Abstract
This paper investigates the experiences of students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) during their first year in higher education, based on 874 Danish and 1314 Norwegian students’ responses to an online questionnaire. Rather than focusing on averages, we compare the experiences of two distinct groups of students: those who rated their overall study situation as better than expected (the satisfied group) and those who rated it as worse than expected (the dissatisfied group). Although the satisfied group were more positive to many aspects of their study situation, the dissatisfied group were also relatively positive to many aspects. All respondents expressed that the study cost more time and effort than anticipated, but only for some students (notably the satisfied group) was this high cost counterbalanced by a high value in terms of subject interest and social integration. Implications are discussed in terms of future research directions and how educational institutions can improve students’ meeting with higher education.
Highlights
Most Western countries are concerned with securing a sufficiently large workforce within Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) (EU, 2004; Henriksen, 2015)
The first part presents the results found in the closed questions concerning the first year students’ general first year experiences and differences between the satisfied and the dissatisfied group
When comparing the satisfied respondents with their dissatisfied peers, it should be noted that because the dissatisfied group is much smaller than the satisfied group, the mean scores for the satisfied group are closer to the mean scores of “all students”
Summary
Most Western countries are concerned with securing a sufficiently large workforce within Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) (EU, 2004; Henriksen, 2015). One-third of higher education students drop out of their studies before they complete their first degree (OECD, 2009). This is a challenge for individual students, and for the higher education institutions and society as a whole. In order to understand why some students leave and others stay in higher education STEM, dropout must be approached as an interaction between the students and the culture of the study programme they enter (Johannsen, 2012; Ulriksen, Madsen, & Holmegaard, 2010). Seymour and Hewitt (1997) found more similarities than differences between the two groups, leading them to suggest that retention should be approached as a more general question of the students’ first-year experiences and the strategies they employ to cope with the difficulties they encounter. A similar point was made by Harvey, Drew and Smith (2006)
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