The black box revelation of instructional practices: a mixed study of the transition to HE

Instructional practices (IP) could be an important lever for student’s adjustment to the first year at the university. Yet, the role of teaching practices is overlooked in the literature about students’ transition to Higher Education (HE). To overcome this limitation, the current study proposes to analyse the link between teaching practices and student achievement controlling for individual variables. More precisely, multi-level analyses were carried out on 932 students scattered on 18 different courses from five universities. Instructional practices were measured through teachers’ self-reported questionnaires. The main results highlighted the significant link between instructional support or consideration for students’ perspectives and student academic achievement. Moreover, eight focus groups were carried out with students to understand more deeply the role of the teacher in their adjustment to HE. Five major themes emerged from the data: Non-verbal attitudes, Teacher’s flexibility and structure, interactive and entertaining lessons and clear and consistent expectations. These results provided several guidelines to improve IP to ease students’ transition process to HE.