One major aim of all higher education is to enable students to become able to think well, although what this might mean in practice is problematic. This study aims to contribute to our understanding of lecturers' and students' attempts to work towards the goal of 'good' thinking in vocational degree courses provided in the further education sector. It describes these attempts from the viewpoint of a group of students and lecturers. Individual surveys were conducted with a group of undergraduates in a further education college as well as with their lecturers. A teaching session with each of these lecturers was also observed. The survey allowed the participants to express their individual ways of construing teaching and learning. The results and practices described in the study appeared to arise from institutional pressures and from the students' previous educational experience. This paper raises questions about what might count as 'good' teaching practice in the circumstances described.

At a time when more and more higher education is provided in further education colleges in the United Kingdom (UK) and other developed countries, it seems useful to find out what steps lecturers take in such colleges to promote 'generic' abilities implied by 'graduateness' (The UK Higher Education Quality Council, 1996). There seems to be consensus in developed countries that 'graduateness' implies abilities encompassed by notions of 'good' thinking (e.g. the Mayer 1992 report in Australia). For example, a theme which permeates influential Australian literature on learning and teaching in higher education is that learning and teaching should and could be done in ways which develop students' ability to think well (eg. Biggs, 1999, Prosser, & Trigwell, 1999, Ramsden, 1992).

This study helps to suggest starting points for change by describing how further education lecturers went about their work with undergraduates and through exploration of reasons which the staff and students offered for preferring some ways of working to others. Such reasons seemed likely to reveal the influences of a range of intervening student learning factors, which are discussed in a later section of this paper.

Although all the teaching described took place in a further education college, the degrees which the students were pursuing were awarded by a university in accordance with a partnership arrangement which is common in the UK. The further education college lecturers were responsible for all aspects of the day-to-day teaching and management of the courses but decisions about matters such as aims, course content, assessment criteria and assessment strategies required the approval of the partner university.

Specifically, the aims of this study were to: 1. describe undergraduate learning and teaching in a degree course provided in the further education sector; 2. understand how student learning factors and institutional arrangements might influence lecturers to realise their espoused student-centred orientation in certain ways;3. compare lecturers' practice with notions of 'good practice', implied in psychological and educational research about learning to think well.

Two bodies of literature address questions about the nature of good thinking and how it might be fostered: the literature on critical thinking and the literature on teaching in Higher Education. It is implied in these bodies of literature that good thinking involves being able to engage in self-directed transformations of one's understandings of aspects of the world and that it involves the evaluation of evidence relevant to some claim so that a sound conclusion can be drawn about the claim. (eg. Bensley, 1998; Boekarts 1997; Gardner & Johnson, 1996; Perkins & Grotzer, 1997).

Practices claimed to be optimal for developing the sorts of thinking expected of graduates have been well described (eg. Entwistle, 1994; Ramsden, 1992; Tait & Knight, 1996; Wisker & Brown 1996). What such approaches have in common is that they encourage students to find questions worth pursuing, to pursue their questions through self-directed search and the 'interrogation of knowledge' and to debate their emerging views with others.

From reviews of research (see Pithers & Soden, 2000), Kember (1997) suggests that lecturers' practices may be influenced by an inter-play of factors. In Kember's model, student 'presage' factors are posited as a direct influence on practices. Presage factors include the knowledge and dispositions students bring to the course, what they want from the course and what they are able and willing to do to achieve what they want. Kember (1997) compared the categories produced in different studies of conceptions of teaching in tertiary education and identified two broad orientations that he labelled 'student-centred/learning oriented' and 'teacher-centred/content oriented'.

Only 10 lecturers who espoused (during preliminary interviews) conceptions of teaching that could be summarised as a 'student-centred orientation' were used in the study. This was so the researchers were able to explore the extent to which the lecturers later acted in accordance with their conceptions. There seems to be a relationship between conceptions and practice but other factors might influence the strength of the relationship (Kember, 1997). Lecturers with an orientation that could be described as mainly teacher-centred were excluded from the study.

Sixty students participated in the study, all of whom were enrolled in the first year of full-time degree courses taught in a further education college.

Individual interviews (of approximately 40 minutes duration) were conducted with each participant. The interviews allowed participants to express their individual ways of construing learning and teaching. Participants were asked for justifications for preferring some teaching practices to others.

The purpose here was to test in practice the descriptions of the teaching that the students' and lecturers' provided during the interviews.

The purpose was to check on the robustness of the students' descriptions of the teaching and to check on their opinions expressed during the interviews. Forty-five students in the sample completed the 42-item questionnaire, after the interviews had been completed.

The transcripts of interviews were reduced to categories by means of repeated readings of the transcript material, with much revising and refining of categories. The unfolding description was constantly tested and reviewed to take account of all relevant data. The interview data and observations of teaching were examined repeatedly in order to search for inconsistencies between descriptive accounts and observable behaviour so that any negative evidence could be considered in the analysis. Finally, the lecturers involved in the study read the paper and discussed interpretations.

In addition, documentary sources of information were used to check and interpret all of the data gathered. These documents included records of student entrance qualifications, curriculum information, pass rates (which had been at a high level since the courses started), minutes of meetings with the partner university and minutes of staff/student liaison meetings.

Taken together, the observations and interviews suggested that what went on in the class meetings can be summed up as what Lonka and Ahola (1995) described as good 'school-type' learning. Close staff/student relationships, highly valued by students, were a central part of the picture. These seemed to be based on the lecturers being able and constantly willing to 'scaffold' students skilfully through chains of reasoning, rather than leaving them to 'fathom it out' (Bliss, Askew & Macrae, 1996).

Another important part of the total picture was that lecturers and students reported very little incidence of independent study. Almost all of the lecturers reported that they had tried but given up setting and supporting tasks, which encouraged students to engage in self-directed learning. In general, the lecturers marshalled and taught the course knowledge in a form that is often referred to as 'spoon-feeding' (Wisker & Brown, 1996).

A summary of the interviews was constructed in which students justified the value they placed on certain teaching practices. Students' justifications for believing that the overall teaching practice helped them to learn were accounted for by two main categories. The justifications that students gave for valuing so highly the way their lecturers' worked with them, suggested that the students did not want any change. The students' reasons for their apparently strong desire for the current practices to continue appeared to operate like the student 'presage' factors described in Kember's (1997) model. The extent to which the label 'spoon-feeding' was an appropriate one for the practices the students described was discussed with them during interviews. Almost all students rejected this label as a valid description of how their lecturers worked with them. Their conception of what 'good' learning and teaching involved was different from the conceptions of this process in research literature (e.g. Wisker & Brown, 1996).

When the students were provided with examples of activities associated with more self-directed learning and asked to comment, most responded that they could see no advantages and described many drawbacks. In the questionnaire, which was designed to check the views that the students had expressed in the interviews, 90 % of them rejected a label of 'spoon-feeding' as a description of the practices they had experienced. All of this implies that, unless the students' conceptions of learning and teaching can be further developed, they would resist change towards the more self-directed measures, commonly advocated in the relevant research literature.

The first category of student justification of their espoused beliefs about good teaching, suggested that they valued the teaching they experienced for its contribution to their understanding of cognitively complex, 'discipline-specific knowledge'. Indeed, they believed that they would have failed in their attempts to understand this knowledge had the instruction been less direct and intensive

The value the students placed on the lecturers' practice can be illuminated by relating their reported difficulties to Ausubel's (1968) seminal account of the ways in which relevant, prior knowledge influences learning and to a later substantial body of research which has its roots in this account. In reviewing this research. Black (1999) reiterates the point that transformations of new ideas can only be achieved in the light of what the learner already knows. Furthermore, Stevenson and Palmer (1994) review research that attributes learning difficulties to students being unable to activate sufficient prior relevant knowledge.

Twelve of the student participants who had withdrawn from a similar degree course at a university attributed their present success to the college approach. Their reasons were similar to those offered by the other students and resonate with the lecturer's conclusion that 'these students would be lost in a university'.

All of the lecturers gave examples of how they had tried to use more self-directed approaches designed to encourage students to find questions worth pursuing, to pursue their questions and to challenge each other's interpretations of knowledge. The lecturers expressed regret that such attempts did not seem to work in their situation and agreed that the way they went about their work was inconsistent with beliefs they expressed in interviews about appropriate ways of working with undergraduates. Their justifications could be accounted for in two main ways.

Lecturers' seemed to experience interacting pressure from the students and institutional pressure to accommodate mismatches between students' cognitive resources and course demands. Typically, lecturers justified their approaches in terms of making sure that students did not fall seriously behind in their academic work. The lecturers judged that the students were unable to engage in more independent study.

The degree examinations required students to understand and use a good deal of discipline-specific knowledge. This requirement imposed a pace of learning that was difficult for students to sustain with any degree of independence unless they had substantial prior relevant knowledge. Documents recording students' entrance qualifications, and their own reports during interviews, suggested that the students' prior experience of handling complex bodies of knowledge was likely to be much less well matched to course demands than that of traditional entrants to undergraduate courses in applied sciences. If content is as extensive as it was in the courses in this study here, students cannot be expected to invest time in developing an ability to think critically about what they read. Nor are they likely to engage in self-directed work which might use up far more time than relying on close direction from lecturers.

It was clear from the interview data that the lecturers would have preferred to work in other ways with the students. However, they were not prepared to expose students to the risk of lower pass rates and higher drop out rates or to risk low ratings by the student body, less status among their colleagues and difficulties in recruiting future students. Lecturers believed that attempts to negotiate radical reduction of content with the partner university, would have been perceived as a lowering of standards. Minutes of meetings showed university staff expressing anxiety that 'franchising' the degrees would have this effect and the further education lecturers were just as anxious to rebut this charge. Professional bodies had significant influences on the content to be included in courses. Yet, if one purpose of offering undergraduate programmes in the further education sector is to open up access to higher education, the question of how much discipline knowledge is necessary needs to be revisited.

There was very little evidence that students were gaining the experience of processing and interrogating knowledge independently which is associated with learning to think critically. However, the 'school type' learning described in this study included some features that have made a difference to students' ability to learn and think well.

If an aim of higher education is to develop students' thinking, this aim needs to be acknowledged explicitly and appropriate changes made to course design. If governments are serious about widening access to a higher education that empowers students as critical, reflective practitioners and citizens, lecturers need to be offered not quick-fix solutions but opportunities to influence factors that affect their teaching and consequently, students' learning.

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