The Delicate Balance to Adjustment: A Qualitative Approach of Student’s Transition to the First Year at University

Abstract

First year experience in higher education has been extensively investigated in the literature. Yet, two limitations can be identified out of the literature. The majority of the studies focused on single factor analysis, restraining the multifactorial understanding of adjustment’s determinants. Moreover, the temporal unfolding of the first year at the university has mainly been disregarded, limiting the dynamic framing of adjustment process. To overcome these limitations, the current study used a longitudinal qualitative design in order to grasp the dynamic complexity of adjustment process. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in two steps with 17 freshmen from Science department. The aims were to unfold the constructs at play in student’s adjustment process and the dynamic interplay between them over time. The analyses were grounded into Nicholson’s theoretical framework of transition cycle and the material was analyzed through thematic and sequential analysis. Four themes (readiness, reaching personal drives, fighting an overwhelming program and becoming a self-regulated learner) and four different events (starting up, click, exhaustion and deficiencies accumulation) were identified in the material disclosing the dynamic nature of adjustment process. An overall reflection on the findings is proposed in the conclusion.

First-year academic achievement: the role of academic self-efficacy, self-regulated learning and beyond classroom engagement

“…De Clercq et al (2018) suggested the importance of career guidance from the start, with not only long-term goals but also concrete and clear information about study. They suggested the importance of generating opportunities in experiencing study regularly.…”

“…The Nicholson transition cycles model (see Coertjens et al 2017;De Clercq et al 2018) describes the transition to higher education through four phases, namely preparation, encounter, adjustment and stabilisation. The preparation phase concerns students' orientation on and preparation for higher education, and usually takes place well before students have registered for a course at university.…”

“…The final phase concerns the stabilisation phase; this phase is usually reached when the student has fully adapted to the higher education context. De Clercq et al (2018) mentioned that this phase is usually not reached within the first year of higher education.…”

Entering Higher Professional Education: Unveiling First-Year Students’ Key Academic Experiences and Their Occurrence Over Time

“…The CIT, developed as an interview method ( Chell, 2004 ), is recognized as an effective exploratory tool to collect self-reported experiences of essential real-life events ( Butterfield et al, 2005 ). According to Flanagan (1954) , a critical incident is a crucial event that makes a significant contribution—positively or negatively—to a certain phenomenon. In the present study, the basics of CIT were used to explore events that students perceived to be essential for their lived first-year academic experience during the first semester of their FYHE.…”

“…To classify the reported text segments into relevant themes (RQ1), a cross-case content analysis was undertaken ( Krippendorff, 2004 ). In the first phase of this analysis, conforming to the CIT literature, we adopted an inductive open-coding approach to make a first abstraction of the critical incidents ( Flanagan, 1954 ; Chell, 2004 ). For each of the reported critical incidents, the entire text segment was allocated to one or more pertaining codes, which resulted in a transparent overview of the data.…”