The Impacts of University Education on the Amount of Student Learning Experiences : Focusing on the learning experiences directly encouraged by university education

In the United States, against the backdrop of a paradigm conversion from education to learning, the study of student engagement has been actively conducted since 2000. Meanwhile in Japan, it may be no exaggeration to say that the student learning experiences have been downplayed. Consequently, this paper focuses on the student learning experiences, especially the one which is directly encouraged by university education, and also tries to clarify the extent to which the amount of these experiences has been determined by university education. The key findings are as follows. Firstly, a statistically significant relationship is recognized between the amount of learning experiences directly activated by university education and some characteristics which the university curriculum has. Secondly, it becomes clear that student learning contexts in high schools or their learning experiences which have not encouraged by university education would have stronger influences on their learning amount than the university curriculum has. Moreover, these influences on low-prestige colleges seem to be stronger than other colleges. This means students who already have basic academic abilities, learning readiness and affinities for learning would tend to learn urged directly by university education in low-prestige colleges. It may be said that these findings shed light on the problematic points of the current educational reforms. One of the main points should be that the university curriculum has not fully constructed such system that could work closely with the amount of student learning experiences. Once such system is constructed, it would be possible to weaken the influences of basic academic abilities, learning readiness and affinities for learning, which would strongly determine their amount of learning experiences at this time