. Only around a third had used anything like a virtual learning environment (VLE) before arriving. So when we hand them a VLE full of resources and tell them it’s all online, we shouldn’t be surprised that what we call independent learning feels to them like being left out in the cold. Nearly half said they would prefer one-to-one, in-person feedback, something which we rarely offer. 

Assessment tells a similar story. Only 4% of incoming students prefer exams. Most associate them with stress and anxiety. Students are concerned that this form of assessment relies on their memory only, yet exams still dominate in plenty of disciplines. And on generative AI the sector seems caught between panic and overconfidence, when the reality is that 39% of students report no experience of it at all. If there’s one headline in all of this, it is that students want human teaching, human feedback and human connection. 

The local picture 

If the national data tells us what students arrive wanting (structure, guidance and human connection), my scholarship on my foundation year modules at Sussex adds local detail to this, looking at what happens across the first term of university. Only 17% of our foundation students felt their previous education had prepared them “a lot” for university study. When I asked about their biggest transition challenge, time management came out well on top at 37%, with completing the reading, getting to know others, and thinking critically all trailing behind. Time management as the biggest challenge makes sense when you think about how students have come from a heavily scaffolded environment. When that structure is no longer there it should not be surprising that time management is the first thing to suffer. Getting to know others also featured highly and brings in the human connection theme again. I have written in detail about supporting students’ time management in this journal article.

These early challenges matter. Students who went on to obtain lower grades were the ones most likely to have flagged time management as a problem, late formative submissions clustered almost entirely in the lower grade bands and attendance tracked attainment closely. In other words, students told us where the difficulty was, early and specifically. 

Moving forward 

In response, in my foundation modules I treat transition as something that runs throughout the modules: making time management something we support continuously rather than assume. Assessments foster creativity and application of learning and are structured in a way that promotes completion in stages across the term thereby supporting time management. Students use active learning to help build connections rather than hoping friendship happens by osmosis and formative assessment opportunities help ensure any problems can surface at a time when we can address them constructively. 

None of this is rocket science and perhaps that’s what’s most sobering about it. Students have been telling us where transition breaks down repeatedly. What scholarship does is turn these reports into evidence that can pave the way for innovation. For me, that is the real value of the scholarship of teaching and learning: it doesn’t just describe our students’ experience, it gives us a clearer idea of how to start improving it. It is in all of our interests that we do just that.