First year university students’ perception of autonomy: an individualistic approach

ABSTRACT

Autonomy has been considered both as a precondition and a crucial learning outcome of higher education. Recent research has been focusing on measuring university students’ autonomy or its development. However, whether and how students’ autonomy can be measured quantitatively is still debatable. Although autonomy is known as a changing process and varies among individuals, it is agreed that students’ learning behaviours are largely affected by their perceptions; very few studies, however, have examined students’ own perception of autonomy. This study, therefore, adopts a longitudinal qualitative approach to investigate the changes in students’ own perceptions of autonomy over five different times during their first-year study in a Hong Kong University, and examine the relationship between the perceptions and behaviours of their autonomy. Using in-depth semi-structured interviews with eight first-year students, the study found that although the participants held some common understanding of autonomy, they also demonstrated various interpretations of this concept. They also had a slightly different focus on different dimensions of autonomy, which were affected by their own individual experiences. An individualistic approach is therefore proposed to understand students’ development of autonomy.

KEYWORDS:

• Perception of autonomy
• higher education
• first-year university students
• measurement of autonomy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Humanities and Social Science Foundation of Chinese Ministry of Education in 2017 with the Grant No. [17YJA 880016].

Notes on contributors

Feng Ding

Dr. Feng Ding, Associate Professor in Faculty of English Language and Culture, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangdong, PRC. Main research interests: learner autonomy, school-university transition, cross-border transition, internationalisation of education.

Baohua Yu

Dr. Baohua Yu obtained her PhD from the University of Hong Kong and currently she is an Assistant Professor at the Education University of Hong Kong. Her major fields of research are cross-cultural psychology of international students, intercultural communication competence, self-regulated learning, and Technology-enhanced language education. She has published in leading international journals such as Higher Education, Studies in Higher Education, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, and Language Teaching.