In this study, 28 university students from two different fields--the humanities and veterinary medicine--were interviewed. The aim was to explore the role of individual interest and future goals during the first two years of university study through retrospective interviews. The results showed that, while support from the learning environment was…

Within higher education, reflection has been seen as a prerequisite to quality teaching and developing as a teacher. However, little empirical research exists concerning the link between teacher reflection and action, which defines the extent to which the teacher's reflection-based views are channelled to the benefit of the students. This article…

Teaching is connected with a variety of emotions, but research on this area is scarce in the field of higher education. The present study explores the role of emotions and confidence within six different teacher profiles. Furthermore, the study aims to analyse emotions that arise during participation in courses on university pedagogy. Altogether…

This study explores factors affecting the study pace of law students during their first academic year. The participants comprised two student groups: those whose number of study credits were the lowest and highest. Altogether, 25 students (11 with a slow and 14 with a fast study pace) were interviewed. The factors affecting study pace mentioned by…

This study examines interdisciplinary differences in final-year psychology, pharmacy and theology students' academic thinking and personal epistemology. The semi-structured interviews (n = 52) were analysed using content analysis to assess students' individual perspectives of the cognitive process of thinking, knowing and reasoning. The three…

Studies on teachers' approaches to teaching have identified two qualitatively different categories of approaches. The learning-focused approach is about teaching as facilitating students' learning and learning as knowledge construction, while the content-focused approach concerns teaching as transmission of knowledge and learning as absorbing the…

Two related studies are reported in this article. The first aimed to analyse how academic discipline is related to university teachers' approaches to teaching. The second explored the effects of teaching context on approaches to teaching. The participants of the first study were 204 teachers from the University of Helsinki and the Helsinki School…

This study tried to take into account problems related to researching learning dissonance by applying qualitative research methods and carefully considering the criteria by which coherence or dissonance are diagnosed. Found very clear differences among students' study orchestrations in terms of coherence and dissonance; the orchestrations varied…