The Relationship between Students' Approaches to Learning and Performance on the Undergraduate Social Work Degree

Abstract

A descriptive analysis of the final degree classification of employment-based/part-time and full-time students who were on the undergraduate programme which commenced in the academic years 2003–2006, indicates that the students who studied on the employment-based route performed better than the full-time students in the same cohort, even though their exposure to teaching was the same. There may be several factors that contribute to the difference in outcomes between the full-time and employment-based students, but no study has been done previously to identify the contributory factors. The aim of this study was, therefore, to explore the factors that may account for the difference in performance between these two groups of past students.