‘This is Not Something You Solve in Week One of Third Year’: Applying a Transitions Perspective to Honours Learning and Teaching in an Undergraduate Degree Programme

Transitions as a concept is gaining increasing traction in both academic development and student experience enhancement, but little has been written about how it can be used to design research studies into learning and teaching. This paper demonstrates how a transitional perspective has been used to inform an exploratory study of the move from second to third year in an undergraduate maths degree at a large Scottish university. This perspective takes the staff and student experience into account and looks at third year not in isolation, but as part of an entire programme. In doing so, this study is able to offer a deeper understanding of this transition in mathematics which generates questions about the nature of the undergraduate learning and teaching environment for practitioners both within and beyond the discipline.