Learners that change: Assessing students'
perceptions in undergraduate studies

The expectations that both learners and society at large have of higher education institutions are complex and it remains difficult to predict the needs of societies in constant change. It therefore appears important to determine the perceptions and expectations of the students participating in higher education. In particular, students hold perceptions and expectations concerning the academic (intellectual), social and moral dimensions of their own development. In countries where higher education transformation is rapid and deep, strategies need to be devised to determine whether, in what respects and what directions student development indeed takes place. One way of determining this is to assess students' perceptions of their own development by collecting relevant pre-entry data and comparing it to follow-up data for cohorts of students.

This paper reports on work done at one university in South Africa where a research project has been running for four consecutive years on how students perceive their own change during participation in undergraduate programmes. Theoretical considerations are discussed to establish pre-entry, end of first-year and end of undergraduate studies instrumentation in order to determine change in student perceptions of their own development. This includes how the results might influence approaches to teaching, learning and change. In addition, the report provides analytical results from the comparison between the 2002, 2003 and 2004 cohorts of students as well as descriptive results of three consecutive student surveys. It discusses implications and potential measures to use data more productively for educational change and development at various institutional levels.