By Tom Lowe
Last semester, I began a blog series with Simac discussing the multi-faceted but popular topic of student engagement in modern higher education, where I spent time discussing the prominent challenges facing our sector. Topics such as the changing engagement preferences of our students post-Covid-19, a perceived (or very real) drop in student attendance in timetabled classes, and questioned which digital ‘footprints’ of students’ engagement we should pay attention to; areas that are all alive and evolving in the student engagement discourse in higher education today. Throughout the series, I outlined the importance of empathising with our students’ position, which is often pressured by challenges such as the costs associated with learning – let alone living - and the various areas impacting upon their mental wellbeing. To create this empathy, I emphasised taking time to speak with our students about their education, as this can inform our work within higher education as we have a better understanding of the challenges they face and what changes to practice we can make to alleviate these pressures. I made the comparison to the workplace, arguing that post-pandemic we are all more conscious of the activities that require time investment, and as a result we are more critical about how we plan our time, and that we are always looking for strategies to make our daily tasks quicker, cheaper and more convenient.
The quote in the title of this blog is not from a single student, but from several, and one that is echoed often around the sector and may be familiar to you, too. I have personally heard this directly myself, and from fellow colleagues who are often frustrated to hear such strategic motivations for learning at degree level. In this blog series I explore why we are experiencing higher levels of strategy from our students towards assessment and learning more generally. I will consider why we seem to be experiencing more students motivated by the grade and ‘what counts’ for assessment success, and why we are seeing a decrease in the love of ‘learning for learning sake’ in our universities. As our universities in the UK are increasingly measured across all student metrics, from grades to graduate employability, are our students becoming just as focused on the numbers and stats as our regulators? Let’s untangle these questions and considerations in this blog and explore this aspect of our current students’ educational journeys.
Our students’ learning journey is not the same as yours
Many of us working in higher education have stayed, or returned, to universities because we believe in learning and the pursuit of knowledge as goods in of themselves. For those of us who have never left universities, I venture to say that we are likely to be pretty keen on education, have a passion for our disciplines, and care deeply for the notion of learning for learning’s sake. For those of us who have returned to higher education as a lecturer or professional services colleague following some time in industry and other professions, we are likely to have returned because we wish to share our knowledge of the professional sphere from which we’ve come or that we care about the education of the next generation. It is important to recognise and underscore this feature of our perspectives as this informs our view on student behaviour. It almost goes without saying that those of us working in higher education care about learning, likely because we valued and enjoyed learning during our own higher education – why else would we do the job? It is because of this perspective on learning that we become disappointed with our students, who are maybe going to university for the ’student experience’, or as a means to an end to gain a qualification for a desired profession or job, or just because their parents or teachers told them to go. It should not be surprising, therefore, that some students’ motivation for study may not be quite as committed to the love of learning for learning’s sake as our own was when we studied. This is not true of all students, of course, but these attitudinal shifts are certainly on the rise, if not a more prominent view than ever before.
Dominant discourse in secondary and post-sixteen education is targeted towards progress onto university education in nations such as the UK. As the university sector ponders over how to increase graduate employability for our students to progress onto Higher Skilled jobs, the game is perhaps simpler for post-sixteen education, where that ‘green’ tick of positive destinations is easily achieved through supporting students to apply for UCAS and go onto university – and in a market-driven system universities are of course ready to welcome them. Singing to the same hymn sheet as post-sixteen educational institutions are many parents, cohorts of present students and alumni, and employers. All of whom are outlining the importance of a university education. It is interesting to note here that many employers see a degree of any discipline as an essential criteria, with 84% of employers in 2023 citing that their graduate roles will take graduates from any programme (HEPI, 2024). Then Prime Minister Tony Blair set the target in 1997 of 50% of 18-year-olds in the UK progressing onto Higher Education and this was achieved in England in 2019. University study as a full time occupation continues as a societal trend as a means to occupy and train the highly skilled workforce desired by the economy. This has unavoidable ramifications, both positive and negative, on the mindsets of students coming to university and their expectations of their learning experience and outcomes.
Student expectations of assessment and banking pedagogies
Despite the nomenclature and my own role at Westminster, this section will not be talking about finance education – it will be talking about an approach to teaching and student learning often driven by an assessment regime of exams. Traditional assessment practices across educational levels have historically focused on exams, which have been used for decades as an efficient means to assess students’ learning with a heavy emphasis on memorisation and retention of facts. Examinations can of course vary in practice, from multiple-choice questions, to test booklets of 20+ questions giving individual to dozens of marks per question, to essay-based exams, and in person observations of practice, particularly familiar in a healthcare setting, and more recently digital and even ‘open book’ exams. At secondary level learning in the UK, exam papers have returned to be the norm in assessment, with the 2010-15 UK Government returning A Levels and GCSEs to exam focused learning. This sees less of our students taking coursework prior to university education and, more importantly, our students thus had greater exposure to a set curriculum that is guided by the assessment notion that there are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers.
The practice of teaching a set curriculum, passively receiving information, which is then to be revised and repeated in an exam, is known as a banking pedagogical approach (think of teachers depositing knowledge into the piggybank of student minds). This ‘teach to the test’ approach is efficient to operationalise at scale but has long been critiqued for its limitations to empower to learner as an independent critical thinker and importantly, an independent problem solver who creates their own answers. Brazilian educational philosopher Paolo Freire in the 1970s famously argued against banking education, where he asserted that it held limitations for learning, as students would focus on learning approaches of ‘revise and repeat’, rather than skills associated with higher order thinking such as synthesis, critical evaluation, application, and creative problem solving. Questions are often asked of this approach as to whether students are truly learning the ‘why’ when exposed to the banking approach, as instead they merely memorise the facts that are taught without questioning and connecting to wider application.
However, this approach is what students are commonly exposed to globally prior to university, so we should not be surprised to hear such statements as, “what is the answer?”, which then of course leads to the common refrain, “just tell me what I need to do to get a first”, as this has been their learning so far. This strategic approach to learning becomes all the more pressing as an issue to reflect on when one considers the rapid changes in technology in the advent of generative AI. If students are familiar and comfortable with passivity in learning, why not outsource the active higher order thinking? If they come not with a love of learning for learning’s sake and understand teaching to be ‘banking’, how do we as educators combat this to ignite a passion for education, not as a means to an end, but as a continuous process of self-development and critical consciousness. I say this not to be scare mongering, but to highlight that these socio-political shifts in teaching and learning have very real impacts on our students and, therefore, engagement.
Looking ahead, it’s fair to say that the situation is complex when considering the students we are inheriting from secondary and post-sixteen education. At the University of Westminster’s School of Finance and Accounting, my professional home, we are taking time to support our students through a variety of increasingly unfamiliar assessment formats, which are importantly authentic and linked to industry activities. Students are not necessarily arriving at university ‘coursework-ready’, so taking time to support student transitions in nuanced, independent research study, where perhaps there is not ‘one answer’ and ‘right/wrong’ criteria can be daunting. Linking these activities with authentic assessment can be one approach to situate the assessment formats more concretely with their future endeavours and therefore shift opinions on their view of what assessment should look and feel like. Their future experiences will not be like an exam, and the answers to workplace issues are subjective to each scenario. It is also not only assessment we must focus on in light of these changes, but how we teach and plan learning. Therefore, in my next blog, I will go from assessment to learning, to look at how universities are adopting models of flipped and block learning to support the cost of living and engagement challenges.
Tom Lowe has researched and innovated in student engagement across diverse settings for over ten years, in areas such as student voice, retention, employability and student-staff partnership. Tom works at the University of Westminster as Assistant Head of School (Student Experience) in Finance and Accounting where he leads on student experience, outcomes and belonging. Tom is also the Chair of RAISE, a network for all stakeholders in higher education for researching, innovating and sharing best practice in student engagement. Prior to Westminster, Tom was a Senior Lecturer in Higher Education at the University of Portsmouth, and previously held leadership positions for engagement and employability at the University of Winchester. Tom has published two books on student engagement with Routledge; ‘A Handbook for Student Engagement in Higher Education: Theory into Practice’ in 2020 and ‘Advancing Student Engagement in Higher Education: Reflection, Critique and Challenge’ in 2023, and has supported over 40 institutions in consultancy and advisory roles internationally
Readings on this topic:
Freire, P. (1968) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin Books.
Higher Education Policy Institute [HEPI] 2023. Humanities education is a UK strength: New report shows it is a mistake to set up a Humanities vs STEM contest. Higher Education Policy Institute [HEPI], 30th March 2023. Retrieved from: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2023/03/30/humanities-education-is-a-uk-strength-new-report-shows-it-is-a-mistake-to-set-up-a-humanities-vs-stem-contest/#respond#
Sokhanvar, Z., Salehi, K. and Sokhanvar, F. (2021). Advantages of authentic assessment for improving the learning experience and employability skills of higher education students: A systematic literature review. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 70, p.101030.
