Please mind the gap: students' perspectives of the transition in academic skills between A-level and degree-level geography

Abstract

This paper explores first-year undergraduates' perceptions of the transition from studying geography at pre-university level to studying for a degree. This move is the largest step students make in their education, and the debate about it in the UK has been reignited due to the government's planned changes to A-level geography. However, missing from most of this debate is an appreciation of the way in which geography students themselves perceive their transition to university. This paper begins to rectify this absence. Using student insights, we show that their main concern is acquiring the higher level skills required for university learning.

Keywords:

• A-level geography
• transition
• higher education
• skills
• geography

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the help we received from our students, whose views formed the foundation of this paper, and to express our gratitude for the advice we received on earlier drafts from Professor Alastair Bonnett, Professor Peter Hopkins and Dr Kye Askins. We would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editor for their useful and challenging comments. All errors and oversights do, of course, remain our responsibility.

Notes

1. Following the introduction of Curriculum 2000, an A-level now consists of modules studied over two years. Some of these modules are assessed during the first year and make up a stand-alone qualification called an AS-level. Further modules are assessed at the end of the second year. These second-year, the so-called A2, modules do not form a qualification in their own right; the satisfactory completion of the AS and A2 modules in the same subject instead constitutes a completed A-level.

2. OCR has also established a Higher Education Strategic Forum and 10 subject consultative forums, although it is noticeable that, at the time of writing, geography did not have its own dedicated forum.

3. The Russell Group is an association of 24 British public research universities. It is headquartered in London and was established in 1994 to represent its members' interests, principally to the British government.

4. Entry requirements for both the BA (Hons) and BSc (Hons) Geography degree programmes at this time were grades ABB at A-level (or equivalent), which placed the students at the upper end of those entering university in the UK.

5. We acknowledge that Bloom et al.'s work has been subject to critique and revision (see, for example, Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001), but it was used here only as a tool to help students to begin to think about different modes of learning.