Stressful, important and rewarding : How higher education students experience learning in different environments

This dissertation explores how higher education students experience their studies. Experiences were studied at three interconnected levels: cognitive, motivational and emotional; they were defined respectively as the student’s perceptions of the learning environment, study-related personal goals and emotional experiences in the learning situation. The general research questions were: 1) What are the components of successful and unsuccessful engagement with the learning environment? 2) How do students experience different kinds of learning environments, and what kinds of roles do experiences and emotions have in the learning process? 3) To what extent are experiences of the learning environment related to the features of the faculty and student qualities? Four empirical studies were conducted to address these questions. Studies I, II and IV were quantitative and applied self-report questionnaires, and Study I also had a follow-up setting. Study III was also a follow-up study, in which experience sampling conducted with mobile phones was accompanied with qualitative interview data. Study I explored what kinds of study-related goals students have at the beginning of their studies and how they relate to their study progress. The participants (N=133) were theology students, who at the beginning of their studies were asked to complete a questionnaire about their personal goals. Study success was followed for the first three years of their studies. The results showed that students whose study-related goals were important and stressful, and who reported progress in achieving them, advanced more rapidly in their studies. Study II focused on how students’ experiences of their learning environment are related to their well-being and academic self-concept. The participants were 610 medical students. Structural equation modelling was used to investigate the relationships between the variables under study. Experiences about the learning environment were related to how interested the students were in their studies or how exhausted they had become as a result of them. In turn, interest and exhaustion were related to higher levels of academic self-concept. A cross-sectional design was used to compare experiences between different medical schools. Novice PBL (Problem Based Learning) students experienced higher levels of exhaustion, no differences were found in the later phases of studies. Thus, the PBL environment appeared challenging, but only during the first years of study. Study III followed the experiences of nine student teachers for two 14-day follow-ups. The first follow-up consisted mostly of lectures and ordinary small-group work. The second period ran parallel to the completion of an intensive inquiry-based project that was the focus of the present study. A multivariate analysis of variance revealed that studying during the inquirybased period produced stronger experiences of being challenged as well as more negative emotional experiences than the teacher-centred period. However, the interview data indicated that the participants enjoyed the inquiry-based period. In Study IV, the objective was to study the relations between approaches to learning and both the disciplines of the students and their perceptions of the learning environment. Altogether 2,509 students from different fields participated in the study. The results indicated that both approaches to learning and the discipline have an effect on students’ experiences of the learning environment. The dissertation showed that combining different cognitive, motivational and emotional perspectives and using a variety of methodologies helps to build a more comprehensive picture of how higher education students experience their studies. The most important findings of this thesis were: 1) Successful engagement with the learning environment is not merely about seeing the studies as important, being satisfied with the faculty or career choice, or seeing oneself as capable of achieving the tasks. Stress, worry about competence and to some extent exhaustion are important components of engagement in studies. 2) Negative affects, experiences of high levels of challenge and exhaustion may be essential parts of the process of gradually learning to take responsibility for both individual and collaborative learning processes. 3) Students’ experiences of their learning environment are not related to a single feature or set of features, but are connected to both their approaches to learning and the characteristics of the learning environment, such as the pedagogy used.