Student Learning and Academic Understanding

A Research Perspective with Implications for Teaching

Noel Entwistle

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780128023693
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicologia cognitiva e cognizione

The research described in Student Learning and Academic Understanding had its origins in the pioneering work of Ausubel, Bruner, and McKeachie and followed two complementary lines of development. The first line extended the ideas of Marton on approaches to learning through an inventory designed to assess these approaches among large samples of students and using in-depth interviews with students about their experiences of academic understanding. The second line drew on a range of studies to explore the influences of university teaching and the whole teaching–learning environment on the quality of student learning. Taking the research as a whole shows the value of complementary research approaches to describing student learning, while the findings brought together in the final chapter suggest ways of supporting deep approaches and the development of personal academic understanding among students.

Student Learning and Academic Understanding covers a wide range of concepts that have emerged from interviews in which students use their own experiences to describe how they study and what they find most useful in developing an academic understanding of their own. These concepts differ from the traditional psychological concepts by being focused on the specific contexts of university and college, although they are also relevant to the later stages of school education.

• Explains the origins, meanings, and relevance of "deep" and "surface" approaches to learning
• Introduces an array of concepts derived from the specific contexts of university education
• Illustrates how in-depth interviewing can be used to explore students' ways of thinking
• Provides a series of heuristic models to guide thinking about the influences on student learning
• Includes an inventory on approaches to studying and experiences of teaching for use by teachers

Part 1

Introduction

• Chapter 1: Researching Student Learning
• Chapter 2: Evolving Ideas About Human Learning

Chapter 1

Researching Student Learning

Abstract

This first chapter sets the scene for the rest of the book. It provides a rationale for the line of research I have been following for over 40 years, with its direction being influenced by findings and insights from many other researchers. It also describes the research background of the author and explains the use of both quantitative and qualitative research methods, in the form of disciplined enquiry, to investigate the nature of student learning at university and the later years of schooling. The main thrust of the book depends on seeing the main aim of educational research as being a better understanding of teaching and learning, which could improve the performance and enjoyment of students at university. This chapter compares contrasting research methods used in the field and makes the case for research approaches more closely focused on the student’s experience. These approaches often lead to generative concepts with pedagogical fertility that can open up new ways of thinking about teaching. The book as a whole follows the progression of one strand of student learning research from the late 1960s until the present day, paralleling the more general development in the field.

Keywords

disciplined enquiry

educational psychology

educational research

generative concepts

pedagogical fertility

research methods

student learning research

Introduction and overview

This chapter sets the scene for the rest of the book. It provides a rationale for the line of research I have been following for some 40 years, with its direction being influenced by findings and insights coming from many other researchers. The term “line of research” is intended to differentiate it from the more general idea of an area of research. My line of research had a single main objective, but its specific focus changed over time, producing a continuing thread of ideas about how students learn at university, with earlier conceptualizations feeding into later ones. It was, of course, much influenced by existing ideas and theories and developed accordingly, contributing directly to a broader area of student learning research. This research area now has its own sets of concepts derived from the specific context of university education, but is also applicable to the later stages of schooling. Underpinning all this work has been the belief that students can be helped to adopt more effective ways of learning and studying through teaching approaches specifically designed to support such learning. My intention is to map the progression of this field of research, from a particular research perspective, based on my own research and other studies and ideas that have influenced it.

My own line of research began with attempts to measure academic motivation at school level, but soon moved on to research into the prediction of academic performance at university, with an initial focus on the combination of ability, personality, motivation, and study methods as the main predictors. Later on, the ways in which students went about learning within university contexts became my main concern, leading to a growing interest in the nature of academic understanding. The different forms of understanding, that students reported, provoked explorations of how teaching approaches affected the quality of student learning, and eventually included the influences of the whole teaching–learning environment.

While writing this book, I had several potential audiences in mind and this has affected the way in which the ideas and evidences have been presented. The main audience is educational researchers and students, who have an interest in the development of research in the field of student learning. However, increasingly, the research findings and their implications have come to interest academics in other disciplines, and also schoolteachers, who may have rather little technical knowledge of either the main psychological concepts or the related research methods. Given this breadth of potential interest, the language used has to be reasonably accessible to practitioners, but the academic discourse in this field research has a purpose, and has to be followed up to a point. The result is an inevitable compromise.

Influences on my research perspective

Although psychology has fought a continuing battle against subjectivity in research, the choice of theoretical perspective and research methodology inevitably draws in elements of it. Some indication of the main influences affecting my own perspective is thus needed.

My first degree was in physics and that led to school teaching for few years. During teacher training, however, I had been fortunate enough to be taught by two eminent educational psychologists—Frank Warburton, who introduced me to ideas about personality and motivation, and Stephen Wiseman, who explained how educational research was carried out. Both of them showed me how knowledge of psychology could be used to improve teaching and their ideas led me to explore how I might become an educational researcher.

An opportunity came when I was offered a post as a research associate at Aberdeen University, working with Professor John Nisbet, a well-known educational psychologist, who had been taught by Godfrey Thomson in Edinburgh. Thomson had been at the forefront of research into the measurement of intelligence together with Spearman in England and Thurstone in the USA, all of who had used factor analysis. The Aberdeen project involved a large sample of pupils as they moved from primary to secondary education in Scotland, using measures of ability, motivation, personality, and achievement, and also essays that children wrote about their experiences of changing schools. I came to appreciate the power of factor analysis to show the patterns of relationships among variables, but also how a close reading of these children’s essays enabled us to understand their experiences of the significant, sometimes even traumatic, experiences they had when moving from primary to secondary education (Nisbet & Entwistle, 1969). The ability to cope could be seen to depend on both ability and personality.

My early experience of psychology had been unusual, with no undergraduate training in experimental methods or general psychological theory although I had attended courses at Masters level in Aberdeen. My research expertise grew out of the experience of working with survey methodology and the concepts most commonly used within just one branch of psychology, namely educational psychology. Inevitably, all my previous experiences have shaped my perspective, first through the practical experiences of being a classroom teacher, and then from the experiences of using quantitative and qualitative research methods in tandem. I could thus view the findings of educational research from the perspective of both teacher and researcher.

Initial experiences of conducting research

The survey research carried out in Aberdeen, contributed to my doctoral thesis, which enabled me to obtain a lectureship in the newly established Department of Educational Research in Lancaster University. There, I directed a large-scale longitudinal survey designed to predict academic performance among undergraduates, which led eventually to a Chair in Educational Research and the beginnings of my line of research into student learning.

There is an inevitable tension between what a teacher or administrator expects from the findings of educational research and what an educational psychologist seeks to unravel. Charles Carter, the Vice-Chancellor at Lancaster University, made his perspective on research into higher education very clear in an address he gave to the Society for Research into Higher Education. He considered that:

The purpose of research into higher education, for most of us, is a practical one. We do not want merely to describe the quaint or awful things that are going on: we want to make things better... So I hope that... you [researchers] will... refrain from chasing along familiar paths and surrounding what you find with a spurious erudition, and see if your colleagues can be helped with some of the simple and obvious faults which have persisted in higher education for too long.

(Carter, 1972)

However, the career prospects of educational researchers depend on being able to publish findings in international journals, and that necessitates not just sound evidence but also theoretical frameworks that support an understanding of the complex interactions involved in the outcomes of student learning. Such an understanding, from the researcher’s perspective, is essential before implications for practice can be suggested with any confidence; so demonstrable “erudition” is still necessary.

The role of educational research

In the early 1970s, John Nisbet and I were asked to explain what psychologists could contribute to educational research and, we argued that it went beyond the systematic understanding and explanation of educational phenomena to recognize another purpose—influencing practice.

Educational research consists in careful, systematic attempts to understand the educational process and, through understanding, to improve its efficiency.

(Nisbet & Entwistle, 1973, p. 113)

The idea of influencing practice through the findings of educational research implies the need for additional ways of thinking about the research. Bantock (1961), for example, suggested that:

[This] necessitates at least an imaginative projection into what the phenomena concerned mean, a meaning which can only come from inside the activity to be studied... (It depends on) a sympathetic understanding of our fellow beings, on finding meaning in their activities, on grasping intuitively how they feel, what their plans are, what they are driving at, ...the feel of the “whole person alive.”

(pp. 168, 170, 177, emphasis added)

If we want to understand how learning and teaching work within everyday contexts, then an exploration of the experience of participants within those contexts is essential, and that implies a readiness to explore alternative research methodologies. Indeed, educational research may have to go a step further if it is to have an impact on educational practice, by considering the importance of using generative concepts that have pedagogical fertility (Entwistle, 1994; Appendix B2).

The concepts that are most likely to influence teaching are the ones that provide useful insights into the teaching process, and avoid unnecessarily technical language. One hallmark of a good psychological theory is its “fertility,” its ability to generate new lines of research and provide more powerful explanations. In education, there is an important place for theories that are “pedagogically fertile,” in the sense that they encourage teachers to think about teaching and learning afresh, and therefore help them to generate their own ideas for practical innovations.

Perkins (2003) made the distinction between explanatory theories, with an important theoretical role, and action theories that are often simpler and suggest ways of putting the ideas into practice. Providing an explanatory theory may be hoped to improve educational practice, but the way it is presented may fail to communicate its value to teachers.

It pretends to guide action… but it’s really a very abstract principle at great remove from practical action;… [it is] less of a map than a maze, [having] too many steps, too many concepts, [and being] hard to remember, hard to use. The advice is not lean, pointed, and energizing enough to focus our efforts well. …The language of real change needs not just explanatory theories, or even action theories, but good action poetry—action theories that are built for action—simple, memorable, and evocative. …The language is expressive, even metaphorical, sometimes spare and to the point, but either way evocative. It functions with the compressed and compelling efficiency of poetry.

(Perkins, 2003, pp. 213–214)

Research methods in student learning research

The assertion by many psychologists, and some educational researchers, that there is a “gold standard” for credible research into human behavior, set by the experimental method, makes little sense in the context of explaining everyday teaching and learning at university. Learning at university is always highly contextualized, dependent on the particular method of teaching and assessment, and the nature of knowledge within a specific discipline. And, to take account of that, we have to be more flexible in our use of research methods, while retaining an awareness of their limitations.

In the physical sciences,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Student Learning and Studying
• Part 3: The Nature of Academic Understanding
• Part 4: Influences on Academic Understanding
• Part 5: Integrative Overview
• Appendices A: Inventories and Their Development
• Appendices B: Extracts From Related Material
• References
• Author index
• Subject Index