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- Who are they? Making non-traditional students visiblePublication . Gonçalves, Teresa; Almeida, António Fragoso de; Ribeiro, Carlos Miguel; Monteiro, Rute; Quintas, Helena; Bago, Joana; Fonseca, Henrique; Santos, LuciliaThe implementation of the Bologna processes in Portugal allowed a national Law to be changed so that the access to Higher Education was made easier for mature students older than 23, who have some sort of professional experience. In this paper we’ll report the first (still superficial) results of a research project which, involving the universities of Aveiro and Algarve5, aims to study deeply non-traditional student’s situation in order to create conditions for improving their academic success and reduce dropout.
- The transition of mature students to higher education: challenging traditional concepts?Publication . Monteiro, Rute; Almeida, António Fragoso de; Gonçalves, Teresa; Ribeiro, Carlos Miguel; Quintas, Helena; Bago, Joana; Fonseca, Henrique; Santos, LuciliaThe Bologna Process, recently implemented in Portugal, has brought many changes to higher education institutions. One of these changes refers to a law that enables mature students (23 years and older) to gain special access to higher education, taking into account their professional experience and other biographical elements. The numbers of non-traditional students are therefore increasing in our country, making our academic population more diverse. We designed a research project to investigate the special circumstances of non-traditional students in our institutions and to provide recommendations that should improve their academic lives. In this article, we describe survey results, focus-group interviews and life histories and use them to understand the transition of mature students into higher education. Our results include interpretations of the factors that students view as barriers to their participation in higher education, the importance of peer support, and reflections on life histories that provide greater insight into the transitional process. Although several barriers were identified by mature students, there is also a positive impact from transition. It is clear that transition today is no longer punctual or linear either in time or space. We should therefore challenge traditional views of the transition concept, in which students are considered to be a problem to higher education institutions, because this diverts attention away from the responsibilities of those institutions towards facilitating change.