Learning to Learn: Developing Student's Cognitive, Motivational and Interpersonal Strategies

LEARNING TO LEARN: DEVELOPING STUDENT'S COGNITIVE, MOTIVATIONAL AND INTERPERSONAL STRATEGIES FOR LEARNING

Paper presented to the conference "The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning" organised by the University Grants Committee funded institutions 24 - 26 May 2001, Hong Kong

This paper is presented by the project team of the UGC funded project: “Learning to Learn: Developing Students' Cognitive, Motivational and Interpersonal Strategies for Learning”. Correspondence concerning this paper should be addressed to the Principal Project Supervisor.

Principal Project Supervisor HO, Angela S.P. Educational Development Centre The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Hong Kong Tel: +852 2766 6282 Fax: +852 2334 1569 E-mail: [email protected] Co-supervisors (all from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) AU, Austin Institute of Textile and Clothing BABSON, John General Education Centre CHAN, Steven Department of Computing CHAN, Tony Department of Mechanical Engineering CHENG, Winnie Department of English CHEUNG, R.C.T. Department of Computing CHO, Pauline Department of Optometry & Radiography CHUEN, C.W. Department of Mechanical Engineering DAVIS, Howard Department of Business Studies FRANKLAND, Steve Department of Manufacturing Engineering KING, Bruce Department of Land Surveying & Geo-informatics LAI, Yau Ming Department of Optometry & Radiography LAM, Andrew Department of Optometry & Radiography LEUNG, Melvin Department of Manufacturing Engineering LO, Terence Department of English POWELL, Gregory Department of Building Services Engineering STOTT, Vanessa Department of Business Studies SUNG, Tony Department of Building Services Engineering YUEN, David Department of Mechanical Engineering Project staffs (all from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) CHAN Chi Hung Educational Development Centre LEE, Ada Educational Development Centre MAN, Fion Educational Development Centre

Abstract In 1999, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University launched an institution-wide project with the title "Learning to Learn: Developing Students' Cognitive, Motivational and Interpersonal Strategies for Learning" with funding from the UGC competitive Teaching and Learning Development Grant. This presentation is a preliminary report of the Project. It provides an overview of the Project: its philosophy, organisation and progress, and introduces the methodologies and resources that the project team has proposed for helping students develop their learning attributes and capabilities, including a student guide to qualitative learning outcome, strategies for enhancing thinking skills and metacognitive skills, a programme goal orientation package, a self- instructional Group Project Kit, and a self-help workshop on group project skills.

1 Introduction “Learning to learn” has always been recognised as one of the most valuable outcomes that students can derive from their university education. Recent changes in Hong Kong have made this even more justifiable. The expansion of tertiary education in the 90's has allowed a large number of students to be admitted to universities; many of these students are less prepared for the challenges of university learning when compared to the elite groups admitted in the older days. The recent emphasis on student-centred approaches and problem-based learning in the tertiary institutions, while being an encouraging development, has added new demands on students in terms of abilities to learn: requiring a much higher level of independence in learning. Within the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), the change to the credit-based system requires students to build personal connections between a wider variety of subjects open to their choice. Additional challenges are presented to students by the current job market which requires more creative and flexible professionals in possession of transferable skills. One of the strategic objectives of the PolyU is to nurture all-round students with global outlook, critical and creative thinking and ability to pursue life-long learning. This is in line with the basic premise of the Government's Education Blueprint for the 21st Century of pursuing all-round development and life-long education of individuals (Education Commission, 2000). Under this premise, the secondary and primary curricular are already set into a reform with the guiding principle of 'Learning to Learn' (Curriculum Development Council, 2000). This paper describes an effort in the PolyU aiming to achieve this goal of helping students learn to learn. As the Project is still in the developmental stage, this presentation gives only an interim account of its progress for the purpose of information sharing. The PolyU 'Learning to Learn' project In 1999, the PolyU put forth a proposal of an institution-wide project with the title "Learning to Learn: Developing Students' Cognitive, Motivational and Interpersonal Strategies for Learning" and has successfully obtained funding from the UGC competitive Teaching and Learning Development Grant. The Project involves twenty teaching staff from ten different academic departments such that all the six faculties of the PolyU are represented, with the principal project supervisor from the Educational Development Centre. The overall aim of the Project is to help students learn to learn and develop abilities for life-long learning. The project team has agreed upon the three domains of cognitive, motivational and interpersonal abilities for learning as the focus for this Project. Three specific objectives have been laid down: (a) to identify students’ needs, as perceived by themselves, in coping with the difficulties encountered in university learning; (b) to develop methodologies and resources for addressing the identified needs in learning to learn, and to evaluate the effectiveness of these methodologies and resources; and (c) to document and disseminate the findings generated under objectives (a) and (b). The Project has three phases: Phase I is the investigation phase for exploring students’ perceived learning problems; Phase II is the development of methodologies and resources for enhancing students cognitive, motivational and interpersonal abilities for learning; and in Phase III the methodologies and resources will be implemented in the participating departments and their effectiveness will be evaluated. Phase I: Investigation of students' needs in learning to learn The investigational phase of the Project has already been completed. In the first semester of the academic year 1999/2000, focus group interviews on students' perceived learning difficulties were carried out with about 150 students from 9 participating departments. Students, in groups of three to five were invited to talk freely on three open questions: (1) Describe situations during your study in the PolyU when you had found difficulties and wanted help. (2) What caused these difficulties? (3) What kind of help would be most useful? The focus groups were allowed to run in a discussion format, such that students could have the chance to exchange their views about their learning experience and to comment on each other's opinion. The interviews generated rich and revealing data. A substantive list of students’ perceived difficulties in their university studies is extracted from the data and most of them can be categorized into the domains of motivation, cognition and interpersonal

2 learning. Close examination of the findings has led to illuminative interpretation of students’ needs in learning to learn. The most prominent feedback from students is dissatisfaction with memorisation of information for examination. Moreover, they have a strong desire for acquiring higher order cognitive skills such as application, transfer, dealing with variations, handling multifaceted problems, etc. This suggests that students seem quite clear on what their university learning should involve. Another major and interesting finding points to a phenomenon that students' motivation is very much tied up with the extent of their understanding and appreciation of the goals and objectives of the programme, or more specifically the subjects, that they are studying. These findings imply learning to learn needs which obviously extend beyond the common agenda of reading, writing, note-taking, preparing for assignments and examinations, time management, general university goals, etc. which are usually offered in traditional study skills training. In order to cope with, and be successful in university studies, students quest for the development of higher order cognitive abilities and they need to be provided with a more contextualised orientation in terms of both the learning goals and learning skills. A detailed report of these findings are presented in another paper in this conference (Ho, Chan, Sun and Yan, 2001). Phase II: Development of methodologies and resources for enhancing students' cognitive, motivational and interpersonal abilities for learning The interview findings have provided useful guidelines for making a proposal on the deliverables to be developed. The following explains the items under the cognitive, motivational and interpersonal domains. Developments in the cognitive domain Transcripts of the focus group interviews reveal that the cognitive strategy most frequently employed by students in the PolyU is memorisation. The problem with memorisation does not appear to be a deficiency in memorisation skills. Instead, students are obviously handicapped in many of the higher order cognitive skills for achieving a higher level learning outcome, and therefore they retreat to memorisation - a skill which they can manage much more competently, probably because that is what they have learnt to practice during their earlier years. A more important point to note is that students reiterated that they are dissatisfied with and essentially de-motivated by the fact that they often need to memorise without understanding (see Ho, Chan, Sun and Yan, 2001). The critical learning to learn need is therefore enhancing higher order cognitive abilities such that students can achieve genuine understanding and be able to apply and transfer the knowledge acquired. In attempting to address the higher order cognitive learning to learn needs, the following sets of deliverables are being developed: 1.a student guide to qualitative learning outcome 2.an inventory of strategies for enhancing thinking skills and metacognitive skills for teachers' reference 3.ready-to-use resources materials for implementing cognitive/metacognitive training strategies A student guide to qualitative learning outcomes Students told the interviewers that they found themselves having to rote learn considerable quantities of information for examination. When teachers were consulted about this situation, they pointed out that students generally tend to write down a lot of facts as answers like a long shopping list which do not have a structure and do not reflect real understanding. This phenomenon corresponds to what Biggs (2000) classifies as a quantitative view of learning outcome which sees learning as a quantitative increase of information, knowing more. In contrast to the quantitative conception is one which sees the need to relate the information to form a meaningful framework for oneself - the qualitative conception. Hence, the learning to learn need could be conceptualised as helping students to change from a quantitative conception to a qualitative conception of learning. A study guide is being developed for this purpose. In it materials from Biggs' SOLO taxonomy for learning outcomes (Biggs and Collis, 1982; Biggs, 2000) and concepts about deep and surface approaches to learning (Marton and Säljö, 1976a, 1976b) are introduced to students and exemplified with actual work of students.

3 An inventory of strategies for enhancing thinking skills and metacognitive skills The literature has long documented calls for developing students' thinking skills, though many of them were discussed from a teaching perspective or have adopted a cognitive psychology orientation, the underlying learning to learn concern is generally evident. Reviews on attempts to teach thinking either separately or embedded in classroom practice are available (Chipman, Segal and Glaser, 1985; Hamers and Overtoom, 1997; Resnick, 1987). In the more recent literature, metacognition has become generally recognised as important in affecting students' cognitive performance. Metacognitive skills refer to the strategies used to monitor and control one's own cognitive activities, e.g. how the learner goes about understanding or making inferences (Flavell, 1979). More and more learning to learn strategies and courses emphasize the development of metacognitive awareness and metacognitive skills training (Gibbs, 1981; McRindle and Christensen, 1995; Scardamalia and Bereiter, 1985). It is, therefore, viable to compile an inventory of such strategies for teachers' reference. Reports of these strategies are predominantly educational research articles which are generally too lengthy and difficult to read for the busy university teachers. The inventory that we are developing aims to present digests from research reports, explaining the essence of the methods for enhancing learning abilities such that teachers can benefit directly. Ready-to-use resource materials for implementing cognitive/metacognitive training strategies In order to facilitate the implementation of the strategies collected in the inventory, we are also developing ready-to-use resource materials for some of the more relevant strategies. Usually a teachers' manual, a students' manual and worksheets are produced such that teachers interested in the method can use them readily with their students. The following are some items which are already completed with resources: * The 3-column table for question formulation in which students are asked to draw up three lists of questions: (a) those answers are in the lecture/text and which the student understands; (b) those answers are in the lecture/text but the student does not understand; and (c) those are related to the text, but are not discussed in it and which the student is interested to know about (Koch and Eckstein, 1991). * Generic questions stems for encouraging higher level questioning and answering (King, 1990). * The 'Think-Pair-Share' technique which guides students to make their thinking visible and explicit so as to learn about how to improve their thinking process (Berry, 1997). Developments in the motivational domain An interesting finding of the focus group interviews relates to the reasons for the lack of motivation in studying. It is observed that students easily experience frustration and become de-motivated when there is a mismatch between their expectations and what is offered in the programme. Unfortunately in many cases students do not appear to understand well enough the goals of the programme that they have enrolled on. The most common dissatisfaction is found to be associated with an unrealistic expectation of the 'practicality' of course materials. Many students adhere to a deleterious 'technician' mentality expecting to be trained as a craftsman possessing all the hands-on skills and they complain that the curriculum is unduly favouring the theoretical side. Another major de-motivator reported by the students is the inability to see the relationship among subjects. They complain that the relevance of some subjects is never made explicit to them, making it very difficult for them to apply and create associations. Learning difficulties and hard feelings also arise frequently from a lack of understanding of the rationale for some special learning activities such as problem-based learning. In such situations students are expected to develop process skills besides acquiring information, they are also expected to play a role in learning which is very different from sitting passively in lectures. If such agenda and expectations are not fully understood and shared by the students, it is hardly possible to achieve the learning objectives (see Ho, Chan, Sun and Yan, 2001). The above de-motivating factors are collectively labeled as 'curriculum-related mismatches in expectations' and they suggest that clarification with students about the learning goals specific to the programme, and to any special learning tasks is of prime importance. Goal setting has long been a common component in study skills courses, though the focus is usually on general university goals and personal goals. While we fully acknowledge the value of these generic goals, our investigation suggests that it is also necessary to go beyond them into a more contextualised goal setting by relating students' learning to the

4 programme goals and the task goals. The project team has proposed several possible approaches for rectifying the mismatches in goals identified in the interviews, some ideas are: 1.programme goal orientation 2.'enhanced' programme handbooks 3.contract learning Due to limitation of resources, the project team has chosen to work on item 1 as the first priority and may pick up item 2 at a later stage. Programme Goal Orientation package Departmental-specific Programme Goal Orientation packages are proposed for addressing the 'curriculum-related mismatches in expectations' identified in the interviews. The packages will include two major components: * a Goals Checklist which contains items describing generic university goals plus items about the more specific goals relating to the characteristics of the discipline and the programme * worksheets for guiding self-reflection, goal setting and sharing discussion to be carried out by the students 'Enhanced' programme handbooks Programme handbooks are a document that sets out the details of the programme goals and the curriculum design for students' information. Unfortunately, most programme handbooks are written in such a way which does not facilitate understanding and appreciation of the content in it. It is within the plan of the project team to assemble a variety of alternative approaches for 'programme handbook' which allows the programme goals and the relationship among subjects to be explained in a stimulating and user-friendly manner. A preliminary survey of the literature has suggested the following possible entries: graphic organisers/concept maps; QUEST - 'questioning the unit guide'; running commentary on programme series; activities for matching expectations of teachers and students, etc. Developments in the interpersonal domain One significant difference between university and secondary school learning is the emphasis given to group work and project work. In universities group projects have become an essential activity while in secondary schools they are rare occurences. Collaborative learning is the essence of group projects, and it carries a number of characteristics which are different from the situation of learning on one's own. In a collaborative learning situation, knowledge is seen as constructed by the consorted efforts of the group members (Peters and Armstrong, 1996). In achieving this the group members have to exercise different interpersonal skills like resolving conflicts, and arriving at a collective decision. Educators have recognised the need for helping students with group skills (Thorley & Gregory, 1994; Yan, 1999). Our own investigation also confirms that students had difficulties coping with group projects, particularly for the first time. When we planned the deliverables in this domain, the following factors have been taken into consideration: - Group projects usually span over a period of time and students will have different learning to learn needs at different stages, and hence it is necessary to provide some flexible and continuous help to them during the process. - Students are usually left to work on their own for group projects, and therefore it is very likely that they will have to learn about learning in a group by themselves. The literature has reported that it is a heavy demand on both time and human resources if learning skills tutorials are offered in parallel to normal teaching and learning (Zeegers and Martin, 2001) and it will be unrealistic to expect many departments can afford to do so. Based on the above considerations, two products are proposed: 1.a self-instructional Group Project Kit, and 2.a self-help workshop on learning in group projects A self-instructional Group Project Kit The Group Project Kit attempts to help students handle the two demands embodied in a group project:

5 the academic task of accomplishing the requirement of the project, and the interpersonal task of working collaboratively with the group members. Therefore it contains a section on group skills and a section on doing the project and and its presentation. It is supposed to be distributed to students by their teachers at the point when students start their first project work, and to be used by the students during the project process. The major difficulty encountered in the development of this Group Project KIt is ensuring that students will really use it. Since the use of a self-instructional kit depends heavily on the initiatives of the students, the Kit is carefully designed to ensure that it invites reading and can be easily understood by the students on their own. Drafts had been given to groups of students to test the suitability of the design and the content. A self-help workshop on learning in group projects A videotape will be produced which can be used to facilitate a self-help workshop. The content of the workshop is a brief overview of the Group Project Kit. This product is to be used by departments with their students before they launch their group projects so as to provide them with some initial preparation. The videotape also aims to direct students' attention to different sections of the self- instructional Group Project Kit, so as to enhance their motivation to use the Kit during the project process. Phase III: Implementation and Evaluation This stage will start in the first semester of the academic year 2001/2002 when the deliverables will be put into field test in the participating departments. Evaluation on the effectiveness of the products in terms of enhancing learning abilities will be carried out. In the current semester, several small- scale pilots have been carried out for some of the products. For example, the 3-column table for question formulation is used as an assessment method by one participating academic staff. Feedback has also been collected from students which indicated that the trial has been pretty successful. This experience is reported in a case study session in this conference (Lee and King, 2001). References Berry, B.K. (1997) Improving Student Thinking. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Biggs, J.B. (2000) Teaching for Quality Learning at University. Buckingham: SRHE and Open University Press. Biggs, J.B. & Collis, K.F. (1982) Evaluating the Quality of Learning: the SOLO Taxonomy. New York: Academic Press. Chipman, S.F., Segal, J.W. & Glaser, R. (1985) (Eds.) Thinking and Learning Skills. Volume 2: Research and Open Questions. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers. Curriculum Development Council (2000) Learning to Learn: The Way Forward in Curriculum Development.Consultation Document. Curriculum Development Council, Hong Kong. Education Commission (2000) Learning for Life, Learning through Life: Reform Proposals for the Education System in Hong Kong. Education Commission, Hong Kong. Flavell, J.H. (1979) Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34, 906-911. Gibbs, G. (1981) Teaching Students to Learn: A Student-centred Approach. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Hamers, J.H.M. & Overtoom, M.Th. (1997) (Eds.) Teaching Thinking in Europe. Utrecht, the Netherlands: SARDES. Ho, A.S.P., Chan, C.H., Sun, L. & Yan, J. (2001) What do students say about their problems in learning? Implications on students’ needs in learning to learn. Paper presented to the conference 'The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning' organised by the University Grants Committee funded institutions, Hong Kong, 24 - 26 May. King, A. (1990) Enhancing peer interaction and learning in the classroom through reciprocal questioning. American Educational Research Journal, 27(4), 664-687. Koch, A. & Eckstein, S.G. (1991) Improvement of reading comprehension of physics text by students' question formulation. International Journal of Science Education, 13(4), 473-485. Lee, A. & King, B. (2001) The 3-Column Table: Life after the journal article. Paper presented to the conference 'The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning' organised by the University Grants Committee funded institutions, Hong Kong, 24-26 May.

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