The transition to self-regulated learning for first-year dental students: threshold concepts

Research shows that when students arrive at university they are often not prepared for independent learning. New students enter a period of transition during their first year, which is often characterised by emotional destabilisation, as they move towards becoming more self-regulating in their new learning environment. In this small-scale qualitative study, data from an in-depth pair interview were triangulated with data from a questionnaire, to explore participants' experiences of self-regulated learning in the first year of a Dental Surgery course. Five threshold concepts relating to learning in transition emerged from the analysis of the data. These concepts were as follows: learning how to learn using a range of self-chosen sources instead of a single textbook, learning how to organise incoming information without guidance, distinguishing between main ideas and detail during revision, coping with a heavy workload, and knowing what to expect from examinations and coursework. Strong emotions (feeling confused, overwhelmed and scared) were associated with negotiating these threshold concepts. However, the study illustrates how the participants adopted new cognitive and metacognitive strategies to become more self-regulating over time. The findings of the study suggest that lecturers, tutors, study advisers and peers all have an important role to play in explicitly guiding first-year students as they grapple with troublesome threshold concepts relating to self-regulated learning. Furthermore, structural changes to the content-heavy, lecture-based curricula often associated with first-year Medical and Dental courses would help ease students' transition to independent learning, which may make an impact on student attainment.