Positive curriculum design for the second year

This chapter examines the key issues and considers how effective course design may lead to enhanced success at this important pivotal stage of the curriculum. This provides a positive opportunity to develop sequenced activities throughout the first year that progressively let go and foster autonomous learning. Project work will probably be present throughout the curriculum. A strong theme to emerge from focus group discussions is academic security, which relates to the preparedness of students for their second year. In focus group discussions with academic staff and students, second-year induction was frequently described as ʼnon-existent’ or ‘rudimentary’. The intention here is to examine an appropriate generalised approach derived from the author’s research findings. The chapter explores how self-regulation and self-efficacy were important to student success in the second year, and results revealed that students on courses that showed a performance ‘slump’ in the second year reported lower scores for self-efficacy, metacognition and autonomous learning than students on ʼnon-slumping’ courses.