Overseas Postgraduates’ Experience of Learning: A Phenomenographic Study

Abstract

Although the subject – conceptions of learning – has been a significant research area in the phenomenographic tradition, little could be found for overseas students, especially Chinese postgraduates. The present research is a small scale study, which recruited five postgraduates, including three students pursuing their masters’ degree and two doctoral students. The findings show that there are, in general, four conceptions of learning; encompassing learning as knowledge accumulation, applying, obtaining new perspectives, and a communicational process. Representing the internal relationship between different conceptions, the outcome space has finally been established based on these, which was then analysed within a two-dimensional framework. The results show that all of the postgraduates have good experience of learning.