Abstract :
[en] Introduction
The transition to higher education is a complex process and its success is challenging (Kift, 2015). As universities admit increasingly diverse student cohorts with different academic entry profiles, they have developed various support programmes, which unfortunately students do not necessarily engage with (Bornschlegl et al.,2020 ; Plumat et al., 2012). Among academic support programmes, test preparation seminars take a variety of forms, but have the common goal of providing students who have not yet faced university exams with a set of tips conducive to healthy and effective work (e.g. Swan Sein et al., 2021). They are all the more important as the level of preparation for exams varies according to social variables such as students' background (Girotti et al., 2020), thus contributing to social inequalities.
ULiège exam preparation seminars provide students with planning tools, memory tips and healthy lifestyle advice before the exams. They last three hours and are organised on Saturday mornings to avoid conflicts with classes and to allow students living in student housing to go home from Saturday afternoon to Sunday evening. They are held in an amphitheatre away from the city centre to avoid parking problems in the busy city centre on Saturdays. Despite efforts to make the schedule and location accessible to as many students as possible, students attending these seminars are in the minority. Identifying the barriers and levers to student attendance could help design interventions to increase attendance and enable the seminars to help students, particularly disadvantaged students, to prepare adequately for their exams. To identify these barriers and levers, we mobilised the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB, Ajzen, 1991, 2020).
The TPB is a conceptual framework of determinants of planned, i.e., non-reflective, behavior. Originally derived from social psychology, it has been successfully applied to student behaviors in higher education, such as participation in a mentoring program (Huart et al., 2023), academic persistence (Roland et al., 2018), and participation in an instructional language remediation activity (Huart et al., 2024). According to this theory, seminar attendance depends on students' prior intention to attend. This intention is the result of three determinants, each of which has two components. Attitude, or the value attached to seminar attendance, is cognitive when it refers to the consequences of attendance and experiential when it refers to the feelings associated with attendance. Subjective social norms, or the influence of others, are descriptive when referring to students' representations of seminar attendees and injunctive when referring to others' expectations. Perceived behavioral control, or the feeling that attending the seminars will be easy, concerns students' ability to attend the seminars and their autonomy in attending. These determinants stem from students' beliefs, which vary across contexts and individuals. The present study aims to shed light on the determinants of students' intention to attend exam preparation seminars and, more specifically, to identify some key beliefs that could be used to design interventions to promote student attendance.
Method
Following Ajzen’s (2006) recommendations, a pilot study was conducted to identify the most accessible beliefs about exam preparation seminars among a sub-sample of first-year students at ULiège. On this basis, a questionnaire was designed to assess, on a 1-7 Likert scale, students' intention to attend exam preparation seminars, its determinants, as well as the strength of the beliefs identified in the pilot study and the importance students attached to them. 125 students responded. The analysis method of von Haeften et al. (2001) was used to analyze the data and to identify key beliefs on which to design interventions, as well as beliefs that are close to these and represent complementary targets for interventions.
Results
Regression analyses showed that students’ intention to attend the seminars was 44% predicted by the determinants proposed by the TPB (adjusted-R² = .44, F(5,116) = 20.23, p < .001). Two of them made an independent contribution to the explanation of this intention: cognitive attitude (b = .52, t(116) = 3.93, p < .001) and perceived ability (b = .51, t(109) = 4.90, p < .001).
Two attitudinal and two control beliefs significantly predicted students' intentions to attend the seminars. A first attitudinal belief, the belief that attending would reduce feelings of loneliness in the face of exams (b = .052, t(109) = 5.06, p < .001), was associated with feelings of having done one's best, reassurance, confidence, and reduced stress. The second significant attitude belief, believing that attending seminars would deprive them of an activity that was important to them (b = .050, t(109) = 2.73, p = .007), was associated with contact with family and friends. A first significant control belief was that living in student housing and going home to family on weekends was a barrier to attending seminars (b = .046, t(109) = 3.23, p = .002), which was associated with relying on others or public transport for travel. The second control belief was that holding the seminar on a Saturday was a barrier to student attendance (b = .068, t(109) = 5.40, p < .001), which was associated with the 3-hour duration of the seminar.
Discussion
The results of this study show that the participation of first year students in exam preparation seminars depends on their perception of the advantages and disadvantages and the factors that make it difficult for them to attend. As far as the advantages are concerned, it's not so much tips and tricks or information about the types of exams that they come for, but a reduced sense of isolation and increased reassurance. This benefit is offset by the loss of an activity and contact with family and friends, especially when students return to their families at the weekend when the seminar is held on a Saturday. These findings are a reminder that not all students have the same project at the start of their studies (Paivandi, 2015) and that, consequently, exam success is more important for some than others. They also illustrate that the dissociation between places of study and leisure, already identified by Erlich (1998), can slow down students' participation in extracurricular activities.
References
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Summary
In order to facilitate the transition to higher education, student support services organize various support activities for first-year students. However, participation rates can be low, depriving students of help that could have been useful. Identifying barriers and levers to student participation can help design interventions to encourage attendance.
Through the lens of the Theory of Planned Behavior, we found that while students perceived benefits in exam preparation seminars, these were balanced against activities or contacts that were important to them, and that what was considered to be the best organizational conditions were not necessarily the good ones from their perspective.
Main Message
As support activities for first-year students are sometimes faced with low student attendance, identifying barriers and levers to student participation can help design interventions to encourage student attendance. Using the Theory of Planned Behavior, this study showed that attending test preparation seminars can be inconvenient and hindered by organizational factors.
