Tijdschrift voor Hoger Onderwijs

In this article, the influence of secondary school grades on success in higher education is examined. Ethnicity, parental background and subject of study were also taken into account. In this study, the 1999 cohort of secondary school graduates who enrolled in further and higher education was followed. High school grades have a strong influence on success in further and higher education. The influence of parental background is hardly present, making meritocratic elements more important than aristocratic elements.

There is an increased interest in coaching initiatives in the first year of higher education. Learning-trajectory coaching focuses on reflection and becoming aware and is seen as a means for helping students cope with the height and changing demands of higher education. Questions remain on the design and the impact of these initiatives on students’ learning and motivation. The project ‘Impact of learning-trajectory coaching’ aims at answering some of these questions. In the current study, initial results of this project are reported: the development of learning and motivational characteristics of first-year students, the perception of these students on the learning-trajectory coaching they receive and the relationship between student characteristics and perception variables. Answers will help in optimizing the coaching trajectory. Results show changes in students’ cognitive processing strategies and motivation. However, their use of regulation strategies remains stable. Students have a high overall perception of learning-trajectory coaching, but there are differences in perception according to their learning and motivational characteristics. Highly motivated students and students with high self-efficacy feelings have a more positive perception while students who lack regulatory skills tend to have a lower perception. The impact of students’ perceptions on developments in learning and motivational characteristics is found to be moderate. Students who feel supported by their coach and experience learning-trajectory coaching as having a low workload, developed stronger feelings of self-efficacy throughout their first year.

Online surveys for evaluating education have obvious advantages and are becoming more popular, often entirely replacing paper-and-pencil surveys. However, the response rate is nearly always much lower. This raises the key question of reliability: is the group of online respondents sufficiently representative? The primary purpose of the current research was to establish if and how the transition from paper to online surveys affects response patterns. A statistical analysis was performed on the results of earlier paper surveys and of more recent online surveys of the same course. The results showed that there are no significant differences in response patterns (systematically higher or lower). Under certain conditions, however, differences in variability were found. They appear to be related primarily to the absolute number of respondents: if below fifteen, chances of unexpected and hard to interpret outcomes increase.

Dutch higher education considers educating students to become critical professionals who are able to contribute to professional changes pivotal for its mission. However, what ‘critical thinking’ means remains rather vague. Taking the critical, disarranging and liberating thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche (as described in The Gay Science) as a starting point, the author elaborates a renewed concept of critical thinking. By introducing a nietzschean concept of critical thinking into the context of today’s professional higher education, the author investigates what consequences it would have if students were trained in this radical way of critical thinking. In correspondence to Nietzsche’s thinking – ‘To be a Nietzschean, one must not be a Nietzschean’ (Kaufmann, 1974, p. 403) –, the author weighs the advantages and disadvantages of Nietzsche’s concept of critical thinking in order to subsequently create a concept of critical thinking that takes serious both Nietzsche’s liberating, experimental and creating spirit, and today’s educational horizon.