How Different Diversity Factors Affect the Perception of First-Year Requirements in Higher Education

In the light of growing university entry rates, higher education institutions not only serve larger numbers of students, but also seek to meet first-year students’ ever more diverse needs. Yet to inform universities how to support the transition to higher education, research only offers limited insights. Current studies tend to either focus on the individual factors that affect student success or they highlight students’ social background and their educational biography in order to examine the achievement of selected, non-traditional groups of students. Both lines of research appear to lack integration and often fail to take organisational diversity into account, such as different types of higher education institutions or degree programmes. For a more comprehensive understanding of student diversity, the present study includes individual, social and organisational factors. To gain insights into their role for the transition to higher education, we examine how the different factors affect the students’ perception of the formal and informal requirements of the first year as more or less difficult to cope with. As the perceived requirements result from both the characteristics of the students and the institutional context, they allow to investigate transition at the interface of the micro and the meso level of higher education. Latent profile analyses revealed that there are no profiles with complex patterns of perception of the first-year requirements, but the identified groups rather differ in the overall level of perceived challenges. Moreover, SEM indicates that the differences in the perception largely depend on the individual factors self-efficacy and volition.

Education as the Space where Identity Processes Come to Play – Based on Educational Narratives of Women

In this text, the Author carries out theoretical discussion and presents the outcomes of her studies of the shaping process of women's identity in the context of a human (auto)biography, referring to the category of identity, putting particular stress to the educational biography, called a special type of a thematic biography (important for the category of identity), and a category of narration, of key importance for comprehending the phenomenon of auto(biography). A human biography is an invaluable source of information on their life and the person her/himself. Getting acquainted with the biography, looking for information about a given person, learning her/his story from her/himself (biography passed through an autobiographical account) or from the biographical materials, e.g. diaries, letters, memoirs and recollection of others. The Author says that one of the identity criteria is the sense of one's own continuity in time. This criterion can be fulfilled thanks to the autobiographical memory, or a memory of personal episodes and autobiographical facts. The problems of biography are closely connected with the autobiographical memory. In the text the Author presents three intertwined categories: identity, autobiographical memory and biography.

Yitae Scholasticae. The Yournal of Educational Biography, Tom 17, 1998, nr 2

Yitae Scholasticae. The Yournal of Educational Biography, Tom 17, 1998, nr 2

Peer group, educational distinction and educational biographies

The article presents selected results of a reconstructive study on the significance of the peer group for children’s educational biography. Based on the analysis of qualitative interviews and group discussions with c. 11-year-old children from different educational milieus in Germany it is first shown how, in general, groups of friends in different social contexts exert influence on the children’s school careers. In a second part, the text pursues the question of how children produce social inequality themselves, what processes of distinction they practise and on the basis of which traits and criteria. Thereby the study demonstrates that internal and external distinction practices refer to entirely different concepts of achievement.