The university has been adjusting to the patterns of teaching and learning both before and since the experience of COVID, and during that process has drawn on ideas from many sources. Some of these came from research into curriculum design, ways of teaching, and the learning experiences of students. Much of this research, however, is hidden away in research journals and often makes the findings and their practical implications unclear for university teachers. I thought it might be useful to bring together a set of ideas couched mainly in everyday language, looking at teaching and student learning and influences on them. The research I have been involved in is mainly related to the academic aspects of student learning, but there are important links to be made with other aspects of the student experience. Some years ago, an educational research project in this university (ETL Project) set out to explore the students’ experiences of teaching and learning in eight universities and four contrasting subject areas, and how different teaching-learning environments influenced students’ approaches to studying. The starting point was to find out what university teachers expected their students to have learned by the time they graduated. Obviously, there were very different specific answers across the disciplines, but most teachers seemed to be looking beyond ‘taken for granted knowledge’, towards the distinctive ways of thinking and practising in their discipline, crucial to using that knowledge. And, for this, students will need to become aware of the effects of their ways of studying. Modes of thinking Research had described two very different modes of thinking – deep and surface – but interviews with students showed that most of them also had a distinctive intention when approaching their studying. Students either adopted a deep approach, looking for a personal understanding, or a surface approach, geared to remembering knowledge in exams. This research gradually influenced teaching practice to put more stress on understanding and help students see how to develop a personal understanding of topics. For students, the nature of an academic understanding is often far from clear, but research interviews showed how visualisation could be used to bring ideas together into a satisfying personal understanding, as this final-year student did in her preparations for Finals.
Reading and re-reading and going to different sources of information, patterns become familiar, helping you make sense of new things that you haven’t met before, getting to see why this question is important while another one is not, or that this theory is more likely than another. Then, I [must] see the ideas in my visual space, according to how I know them, how I can picture them. … In the end, I come to realise how everything is really related and I’m able to connect everything together and, when it comes, it is not as if I were looking for it – it just happens.Other students also used mind-maps to organise their thinking before exams or writing an essay. Encouraging students to draw their own mind maps in a class or tutorial, followed by discussion among other students, helps them to see connections in developing an understanding. However, there are some theories or concepts that students find particularly difficult. These often involve important breakthroughs in thinking within a discipline, called threshold concepts. If students don’t grasp such ideas, they are likely to struggle with later parts of the course. This effect has implications for both teaching and course design in making sure such concepts are given sufficient teaching time and attention for students to make sense of what comes next in the syllabus. Effects of teaching Looking more broadly at recent changes in approaches to teaching, like those being introduced in this university, we see the importance of engaging students more actively in lectures and tutorials, with the involvement of tutors being particularly important. As a psychology student explained:
[The tutor] keeps my interest alive by presenting, not only the content, but also what matters for her. Experiences, personal understanding, knowledge – it’s all there. Teaching is about her relationship with the subject. Such tutors make me feel that studying this subject is worthwhile and I’m following her perspective to join in these explorations, to let my see, through her eyes, the issue at hand – a ‘meeting of minds’ perhaps?Of course, a single extract from an interview cannot be convincing, just illustrative, but the ETL project also gave a lengthy inventory (scored questionnaire) to all the students taking part. Groups of items provided scores on five different experiences of teaching and three aspects of their own approaches to studying. These were then compared with self-ratings of the knowledge acquired and interest and enjoyment. ‘Knowledge acquired’ was shown to be linked with higher deep approach and lower surface approach scores, as expected, and there was a closely similar pattern for ‘interest and enjoyment’, suggesting that these aspects are equally important to the students. The following items show examples of what students were responding to.
- I was prompted to think about how well I was learning and how I might improve.
- We weren’t just given information; staff explained how knowledge is developed.
- This unit encouraged me to relate what I learned to issues in the wider world.
- Staff tried to share their enthusiasm about the subject with us.
- Staff were patient in explaining things which seemed difficult to grasp.
- Students’ views were valued in this course unit.
Image credit: author
Noel Entwistle
