Tool 3: Approaches to learning
What are we talking about here?
Approaches to learning describe what students do when they go about learning and why they do it.The basic distinction is between a deep approach to learning, where students are aiming towards understanding, and a surface approach to learning, where they are aiming to reproduce material in a test or exam rather than actually understand it.
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What does this mean for engineering education?
If approaches to learning are determined by the student’s response to an educational context then the challenge for educators is to create environments which foster deep approaches to learning (Biggs calls this ‘constructive alignment’ (Biggs, 1999)). This is not as straightforward as one might guess, especially in engineering programmes which have high workloads and ‘high stakes’ assessment (See, for example, Case 2004).
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In what ways might this be a useful thinking tool?
Context is everything in approaches to learning theory.You can’t simply ‘blame the student’ – you have to try and understand how the educational environment is being perceived.This is not as difficult as it might sound. Many people like to use inventories to identify students’ approaches to learning (for example, Ellis et al., 2008) but it has also been argued that simple qualitative studies using student interviews can generate useful contextual results (Case and Marshall, in press).
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Show me an example
Robert Ellis and colleagues conducted their investigation with third year engineering students at an Australian university.They focused their study on conceptions of learning (see tool 2) and approaches to learning, building on the assumption that conceptions of learning are likely to influence approaches to learning.They were interested to see how these ideas might apply in the context of an innovative course which used both face-toface and online discussions.
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Where can I read further to learn more about this tool?
John Biggs is one of the key scholars in this area of research. His early results with his ‘Study Process Questionnaire’ (Biggs, 1978) were surprisingly similar to those arising independently from the work by Marton, Entwistle and colleagues mentioned earlier. His writing is practical and highly accessible and a good starting point for anyone wanting to explore this area further.
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Learning as participation
In working with Tools 4-6 we will draw on a very different perspective on what it is to learn ((This can be termed a sociocultural perspective on learning (Cobb and Bowers, 1999).)). Here we focus on learning as participation.This is not any sort of activity: students are learning to do the activities associated with the professional community of engineers.
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