University Students ’ Perceptions of the Learning Environment and Academic Outcomes : implications for theory and practice

The relationship between university students’ perceptions of their academic environment, their approaches to study, and academic outcomes was investigated at both university and faculty levels. The responses of a large, cross-disciplinary sample of undergraduate students were analysed using higher order path and regression analyses, and the results conŽ rmed students’ perceptions as in uencing both ‘hard’ (academic achievement) and ‘soft’ (satisfaction, development of key skills) learning outcomes, both directly and mediated through their approaches to study. Perceptions of heavy workload and inappropriate assessment in uenced students towards surface, and perceptions of good teaching towards deep, approaches to study. Students’ perceptions of their current learning environment were a stronger predictor of learning outcomes at university than prior achievement at school. Protocols are proposed to guide more Ž ne-grained analysis of students’ perceptions. This article seeks to make both a theoretical and practical contribution to the literature regarding the nature and impact of university students’ perceptions of an academic environment on their learning approaches and outcomes. We will argue that the clarity and generalisability of previous research investigating the association between presage factors in a university learning environment and students’ approaches to learning in that environment are limited by a number of methodological issues in the areas of measurement of constructs, sampling and statistical analyses employed. The present study seeks, Ž rstly, to address these, and to test further the relationships between characteristics of the academic environment, students’ approaches to learning and the outcomes achieved, both in the context of speciŽ c faculties and at the level of the individual student. Secondly, we will report on the practical application of Ž ndings to teaching practice, and the development of speciŽ c protocols to elaborate the speciŽ c nature of students’ perceptions of aspects of their academic environments. Does the type of academic environment within which students are asked to learn (e.g. workload, teaching quality) have any real impact on how they approach their learning and the quality of the outcomes they are able to achieve? Or will students ‘do well’ and ‘not so well’ irrespective of their environments? Such questions are not just theoretically interesting, but also practically signiŽ cant for university educators seeking to understand the impact of their course design decisions on students’ perceptions and behaviour. Research efforts addressing the impact of students’ perceptions can be readily framed within Biggs’s (1989) 3P model, which conceptualises the learning process as an interacting ISSN 0307-5079 print; ISSN 1470-174X online/02/010027-26 Ó 2002 Society for Research into Higher Education DOI: 10.1080/03075070120099359