Abstract:

The Learning Culture Survey (LCS) is a questionnaire-based study, investigating students’ perceptions of and expectations towards Higher Education (HE). The motivation for this research originally based on the idea that conflicts during the learning process generally can lead to learner frustration and thus, reduce the quality of their learning outcomes; besides we assumed that conflicts during the learning process might substantially have been responsible for the alarming drop-out rates, monitored within the European HE-context. Being aware of conflict sources could empower us to either generally avoid related clashes, either through adjusted learning design and preparation of the stakeholders or help to better deal with conflict situations. Besides rather obvious technological issues, different learning styles, discrepancies between actual and expected knowledge and personal disagreements between students and educators, we found a number of issues in the literature that directly seemed being related to differences between the stakeholders’ original culture and the culture in the environment, where they studied or worked. Particularly in international scenarios (e.g., student- and faculty exchange), the found culture-related conflict potential appeared threatening.

The LCS, as a questionnaire, was designed and standardized over a course of 2 years and initially conducted in South Korea and Germany in 2010. The results enabled us to prove that learning culture as a conflict source, is not just a phenomenon of purely academic interest, but instead, an actual source for different types of tangible conflicts. At least for the two investigated, more or less culturally homogenous countries (Germany and South Korea), the students’ answers further revealed very similar patterns across universities. However, we also found limitations of the transferability of our data, e.g., that learning culture differs between educational contexts (within a single country): Our study in the field of German professional training revealed significant differences to the results of the HE context. Already the results between the investigated enterprises differed enough that we had to consider the respective organizational cultures as influence factors instead of generalizing on the level of professional training. Another limitation was found in a test study, we drove in French and British Cameroon, where vast differences in the responses could be isolated between both contexts. Thus, it is yet unclear, if and to which extent results, collected within a country, can be generalized to national level and if Germany and South Korea rather must be understood as very exceptional cases. For this purpose, we need much more data and thus, support from universities all over the world, in order to conduct the online questionnaire within a much broader scope.

Collecting and evaluating respective data is linked to considerable costs and thus, for the legitimation of related efforts, the validity of the data should stay persistent over a reasonable time. For this purpose, we repeated the LCS in our university every four years between 2010 to 2018/19. Besides a small number of actually explainable changes (directly linked to changes in the public opinion), the results kept persistent over the investigated years. In this paper, we present the results of our most recently finalized longitudinal study on learning culture.

Keywords:

Higher Education, Learning Culture, Persistence, Longitudinal Study, Learning Culture Survey, Culture in Education.