The influence of the curriculum organization on study progress in higher education

摘要

During the last decade the demand foruniversity education in the Netherlands hasgrown, and until two years ago there was stilla yearly increase in the number of studentsattending university. However, not all of thesestudents graduate and those that do often takelonger than the programmed four years to finishtheir studies. The policy of the Minister ofEducation aims to increase the rate ofcompletion and to reduce the time needed tograduate. Within the last decade far moreattention has been paid to research as well asthe policy on factors within the curriculumorganization. This is in stark contrast to thesixties and seventies, when student-relatedfactors were more prominent. This articlefocuses on the relationship between curriculumorganization and academic success in the firstyear of university education. In this researchacademic success is defined as the number ofstudents succeeding for the first-yearexamination and can be seen as fraction, withenrolling students as the numerator and students that passed the first-year examinationwithin one year as the denominator. Weinvestigated the academic success of fivegroups of students (enrolment years 1987–1991)within six different departments at theUniversity of Groningen, the Netherlands.Aspects of curriculum organization thatcontributed positively to academic success werefor example, decreasing the study load byspreading exams and programming fewer parallelcourses, whereas it was better not to spreadre-tests over the whole year.