The student learning experience in higher education

1. The student learning experience in higher education Geoff Hayward Associate Director SKOPE Hubert Ertl University Lecturer in Higher Education University of Oxford

2. The Team • Principal Investigators • Geoff Hayward • Hubert Ertl • Ingrid Lunt • Anne Edwards • David Mills • Research Staff • Susannah Wright • Stephanie Sturdy • Steering Group • Professor Graham Gibbs (University of Oxford) • Dr Monica McLean (University of Nottingham) • Professor Miriam David (Institute of Education, University of London)

3. Objectives • The review will provide an overview of the ways in which student learning experience in HE has been conceptualised. It will evaluate the explanatory potential of these conceptualisations for the purposes of developing policy and practice. • Given the above we will then undertake a systematic review of specific interventions aimed at producing more effective student learning and experience. • Categorise systematically the different types of research methodologies that are being employed to investigate learning processes in HE and to assess how successful they are in producing relevant knowledge for use by practitioners and policy makers.

4. Scope of material to be included, search strategies • The review will cover print and electronic publications published in the last 40 years. This time scale is chosen to reflect the expansion of HE in the UK from the mid-1960s onwards. • Earlier literature, such as the work of Perry, will be summarised and accessed primarily through reviews that demonstrate the relevance of such work for later studies to provide a deeper historical background to the Review.   • We will prioritise the more recent materials (last fifteen years, i.e. materials produced after the Further and Higher Education Act of 1992) combined with a qualitative selection process of the older material using sources derived from the more intense search of more recent material. • The review will build on the work done by projects and reviews with a similar remit, such as the TLRP SOMUL project, and the Tavistock Review of pedagogic research and practice in post-compulsory and lifelong learning.

5. Search focus • The intensive search of the more recent research sources will: • Focus on both the published and the grey literature • Interrogate the standard databases (ERIC, British Education Index, Education Media Online, etc.) using combinations of search terms such as ‘learning’, ‘student experience’, ‘higher education’, ‘university’, ‘teaching’, ‘pedagogy’, ‘didactic’ and lexicological derivates thereof • Include hand searches (as far as necessary) of the last fifteen years of a range of journals such as Higher Education, Teaching in Higher Education, Studies in Higher Education, Higher Education Quarterly, Higher Education Review.

6. Levels of analysis • Micro level: content • At this level, the review will outline and critically discuss the main findings of studies on students learning experience in HE. • Meso level: methods • At the meso level, the review will analyse the methods used in the relevant literature to investigate, discuss and describe students’ learning experience in HE. It will contrast the ways in which different methods were used in different contexts to investigate, discuss and describe learning processes • Macro level: methodology • At this level, the review will look for the overriding theoretical ideas that guided the selection and conceptualisation of methods used to investigate, discuss and describe students learning experience in HE. Such methodologies, using the term in a wider sense, are bound to normative framework about learning processes.

8. Selection process and criteria • Stage 1: Relevance for the Review • Is the source clearly aimed at understanding learning processes and the student experience in HE? • Stage 2: Target group relevance • Is the source externally relevant, i.e. to policy makers, researchers and practitioners? • Stage 3: Internal coherence • Is the source internally coherent, i.e. does the strategy of investigation warrant the conclusions reached?

9. Outcomes • Two searchable databases in the form of EndNote libraries: one will be of the research literature and the other of practitioner resources such as course documentation and teacher ‘handbooks’. • A Review report that will match to the report template as set out in Appendix A of the call for tenders. • Presentation of our findings at the HEA conference in 2007. • Wider dissemination of our findings through articles in academic and professional journals, presentations at academic (BERA, AERA, Higher Education Society) and practitioner conferences/seminars (for example the wide variety of UCAS practitioner groups), and the use of practitioner networks in order to achieve impact.