When students enter higher education, they not only start learning and studying but begin a journey of becoming someone new in relation to themselves and to society. Scholarly research has increasingly emphasised this transformative element of higher education yet, to date, the role of assessment has received little attention in the processes of…

Professional identity formation (PIF) is an integral part of educating professionals. A well-formed professional identity helps individuals to develop a meaningful professional self-understanding that facilitates their transition to and sustainability in professional work. Although professional identity and its formation are well theorized, it is…

Assessment of student learning is commonly understood as a seemingly objective measurement of learning outcomes. It is seen as fair that assessment targets students' abilities -- not their identities or personalities. This idea fails to acknowledge how assessment transforms its object, the students, often in unintended ways. While higher education…

Internships are widely recognized within higher education as a useful work-based learning (WBL) approach to enhance student employability. However, there remains a need to understand whether internships provide a developmental experience that includes higher-level (soft) skills such as self-responsibility, flexibility and innovation. Our study…

There is widespread concern that students are increasingly becoming passive consumers of education who primarily attend university to obtain the credentials they need for the labour market. To interrogate this view, a longitudinal qualitative study examined what 47 students in three countries wanted to get out of studying for their degree (their…

In discussing the functions of education Gert Biesta distinguishes qualification, socialisation and subjectification. In subjectification higher education facilitates the evolution of students as distinctive self-determining persons. This paper foregrounds and discusses 'student self-formation', a paradigm of subjectification with fecund…

The first year of university is a challenging period of academic and personal development for students. Through phenomenographic analysis of 27 interviews with students who had just completed their first year at university, this study provides valuable insight into students' perceptions of adapting to learning in a university environment. Four…

Student transitions are a central part of higher education policy and practice internationally. However much of the work within this important area is underpinned by unquestioned and limited assumptions of what transition as a concept might mean. Moreover, too often understandings of transition defer to narratives that sustain a stereotypic…

Placement as a form of work-integrated learning is a valued element of undergraduate education. Prior work explores how placement provides a site for developing professional values, skills and competences as well as identifying how students build awareness of professional requirements. Greater focus on how such processes of awareness are realised,…

Despite their importance to the research enterprise, doctoral students are an underexamined population in higher education. Several studies have emphasized the importance of psychosocial characteristics in academic success and scholarly identity formation. However, few studies have explored their developmental trajectories across a range of…

This conceptual paper contributes to a broader perspective on doctoral experience via a synthesis of several crucial concepts during the doctoral journey. The first part discusses the core challenges customarily confronting doctoral scholars due to the distinct PhD genre leading to introducing the main conceptual base. Metacognition, being central…

Over the years, the evolution of student development theories has paved the way to include diverse students, including students with disabilities (SWD). Still, student development theories are yet to employ a view of disability as a social category and an identity. To fill this gap, the current study applies the three waves of student development…

This article draws on the concept of structural lag to expand the notion of transitions in higher education contexts beyond linear and age-differentiated. Research reported here responds to scholars who are taking theories of transition into conceptually new landscapes. Using a rhizomic data analysis of a doctoral research project, the idea of…

The lack of support in academia, especially during doctoral studies, is a widely debated issue. Such experiences can be expected to be highly relevant to young researchers for their developing identity as scholars and their career aspirations. According to self-determination theory, support for the three basic psychological needs for competence,…

Transformative learning captures the process by which students engage in their learning at holistic levels (emotional, cognitive, spiritual, physical, social, and environmental) and the extent to which they experience a change in perspective, of themselves or society. This four-year, four-cohort study (n = 40) examined the transformative learning…