Conference Agenda

Supporting students’ agency and developing teaching practices is significant to respond to the current demands in higher education (HE) and work-life (Eteläpelto, 2013; Jääskelä, 2021). Agency can be seen as a core component of lifelong learning ability and coping with uncertainty (Su, 2011), and therefore significant in successful changes or transitions of conditions in educational path. Student agency is dynamic and contextual and has been theorized in different fields with a different emphasis such as individual choice or intentions, capabilities or capacity for self-reflection, as well as power structures or discourses (Eteläpelto, 2013). In discussions emphasizing actions within historical life-course, temporal aspects of agency have been raised up (e.g., Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Hitlin & Kirkpatric Johnson, 2015) that involve the dynamics of past and present experiences, as well as with future orientation, which are context- and time-specific, also including the aspects of life outside studies. Therefore, the student agency can relate to earlier experiences in educational path, current contexts of learning, as well as future orientations.

Earlier Jääskelä et al. (2017; 2020) developed a multidimensional scale (AUS) to measure individual, relational and contextual resources of agency in HE course context with an online questionnaire. They defined student agency in HE “in terms of access to (and use of) resources for purposeful action in study contexts, i.e., as students’ experienced or interpreted individual, interactional and contextual resources to engage in intentional and meaningful action and learning”. As a result of profile analysis, Jääskelä et al. (2020) detected subgroups of students according to their experiences of agency in university courses. They found four different latent profiles of student agency from the data collected from 10 university courses: students with lower than average agency, average level agency, average with low participatory agency and higher than average agency. Jääskelä et al. (2020) concluded that agency experiences of the profile groups were significantly different according to form of instruction in the course, and developing teaching practices fostering participatory role of the student, but also increasing student awareness on agency during studies are needed. Therefore, to increase the student awareness on agency, Jääskelä et al. (2021) utilized learning analytics techniques to the data to visualize the results of the AUS -scale to benefit the learners as a basis for self-reflections. Therefore, AUS scale with agency analytics can be used as a tool in pedagogical development to support student agency.

While data collected through the AUS questionnaire offer a general picture about student agency experiences in the context, more in-depth knowledge is needed to describe how students themselves explain the changes in the individual, relational and contextual experiences, and how these are associated with earlier experiences in life related to education and learning. Therefore, there is need for research on how students’ agency experiences in HE are related to earlier learning experiences and contexts, to facilitate a fluent transition to higher education and to work, and to support the development of student agency during HE studies.

The aim of this study is to describe first year students’ perceptions on how experiences in earlier education, starting the studies in higher education and in a course during the first fall of studies in HE are reflected in agency. We will also see how students explain the changes in the dimensions of agency during a course in the first semester of their studies.

The investigation of students’ pathways at the university is closely related to the topic of dropout and success in higher education.

There are several possible theoretical explanations for social differences in educational attainment that is correlated with the students’ pathways at the university. According to the rational action theory approach (Boudon 1974), family background has primary and secondary effects on education choice. Reproduction of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1973; Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Becker 1975) forms the primary impact. Secondary effect occurs during the educational decision-making process: students and parents rationally calculate the balance of cost and the benefit of different education paths and choose the most advantageous track. Since students with lower social status have to travel a longer distance towards higher education from their origin, they calculate with a higher cost, so they have different results in their investment-returns calculations.

Goldthorpe and Breen (1997) developed Boudon's rational action theory approach. According to it, during educational decision-making the final goal of students is not the absolute-measured education level but to avoid social downgrading. Since absolute measured goals of different classes are dissimilar, universal scheme of balancing costs and benefits leads to a different result depending on social origin. The higher education relevance of this approach is that in case of an eventual failure, tertiary educated parents’ children are more inclined to stay in higher education for a longer period of time and attempt different study pathways in order to achieve their final goal of university degree.

The expansion of higher education, flexible forms of training and the pull/push out effect of the labor market often lead to a fragmented, non-linear student life paths (Hagedorn 2004; Lee and Buckthorpe 2008; Hovdhaugen et al 2015). Analysis of university study outcomes (successful completion, retention or drop out) can lead to significantly different results in individual-level and course-based analyses. E.g. in course-based analyses students who leave their starting course and continue their studies in another track are considered to be dropped out, while from the point of view of individual level they are continuing their higher education.

Most of the previous analyses of student pathways are not individual but course-based, that may shelter successful non-linear study tracks. (Tinto 1993; Hagedorn 2004, Robinson 2004; Kuh et al., 2006, Tumen et al 2008; Reason 2009; Thomas, L., and E. Hovdhaugen. 2014; Tight 2020; Pusztai 2015; Hovdhaugen et al 2015; Helland and Hovdhaugen 2022; Aina et al 2022)

The aim of our research is to discover the patterns of individual student study pathways, as well as to explore the influencing factors of study pathways.

Our main hypothesis is that although a significant proportion of the students drop out of the program they originally started, but they eventually obtain a higher education through a different (detour) route. According to our hypothesis, majority of students who follow the fragmented but finally successful student path have higher-status family background. Students from lower-status families typically either take a linear student path to a lower-value program or drop out within a relatively short period of time.

While our analysis is based on data of a single country, the added value of national-level data construction allows us to examine a more universal research question concerning the general mechanism of influencing factors on student pathways. That has a great relevance concerning the social and institutional dimension of higher education success and failure in Europe.

The Irish Higher Education system has undergone significant structural change in the past three years, culminating in the re-designation of the majority of the Institutes of Technology (IoTs) as Technological Universities (TUs). Following a process of amalgamation, a pre-cursor to re-designation, only two of the fourteen IoTs remain, alongside five TUs. This change effectively erased the binary divide in Irish HE.

The Technological University Research Network report described the nature of future TUs as follows:

'establishing high-quality higher education institutions (HEIs) of scale that build an international profile for technological higher education, intensify the mission, purpose and values of Institutes of Technology (IoTs) to achieve sufficient scale, quality and impact to drive regional economic, social and cultural development' (HEA, TURN, 2019, p.4).

Technological Universities and the Technological Higher Education sector provides HE programmes from Higher Certificate to Doctoral level. The sector is characterised by strong regional connectedness, serving a relatively high proportion of part-time and flexible learners, as well as traditional full-time undergraduate students. Historically, it would also have served a high proportion of students who were first in their families to attend HE.

Higher Education in Ireland receives significant funding from the State, which uses student progression and retention figures (HEA, 2019) as one of the key indicators of system and institute performance. While what constitutes good or poor retention depends on comparators, such figures are typically used as a barometer against which to consider Institute and country performance (Gabi and Sharpe, 2021).

The research sought to investigate the thorny issue of retention in an Irish IoT, which was subsequently re-designated as a Technological University.The aim of this study was to explore the factors that contribute to persistence in an IoT, by investigating how persistence decisions were made by students, and how these decisions were informed by their HE expectations and experiences. It explored the role of the student and the role of the institute in achieving successful outcomes.

The research questions were:

1. What identifiable factors contribute to persistence in higher education? And to what extent does programme choice, if at all, influence persistence and programme completion?
2. How and under what conditions (e.g. institutional, cultural, socio-personal, programmatic etc) do these factors become manifest within the context of Irish Higher Education and specifically within the context of programmes that are typical of the Institutes of Technology?
3. How do students stated intentions to study, goals and objectives influence their persistence throughout the duration of a programme of study in an Institute of Technology? To what extent, if at all, do these objectives change or become modified during their engagement with the Institute?
4. From a student perspective, how does, if at all, motivation and expectations of 1) themselves and 2) the Institute change over the course of the programme of study?

The research explored persistence across a heterogeneous student body, rather than with the intention of dis-aggregating the findings by a particular student type. James (2015) refers to the ‘species’ approach to the study of students, for example, mature students, online students. The research aimed to identify common themes or differences among a student body that would typically be found on programmes in the Technological Higher Education sector, and abstract these findings to a wider student body. It amalgamates the theoretical perspectives of Vincent Tinto (1975, 1993, 2012) and Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu, 1984, 1988; Grenfell, 2014; Grenfell and James, 1998). The work of both authors has been described as paradigmatic, and while they are associated with different aspects of HE, there is common ground in the areas of congruence, fit and the ability to feel like a fish in water.