Keynote at University of South Wales L&T Conference 2016

1. Implications of the student learning
journey for teaching
Tansy Jessop
L&T Conference, USW
@tansyjtweets
30 June 2016

2. Session outline
1. What is the student learning journey?
2. One dominant model (Biggs)
3. Two theories (Perry and Baxter Magolda)
4. The central problem
5. Implications and strategies for teaching:
• Curriculum Design
• Knowing and knowledge
• Engaging students
• A paradigm shift.

3. 3P model of Learning and Teaching

4. Deep and Surface Learning (Marton
and Saljo (1976)
Deep Learning
• Meaning
• Concepts
• Active learning
• Evaluate evidence
• Make connections
• Relationship new and
previous knowledge
• Real-world learning
Surface Learning
• Formulaic
• Content
• Passive process
• Inability to distinguish
principles from examples
• Treating modules as silos
• Not seeing connections
• Artificial learning

5. Theory 1: William Perry

6. It all began with Perry’s Module
Evaluations…
“This course has changed my whole outlook on life.
Superbly taught!”
“This course is falsely taught and dishonest. You
have cheated me of my tuition”

7. This has been the most sloppy,
disorganised course I’ve ever taken.
Of course I’ve made some improvement,
but this has been due entirely to my own efforts!”

9. The reliance on traditional instruction is not simply a
choice made by individual faculty—students often
prefer it. This resistance to active learning may have
more to do with their epistemological development
than a true preference for passivity.
William Perry 1981

10. The journey: move over dualism
By confronting students with uncertainty, ambiguity,
and conflicting perspectives, instructors help them
develop more mature mental models that coincide
with the problem-solving approaches used by experts.
William Perry 1981

11. Intellectual Development of Students
Third Year
Commitment Teacher as endorser
Second Year
Relativism Teacher as enigma
First Year
Dualism Teacher as expert

12. Marcia Baxter-Magolda
Miami University
Theory of self-authorship

13. Four stages of knowing
Four Stages
Absolute Knowing Authorities know the answers
Transitional Knowing Authorities don’t know all the
answers, need to search for answers
with the guidance of teachers
Independent Knowing Most knowledge uncertain, people
choose what they feel is best
Contextual Knowing Knowledge relative to context;
knowledge claims need to be tested
against evidence.

14. Three key assumptions
1. Knowledge is complex and socially constructed.
2. Self is central to knowledge construction.
3. Interdependence of knowledge construction.
Mutuality.

15. Theory of Self-Authorship in a nutshell

16. The Central Problem
Collegiate Learning Assessment
2,300 students.
45% showed no significant gains
in critical thinking, complex
reasoning and writing.
Wabash Study (2005-11)
3,000 students from 19
institutions. No measurable
improvement in critical thinking.

17. How much are students actually
learning in contemporary higher
education? The answer, for many
undergraduates, is not much.
Do universities reproduce or
reduce inequality among students
from different family
backgrounds?
[There is ] evidence of limited
learning and persistent
inequality…

18. Take Five
• Your gut responses to
student intellectual
journey theories.
• What evidence do we
have of students’ growth
in complex thinking?
• What helps students to
grow in complex
learning?

20. Common things that get in the way of
the student learning journey
1. Disconnected curriculum design
2. Over-emphasis on content knowledge
3. Absence of active and routine student
engagement in intellectual pursuits

21. 1. Disconnected Curriculum Design

22. Does IKEA 101 work for complex
learning?

23. • A lot of people don’t do wider reading. You just focus
on your essay question.
• In Weeks 9 to 12 there is hardly anyone in our
lectures. I'd rather use those two hours of lectures to
get the assignment done.
• It’s been non-stop assignments, and I’m now free of
assignments until the exams – I’ve had to rush every
piece of work I’ve done.
What students say…

24. Feedback: single most important factor
in student learning? (Hattie 2009)

25. What students say…
The feedback is generally focused on the module.
It’s difficult because your assignments are so
detached from the next one you do for that subject.
They don’t relate to each other.
Because it’s at the end of the module, it doesn’t feed
into our future work.
I read it and think “Well, that’s fine but I’ve already
handed it in now and got the mark. It’s too late”.

26. Strategies to address disconnection
• Team approach to curriculum design
• Smart structural ways to connect curriculum
• Longitudinal student research journey
• Planned iterative cycles of feedback
• Feedback as conversation – who starts the
dialogue?
• Synthesis level-tasks related to feedback
• From feedback as ‘telling’…
• … to feedback as asking questions

27. 2. Teaching privileges content
knowledge over knowing

28. Content Vs Concepts?

29. The best approach from the student’s perspective is to focus
on concepts. I’m sorry to break it to you, but your students are
not going to remember 90 per cent – possibly 99 per cent – of
what you teach them unless it’s conceptual…. when broad,
over-arching connections are made, education occurs. Most
details are only a necessary means to that end.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/a-students-
lecture-to-rofessors/2013238.fullarticle#.U3orx_f9xWc.twitter
A student’s lecture to her professor

30. What students say….
We just have to kind of regurgitate it … there’s no time for us
to really fiddle around with it, there’s so much to cover.
The scope of information that you need to know for that
module is huge…so you’re having to revise everything - at the
same time, you want to write an in-depth answer.
In an exam it's really like diving in and out of books all the
time and not really getting very deep into them.

31. Teaching and curriculum design is about
making tough choices

32. Curriculum Design (Barnett & Coate 2005)
• Knowing is about content
• Acting is about becoming a
historian, engineer,
psychologist, or
philosopher
• Being is about
understanding yourself,
orienting yourself and
relating your knowledge
and action to the world
Knowing
Being
Acting

33. 3. Student engagement in intellectual
pursuits
Pedagogy must move beyond knowledge acquisition to
active knowledge construction
(Baxter Magolda 2001).
Life is not multiple choice (Anne, 2001).
Everyone at a university should be a discoverer, a learner.
(Boyer Commission 1995).

34. But there is an engagement vacuum
• Summative assessment is a ‘pedagogy of control’
driving student effort
• Culture-shift required to engender playful, curious,
authentic engagement in learning
• Symptom: the ratio formative to summative
assessment is 1:8 (TESTA data)
• Student research projects are often a belated
offering.

35. What students say about formative
• If there weren’t loads of other assessments, I’d do it.
• If there are no actual consequences of not doing it,
most students are going to sit in the bar.
• It’s good to know you’re being graded because you take
it more seriously.
• The lecturers do formative assessment but we don’t get
any feedback on it.

36. Formative Blogging Case Study
Problem
Are students reading academic texts?
Symptom
Silent Seminars
Cure
Weekly blogging on academic texts
Impacts
Growth in writing confidence, complex thinking, reading and
engagement
Challenge
Articulation with summative assessment

38. Headline
Findings
Deeper engagement
• Students spent more time-on-task
• Production of writing deepened understanding
• Discussion cemented it

39. Out of the silent seminar…
You have to evidence that you have read it compared to
a seminar reading. You are reading a lot more as well as
the set ones.
I go more in depth with the reading than with the
reading pack when I’d just highlight. It helps.
We sit in blog groups, all talk about it. Discuss the
readings. I think the discussion is more focused.

40. Into engagement…
Over the whole three years this is the most
engaged I’ve been in my readings. I really
liked doing this. I wish we had done it
more. Maybe start it in the first year.
.
…it is also a bit chatty and
informal. Even though I’m putting
in readings, it’s different. It’s a
nicer relaxed way of talking
about literature

41. Key principles of authentic learning and
assessment…
• Builds on personal knowledge and experience
• Creative, risky and challenging
• Students exercise choice and agency
• Linked to the real world
• In the public domain
• Collaborative
• Often digital
• Involves students doing research tasks
• Linked to summative

42. It’s about educational paradigms…

43. Transmission Model

44. Social Constructivist Model

45. References
Arum, R. and Roska, J. 2011. Academically Adrift. Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago.
University of Chicago Press.
Baxter Magolda, M. 2001. Making Their Own Way: Narratives for Transforming Higher Education to
Promote Self-Development. Virgina. Stylus
Blaich, C., & Wise, K. 2011. From Gathering to Using Assessment Results: Lessons from the Wabash
National Study. Occasional Paper #8. University of Illinois: National Institution for Learning Outcomes
Assessment.
Boud, D. and Molloy, E. 2013. ‘Rethinking models of feedback for learning: The challenge of
design’, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 38(6), pp. 698–712.
Harland, T., McLean, A., Wass, R., Miller, E. and Sim, K. N. 2014. ‘An assessment arms race and its fallout:
High-stakes grading and the case for slow scholarship’, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education,
40(4), pp. 528–541. doi: 10.1080/02602938.2014.931927.
Jessop, T. and Maleckar, B. 2014. The Influence of disciplinary assessment patterns on student learning: a
comparative study. Studies in Higher Education.
Jessop, T. , El Hakim, Y. and Gibbs, G. 2014. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts: a large-scale
study of students’ learning in response to different assessment patterns. Assessment and Evaluation in
Higher Education. 39(1) 73-88.
Perry, William 1981. Cognitive and Ethical Growth: The Making of Meaning. In Chickering, A. (1981) The
Modern American College. San Francisco. Jossey Bass.
Nicol, D. 2010. From monologue to dialogue: improving written feedback processes in mass higher
education, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 35: 5, 501 – 517.
Shulman, L. 2004. Pedagogies of Substance. Chapter 7 In Teaching as Community Property: essays on
Higher Education. 128-139. San Francisco. Jossey-Bass.