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| Mr Stephen Latham. | ||
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| Dr Val Clulow. |
Like many first-year marketing students, just the mention of the word ‘statistics’ was enough to strike fear into the heart of Leeanne Barlow.
"Although I did reasonably well in VCE maths, I still felt anxious about tackling statistics, which has a reputation as being really difficult, with a high fail rate," she said.
Ms Barlow is not alone. Many first-year students find it difficult to bridge the school-to-university divide and feel overwhelmed by large classes, complex curricula and their newfound independence, according to senior marketing lecturer Dr Val Clulow.
In a quest to break down learning and social barriers and explore how students’ learning experiences could inform current teaching practice, Dr Clulow established a semester-long peer tutoring program for first-year marketing statistics students.
For one hour per week, very able students tutored peers who were struggling and seeking help with the theory of the subject in collaborative learning groups.
The results were overwhelmingly positive, said Dr Clulow. "The students felt their understanding of the subject improved markedly in a small group, where they built up a rapport with a tutor of their own age and found they could ask questions in a safe, unstructured environment," she said. "Their confidence even improved to a point where they were learning by teaching each other."
The research, which challenges the existing teaching and learning model, would inform further research into the academic results of first-year business students, she said.
And while most students experience some transitional difficulties, international students also often have language, technological and cultural barriers to cope with, says Monash Teaching Fellow Mr Stephen Latham.Mr Latham, who has had more than 10 years’ experience teaching international students geography at Melbourne’s Taylor’s College, has set out to investigate how some of them have fared in their transition from secondary school to their first year at Monash.
His survey of 100 Taylor’s College VCE and Monash Foundation Year (MUFY) geography students last year found widespread ignorance or confusion about university teaching styles, student workloads and independent learning,
The survey also found that the mainly Indonesian and Chinese Malaysian students preferred the active, engaging teaching style they had encountered in the Australian classroom to the passive learning techniques such as memorisation and regurgitation that they had often experienced in their own countries.
"However, while the students believed they learned more by embracing an active learning approach, they were not entirely comfortable or confident with it," Mr Latham said. "If in doubt, they would fall back into what they believed would be the safety of their previously successful learning strategies."
| The Transition Research Seminar Series presents the latest findings in transition research. If you would like to attend or contribute to the series, contact Monash Transition Research coordinator Ms Tanya Kantanis on (03) 9905 2814. |