Researching the First Year Experience: Where to from here?

When Burton Clark (1973) reviewed the development of the sociology of higher education in the United States, from its post-World War II expansion through to the 1960s, he identiŽ ed two dominant streams of research activity. First, the study of inequality in education beyond the high school, which was mainly concerned with issues of admissions and the institutional differences in student experiences. The second stream focused on the impact of the university experience on the cognitive, social and moral development of students. The study of educational inequality and the impact of college on students at that time was very much measurement driven: technical considerations of the reliability and validity of instruments dominated discussion. The legacy was a “relatively massive but trivial” literature (Clark, 1973, p. 8). Alongside, or in reaction to, the large studies Ž nding small changes in values and attitudes, was the growth of analytical ethnographic approaches that produced case studies and vignettes. In Clark’s view, these approaches needed conceptual focus and hard criticism if they were to avoid the “reduction of scholarly discipline to journalistic play” (1973, p. 9). Broadly speaking, the dimensions of equity and institutional impact on student development underpin much of the research still being carried out at system and institutional levels, and they also provide the starting point for a great deal of the work done on the Ž rst year experience, particularly in Australian and New Zealand higher education. Likewise, the problems and tensions associated with the methodologies, as characterised by Clark, persist in much the same way as they did in the early 1970s. Research concerned with the Ž rst year experience is still focused to a considerable extent around issues of equity and the ways university in uences student lives. Unlike the sociology and psychology of the 1970s, the major driving force now comes from the pressure of accountability and efŽ ciency on institutions, academics and support staff to address the problems and pitfalls facing students in the initial days and weeks of their undergraduate courses. This has assumed some urgency as more students now commence university study from more diverse academic backgrounds and levels of preparation. Given the widespread efforts to devise, implement and test strategies that might counter these problems, it is hardly surprising that most of what Ž lls the journals and conference proceedings is program evaluation and institutional assessment directed at monitoring and improving the experience of students. The problematic nature of the Ž rst year experience is generally agreed, and there