Fernando Ribeiro Gonçalves, Sandra Valadas, Carla Vilhena & Luís Faísca

1. Students´ point of view about the reasons of academic failure in higher education Fernando Ribeiro Gonçalves, Sandra Valadas, Carla Vilhena & Luís Faísca Permanent Observatory for Teaching and Learning Quality (OPQE) University of Algarve, Faro, Portugal Introduction This poster presents students´ point of view about the reasons for their academic failure, according to their academic experience.No theories, no hypothesis, no discussion will be presented here! We are just looking for a «grounded theory» emerging from your comments to our data. A multidimensional scaling representation was used to illustrate the proximity between the explanations chosen, due to the co-occurrences on students´response. A minimum spanning tree (mst) connecting explanations shows a radial structure that emerges from Explanation 02. Patterns of response are easly identified. Method Participants During the last registration period at the University of Algarve, we have collected the beliefs of more than 6000 graduation students about academic achievement and motivation. A self-filling questionnaire was used to gather data. Figure 2 – Multidimensional scaling for preferences among explanations; the mst is also represented Variables measured We asked students to evaluate their academic performance, using a 5 point scale ranging from «very weak» to «very good». For those students who judged their academic performance as «weak» or «very weak», we asked them to choose one or more possible explanations among several alternatives: Explanation 01 – I don´t know how to study Explanation 02– I´m not motivated for studying Explanation 03 – I share my attention with other activities Explanation 04– The place where I study is not the most adequate Explanation 05– I miss a lot of theoretical classes Explanation 06– I miss a lot of practical classes Explanation 07– I don´t keep the contents of subjects updated Explanation 08– I don´t take notes in classes Explanation 09 – I don´t organise my notes after classes Explanation 10– I don´t ask teachers for help Explanation 11– Other reasons In order to evaluate the effect of academic experience in beliefs about the reasons of an academic poor performance, we compare the percentages of students choosing each type of explanation in the 1st and in the 5th academic year. Figure 3 – Responses profiles for 1stversus 5th academic year (percentage + upper confidence limit 95%) Results Table 1 presents the distribution of students according to their estimated level of academic performance (Mean = 2,93, SD = 0,79). Figure 1 plots the same evaluation against the academic year. Table 1 Figure 1 The next analysis will be restricted to those students that evaluated their academic performance as weak or very weak (N = 1272). Discussion We invited you to present some comments to our results, using the form attached to this poster. If you are interested in this subject, please provide us with your coordinates. We are looking for contacts for joint research in higher education field.