Tailoring graduate attributes to meet the needs of international students in a pathway program

Increasingly within higher education there has been a drive towards transformation of the learning experience to incorporate skills that extend beyond traditional definitions of academic literacy. This has meant that today’s graduates are expected to leace their places of study with an increased awareness of the attributes they have acquired over the course of their educational journey. This set of accumulated skills, knowledge, and abilities of students has come to be known as Graduate Attributes (GAs), which this paper sets out to define, and then reshape around the needs of international students on pathway, or pre-degree, programmes. Having reviewed the relevant literature and found definitions of a phenomenon that is still relatively new to higher education, it then provides an instance of how the formulation of these attributes has been tailored to meet the needs of international students. In order to do this, and take into account a shorter timeframe of study, the focus was on the acquisition of Core Learning Values (CLVs) rather than Graduate Attributes. To capture a sense of how this worked in practice, the study focuses on the case of Eynesbury Institute of Business and Technology (EIBT), which serves as the setting for a study that explored the way ‘values’ can be added to the study experience of those in Australian first-year pathway instititions. As such this is a small scale instance of action research that has been designed as a means of reflection for EIBT, and as a means of stimulating further developments in the area of interlinking values with attributes so as to enhance the activity of providing a positive learning experience of international students on pathway programmes

Australian tertiary learning and teaching scholarship and research 2007-2012

Research into Higher Education is strongly supported in Australia by journals and conferences. Teaching and learning awards, projects and programmes in Australia have gained a significantly larger profile over the last five years thanks, in part, to an imaginative and supportive environment fostered by the federal government through the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) and now the Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT)