In Bangladesh there is a growing anxiety for the high number of students failing during the first university semesters, and university staffs often claim that students are no longer what they used to be. Very few teachers in private and public universities believe that there had been a rise in the academic standards of the students entering university during recent years. Generally the academic personnel claimed that the students were not properly prepared with regard to specific knowledge and study habits. The rationalizations of the causes of students’ failure have long been of interest to educational researchers and policy makers. Examining the research literature, it is apparent that the answer to “why students fail” is not simply rooted in the students’ lack of enthusiasm or their former knowledge.
Many students arrive at university after they have been admitted principally on their performance in examinations or tests with fixed alternative answers for which reproduction without understanding might have been thought to be an appropriate method of preparation, but which become inappropriate in higher education. There is a difference in the learning situations between the upper secondary school and the university. Learning material becomes more wide-ranging and complex at university. It is apparently very tough in this situation to change the cognitive approach and to compensate for the lack of fundamental concepts learned in a holistic way.
There is a pedagogical gap created during the transition from school to university. At the university, high-school graduates are positioned in environments that need changes in many of their accustomed ways of dealing with teacher expectations, relating to their peers, and performing intellectually and socially. Success and failure of university students have to do with the problem of transition from the essential didactic, “knowledge retailing” milieu of schools to the essential “do-it-yourself knowledge making” circumstances of traditional university teaching. Also the explanation of success and failure in higher education lies not in the characteristics of the students, nor in the efficiency of the teaching, in isolation, but in the complex interactions between students and the learning environments they experience. Some students had not established effective working routines for independent studying at school and, for many, the study strategies they had used in school proved inadequate within higher education.
In Bangladesh, universities most often implement a very individualized way of working and studying. Therefore, individual students must personally obtain more responsibilities for their own education through reading, while attending lectures, seminars and tutor groups are frequently voluntary. Students are not followed up from day to day by teachers as they were in school: a truth that is experienced as a shock by many new students and many of them knew nothing about it before they entered university. The way they handle this new experience may be critical for their academic performance and career.
In addition, in many university courses a lack of early and relevant feedback
Moreover, in many university courses there is a lack of early and relevant feedback. As a result students may go for months without knowing if they are approaching the studies in a meaningful way. The lack of advice leaves students doubtful of their progress. Under these conditions many students are following the strategies which they used in school. However, these approaches appear to be less adequate in the university environment. From this viewpoint some students may have sufficient abilities to succeed but insufficient means to realize their abilities.
Hence, it might have an impact upon how their self-confidence builds up. Their need of self-confidence may produce a difficult time at the university, and make an academic career hard to pursue. Some may argue logically that the experience of pessimistic situations may trigger positive effects, but we do not think that there are many psychological reasons to believe in an overall positive effect in an educational setting. The qualitative content of how students handle the transition from upper secondary school to university may influence their perception of how they manage to study and how they manage to cope with the new learning and teaching environment. The transition can also manipulate attitudes, such as why they should learn: is it just to obtain a university degree or is it to get a better understanding of the world? Will students search for knowledge or will they just seek a degree?
Perceptions of demands and self-evaluation are significant aspects of student life. Students will assess their own capabilities by considering the necessity of study time and effort to obtain certain results. This attitude will be fashioned by their own expectations, by expectations from others, and by comparing themselves to other students. But it will also be formed through what demands they perceive the university poses upon them. If university is unable to make these demands comprehensible for the students, they will have no reference of organized efforts needed to achieve expected results.
Possibly the most readily employed solutions to the problems of transition from school to university would be for the school to train their pupils for the impact of the most unsatisfying features of university tuition, and for the university to continue, at least initially, to provide supportive tuition to students who were accustomed to it at school.
Giving a supportive atmosphere and adequate teaching to new students also involve a more dynamic teaching role than conventional lecturing. Suitable signals from institution leaders must make it clear that effective teaching is a high priority. This means that in such matters as confirmation of tenure, promotions, or new appointments, evidence of effectiveness and excellence in teaching should always be taken into account, and such evidence should have considerable weight in the decisions that are made. In most universities, the first-year teaching lacks the status of teaching at the senior or graduate levels.
There are reasons to consider that when students, who are having a low grade point average from upper secondary school, meet the largely impersonal routines at university many of them lose their confidence and their aptitude to persevere. This is a comprehensible fact for the school system, but also a challenge to university administrators and university teachers. Students, who are H.S.C. or A Level examinees, should be able to bear more responsibilities for their own progress, but at the same time the university should do more to help new students to adjust to the differences between school and university. Students’ incompetence is the result of their failure to take initiatives and to study effectively. The difference between beginning and advanced learners is not only a difference in amount of factual knowledge (although this is usually an important aspect of competent performance), but also a difference in the types of conception the students bring to a problem, and the strategies and approaches that they use.
[This article was also published in Daily Sun on Academia page (March 14, 2011). The link: http://www.daily-sun.com/?view=details&archiev=yes&arch_date=14-03-2011&type=daily_sun_news&pub_no=156&cat_id=3&menu_id=18&news_type_id=1&index=0]
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