ESTUDANTES ADULTOS NO ENSINO SUPERIOR: ESTUDO NO IFAL-MACEIÓ TOMANDO AS EXPECTATIVAS E DIFICULDADES DO REGRESSO À VIDA ACADÊMICA
Abstract
In Brazil and Portugal, in recent decades, there has been a growing expansion and democratization of access to higher education that triggered the emergence of a new audience: non-traditional students. These students differ from the others, known as traditional, by a set of factors: age, socioeconomic profile, and professional experience, namely. Several of them had to interrupt their school trajectory for years, now returning to academic life, to higher education. This article searched to analyze the expectations and academic difficulties that such students present when entering the first year of higher education at the Federal Institute of Alagoas-IFAL / Campus Maceió. The students answered the Brazilian Scale of Academic Expectations for those entering Higher Education - an abbreviated version for Brazil, and the Anticipated Difficulties of Adaptation to Higher Education questionnaire - an abbreviated version for Brazil. The results suggest differences in terms of gender and social vulnerability, point out that female students and quota students have significantly higher averages in the difficulties of autonomy and interpersonal, as well as higher averages in the expectation of social commitment. It is also found that students in social vulnerability have greater difficulty with autonomy and interpersonal relationships. This can be explained due to the life history of these students, often marked by a multiplicity of social, personal and, now, academic functions. The higher academic culture needs to not only understand the expectations and difficulties of these students, in their return to formalized teaching, but also, in order to guarantee their adaptation and academic success, recognize the role they play in the current moment of education, valuing their learning strategies, self-efficacy and self-regulation.
Keywords: Higher Education; Non-traditional Students; Adaptation to Higher Education; Academic Expectations
