They have an academic orientation . Others are more concerned with obtaining a qualification which will ensure a safe job. This is a vocational orientation. These different purposes inevitably affect not just the degree of effort they will put into the course, but also the kind of effort, as we shall see. Students also come into higher education with different beliefs about what learning itself actually means.
Adults hold very different conceptions of learning .
It has been found that many people who have left school early see learning as just the result of building up separate bits of knowledge, like bricks in a wall. Closely allied to this simplest conception is the idea that learning depends on memorizing what has to be learned. All these first three conceptions imply that information is presented to the learner whose job it is, when required, to reproduce that information in the same form as it was originally learned. This is not unreasonable when facts are being learned, but that is only one type of learning. Often we have to understand something for ourselves and that depends on a transformation of the knowledge presented, an ability to relate it to what is already known and to make personal sense of it.