Understanding transitions in exploration profiles of students opting for higher education.

Introduction: Since previous research on educational career exploration has mainly been cross-sectional and therefore has been unsuccessful in explaining how this process can change during the final year in secondary education before students make the transition to higher education, this study aimed to examine changes over time in the exploration process. A person-centered research perspective was taken to further deepen the understanding of how different exploration tasks jointly combine into meaningful profiles. In this way, this study tried to gain more insight into why some students go through this process successfully and others do not.

Entering Higher Professional Education: Unveiling First-Year Students' Key Academic Experiences and Their Occurrence Over Time.

To date, little understanding exists of how first-year students in professionally oriented higher-education (HE) programs (i.e., those that provide vocational education to prepare students for a particular occupation) experience their academic transition process.

Academic (Under)achievement of Intellectually Gifted Students in the Transition Between Primary and Secondary Education: An Individual Learner Perspective.

In the last decade, the Achievement Orientation Model (AOM) of Siegle and McCoach has often been used to quantitatively explore different pathways for academic achievement among intellectually gifted students in educational settings, mostly in secondary education. To study the dynamics of the different components in the AOM, we further examined the inhibiting and facilitating factors associated with academic achievement as experienced by well-performing and underperforming gifted students. Because the transition from elementary to secondary education is a crucial phase for intellectually gifted students, we selected students from the 7th and 8th grade, using purposive sampling.

Scale Separation Reliability: What Does It Mean in the Context of Comparative Judgment?

Comparative judgment (CJ) is an alternative method for assessing competences based on Thurstone's law of comparative judgment. Assessors are asked to compare pairs of students work (representations) and judge which one is better on a certain competence. These judgments are analyzed using the Bradly-Terry-Luce model resulting in logit estimates for the representations.

To what degree does the missing-data technique influence the estimated growth in learning strategies over time? A tutorial example of sensitivity analysis for longitudinal data.

Longitudinal data is almost always burdened with missing data. However, in educational and psychological research, there is a large discrepancy between methodological suggestions and research practice. The former suggests applying sensitivity analysis in order to the robustness of the results in terms of varying assumptions regarding the mechanism generating the missing data.

How are learning strategies reflected in the eyes? Combining results from self-reports and eye-tracking.

Background: Up until now, empirical studies in the Student Approaches to Learning field have mainly been focused on the use of self-report instruments, such as interviews and questionnaires, to uncover differences in students' general preferences towards learning strategies, but have focused less on the use of task-specific and online measures.

Aims: This study aimed at extending current research on students' learning strategies by combining general and task-specific measurements of students' learning strategies using both offline and online measures. We want to clarify how students process learning contents and to what extent this is related to their self-report of learning strategies.

Learning beyond graduation: exploring newly qualified specialists' entrance into daily practice from a learning perspective.

The entrance of newly qualified medical specialists into daily practice is considered to be a stressful period in which curriculum support is absent. Although engaging in both personal and professional learning and development activities is recognized fundamental for lifelong professional competence, research on medical professionals' entrance into practice is scarce. This research aims to contribute to the framework of medical professionals' informal learning and outlines the results of an exploratory study on the nature of learning in daily practice beyond postgraduate training.

Profiling first-year students in STEM programs based on autonomous motivation and academic self-concept and relationship with academic achievement.

The low success rate of first-year college students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) programs has spurred many academic achievement studies in which explanatory factors are studied. In this study, we investigated from a person-oriented perspective whether different motivational and academic self-concept profiles could be discerned between male and female first-year college students in STEM and whether differences in early academic achievement were associated with these student groups. Data on autonomous motivation, academic self-concept, and early academic achievement of 1,400 first-year STEM college students were collected.

Modeling change in learning strategies throughout higher education: a multi-indicator latent growth perspective.

The change in learning strategies during higher education is an important topic of research in the Student Approaches to Learning field. Although the studies on this topic are increasingly longitudinal, analyses have continued to rely primarily on traditional statistical methods. The present research is innovative in the way it uses a multi-indicator latent growth analysis in order to more accurately estimate the general and differential development in learning strategy scales.

Differential use of learning strategies in first-year higher education: the impact of personality, academic motivation, and teaching strategies.

Background: Although the evidence in support of the variability of students' learning strategies has expanded in recent years, less is known about the explanatory base of these individual differences in terms of the joint influences of personal and contextual characteristics.

Aims: Previous studies have often investigated how student learning is associated with either personal or contextual factors. This study takes an integrative research perspective into account and examines the joint effects of personality, academic motivation, and teaching strategies on students' learning strategies in a same educational context in first-year higher education.