Hulme_Transitions Hub

marks and being placed high in your class is usually very rewarding! Moving to university, the assessments are still graded, but the work is harder, the grading system is different, and often you are competing with other very capable students, so your marks and your place in the class can be lower than you are used to. You might find this can be demotivating, and feel less rewarded and less confident about your learning than you have done previously. A first step is to make sure you understand the grading system; at universities in the UK, for example, a mark over 70% is often considered an excellent (first class) mark, but some of my students can be disappointed with their grades because at school or college they were used to achieving grades in the 90s. If you are not sure what your marks mean, you should ask your tutor to explain the system; you might be doing better than you think!

Antecedent: The stimulus that provokes us to do something (e.g. receive feedback on an essay)

Behaviour: Our response to the stimulus (e.g. seek help with essay writing skills from tutor)

Consequences: The reinforcement of our actions (e.g. getting a better grade or more positive feedback on the next essay)

Figure 3.1: The ABC of operant conditioning: Antecedents (stimuli) lead to behaviour (response), which in turn has consequences (reinforcement). The nature of the reinforcement alters our response to the same stimulus next time. Rewards make the same behaviour more likely, whereas punishments make it less likely.

My work on student transitions to university (Kitching & Hulme, 2013; Hulme & De Wilde, 2014) suggests that focusing on grades when you first arrive at university can encourage surface approaches to learning, which, as we saw previously, do not help you to demonstrate higher-level skills such as critical thinking, and so don’t enable you to achieve the best grades. At school or college, rote learning may have been sufficient to do well in your exams; at university, independent

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