Mapping the Learning Journey: Understanding Learning Strategy Development among High-Ability Students Transitioning to Higher Education

The transition to higher education is a period rife with learning challenges for students.Students are required to adjust quickly to an academic context that is completely different from that in secondary school, an experience which has been termed “learning shock”, and they will ideally approach this experience with a repertoire of learning strategies that they will be able to apply flexibly within the new educational context. For high-ability students, however, research suggests that many of them have failed to develop the necessary repertoire of learning strategies to successfully deal with “learning shock” upon entering higher education. In Flanders, 38.6 percent of high-ability students (top 10% IQ compared to age peers) reported experiencing study delay in higher education, despite experiencing negligible study delay within compulsory education. A qualitative study sampling high-ability students in Flanders linked their study delay in higher education primarily to lack of learning strategies, which they attributed to insufficient curricular challenge and a lack of motivation for learning within compulsory education.This project seeks to give a quantitative longitudinal perspective on the issues identified in this qualitative work, and to further specify and clarify the possible learning difficulties that high-ability students experience in the transition to higher education. Through gathering prospective longitudinal data, we want to identify specific learning difficulties that high-ability students encounter during the transition to higher education, including which learning strategies are lacking and how curricular challenge and motivation affect their learning strategy development and academic success. We will also compare their experiences to those of typical peers. Finally, we aim to stimulate adaptive learning strategy development in high-ability students by targeting their motivational resources and learning strategies in the last year of secondary education, so that the transition to higher education contains less “learning shock” for these students. Our goal is to gain a deeper understanding of learning strategy development among high-ability students during this crucial period in order to build a knowledge base that can be used to improve educational support for these students.

Keywords:learning strategies, high-ability students, higher education, motivational beliefs, longitudinal analysis

Disciplines:Educational and school psychology, Higher education, Learning and behaviour