The Routledge International Handbook of Student-Centered Learning and Teaching in Higher Education

Sabine Hoidn, Manja Klemenčič, Sabine Hoidn, Manja Klemenčič

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429535055
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General
• Edition: 1

The movement away from teacher-centered toward student - centered learning and teaching (SCLT) in higher education has intensified in recent decades. Yet in spite of its widespread use in literature and policy documents, SCLT remains somewhat poorly defined, under-researched and often misinterpreted. Against this backdrop, The Routledge International Handbook of Student-Centered Learning and Teaching in Higher Education offers an original, comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the fundamentals of SCLT and its discussion and applications in policy and practice.

Bringing together 71 scholars from around the world, the volume offers a most comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the fundamentals of SCLT and its applications in policy and practice; provides beacons of good practice that display how instructional expertise manifests itself in the quality of classroom learning and teaching and in the institutional environment; and critically discusses challenges, new directions and developments in pedagogy, course and study program design, classroom practice, assessment and institutional policy.

An essential resource, this book uniquely offers researchers, educators and students in higher education new insights into the roots, latest thinking, practices and evidence surrounding SCLT in higher education.

Part I
Student-centered learning and teaching theory

1
FOUNDATIONS OF STUDENT-CENTERED LEARNING AND TEACHING

Sabine Hoidn and Kurt Reusser

Introduction and overview

Consider the anonymous large-sized lecture halls that so many courses in higher education are held in. In these halls, lecturing continues to be the default mode of instruction in many disciplines. Rows of fixed seats are arranged in arcs, all facing the podium like in a movie theatre. The size and architecture of the room is perfect for a one-way transmission of information, focusing the attention of many on one professor – the “sage on the stage.” Often, these rooms are equipped with multiple large screens, a computer and projector, no windows but artificial light. Slides containing the courses’ informational content are projected on the large screen including perfect textbook figures and tables that students already downloaded from the course learning system in order for them to receive information exactly as transmitted (for later exam preparation). In this setting, the instructor as the authority asserts control and tends to be the most active person in the room, doing nearly all of the talking. Students sit in rows, listen, take notes and give rather short answers to questions that the instructor asks, if at all. More often than not, these auditorium-style rooms accommodate not only silent but also disengaged and bored students whose attention spans are too short to concentrate through two-hour lectures.

The lecture is the oldest and continues to be the most widespread teaching format in higher education (Apel 1999).¹ Although lectures often have a poor reputation, they continue to play an important role in stimulating students’ interest in a field, gauging their level of knowledge and providing them with an overview of a discipline. Strictly teacher-focused or transmission-oriented formats of higher instruction as described above, however, have begun to be increasingly criticized in recent decades.² The lack of interaction is considered one of the major limitations of the traditional lecture, and many students would rather prefer to read lecture notes at home than actually attending lectures (Dubs 2019). Thamraksa (2003, pp. 62–63) points out some of the pitfalls of teacher-centered practices in higher education (HE) such as lectures:

Students are not trained to exercise their analytical, critical, and reflective thinking. Much worse, this education system does not prompt students to become independent learners who recognize that knowledge is constructed in many ways, see the value of learning, realize that learning is a life-long process, and understand that there’s no one else but themselves be responsible for their own learning.

Research has consistently shown that lecturing in the entire class period, for example, is a rather ineffective way of teaching because our working memory and concentration span are limited; usually after listening for 10 to 15 minutes to a lecture, students’ minds start to drift away (e.g., Bligh 2000; Middendorf & Kalish 1996). Hence, scholars point to the potential for pedagogical improvement and innovation that can result in radical changes in the structure of the traditional teaching methods with the aim to provide opportunities for deeper learning. Some even ponder: “The trend toward ‘active learning’ may overthrow the style of teaching that has ruled universities for 600 years” (Mazur, cited in Lambert 2012).

Neurologists and cognitive scientists posit that in order for students to use their brains effectively, they have to be engaged in cognitively active forms of learning, because people literally build their own minds throughout life by actively using their brain to organize and connect bits of isolated information (Hinton et al. 2012). Twenty years of neuroscience and evolutionary biology findings about how the brain learns have taught us that “the one who does the work does the learning” (Doyle 2008, p. 63). Student-centered learning and teaching (SCLT) thus means teaching in harmony with how the brain learns – students only construct new neural networks when their brain is actively attending to the new information practicing, reading, writing, thinking, talking, collaborating or reflecting and so forth (Doyle 2011; Doyle & Zakrajsek 2019). Empirical research submits that “students’ academic achievement increases when their learning is customized, interactive, and student-centered rather than standardized, passive, and faculty-centered” (Schell 2012, p. 21). Properly structured and implemented SCLT can hence lead to increased motivation to learn, greater retention of knowledge and academic performance, deeper understanding, more positive attitudes toward both the subject being taught and learning in general, improved student learning experience and persistence in programs (Alfieri et al. 2011; Baeten et al. 2016; Collins & O’Brien 2011; Handelsman et al. 2004).

In their definition, McCombs and Whisler (1997, p. 9) capture the dual focus of learner- or student-centeredness informing and driving educational decision making as follows:

The perspective that couples a focus on individual learners (their heredity, experiences, perspectives, backgrounds, talents, interests, capacities, and needs) with a focus on learning (the best available knowledge about learning and how it occurs and about teaching practices that are most effective in promoting the highest levels of motivation, learning, and achievement for all learners).

Student-centeredness focuses not only on individual learners and their learning processes but on the whole learning context and issues of content, culture, community and instructional practice (e.g., activities, assignments) informed by educational constructivism, a theory of knowledge and learning. Thereby a variety of instructional methods can lead to Student-centered learning (SCL) because it is not the amount of “doing” (e.g., discussions, group work) but rather the quality of the knowledge construction processes these methods promote in students that is essential (Mayer 2004, 2009). Meaningful, deeper learning occurs when the student strives to make sense of the curricular “to-be-learned material” by selecting relevant information, organizing it into a coherent structure and integrating it with prior knowledge (De Corte 2012; Mayer 2010).

Ideas surrounding SCL are not revolutionary or even new, however. In education, the call for SCL has been built over the past century and is largely associated with the work of prominent 20th-century educators. Frank Hayward, John Dewey, Carl Rogers, Lev Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, Paulo Freire, Malcolm Knowles, Maria Montessori and Friedrich Froebel, among many others, have made substantial contributions to the conversation furthering our understanding of learning and how best to maximize human potential through education (O’Neill & McMahon 2005). Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, progressive, humanist, critical and constructivist learning theories challenged the transmission or behaviorist paradigm, arguing that meaningful learning requires learners to actively (co-)construct rather than receive knowledge (cognitive revolution). The “expert teacher” approach rooted in the psychology of behaviorism and characterized by the predominant use of traditional methods of teaching (e.g., formal lectures, seminars and examinations) was found to promote “surface” rather than “deep” levels of understanding, with the students often performing at the minimal level required to obtain a good grade in the course (Reusser & Pauli 2015).

The call for SCL was also inspired by political movements: the massive student protests that broke out worldwide in 1968 with the aim to transform universities to reflect student agency and social diversity; and the rise of critical pedagogy that aimed to empower disadvantaged students with knowledge by understanding students’ social contexts and assisting them in learning (European Students’ Union [ESU] and Education International [EI] 2010). During the 1970s and 1980s, interest in SCL gained particular momentum due to significant changes in society and on the labor market globally: the massification of HE as a rising and increasingly diverse student body entered universities; an increasing number of university courses with a larger class size and a vocational focus; an increasing number of students who were not prepared to benefit fully from their studies and/or dropped out due to a lack in self-regulatory skills; digitalization and the need for more flexible learning environments (e.g., lifelong learning, digital literacy); and growing expectations of students paying more for their university education and with student evaluations getting firmly established as tools to measure student satisfaction with their courses and instructors (e.g., Biggs 2003; Bembenutty 2011; Pintrich & Zusho 2007).

Moreover, starting with the turn of the last century, SCL and the teaching mission of higher education institutions (HEIs) together with calls for widening participation in HE had been identified as policy priority areas in the context of the European Bologna Process (Hoidn 2016; Leuven/Louvain-la-Neuve Communiqué 2009). Meanwhile SCLT continues to gain attention globally, aiming at rethinking curriculum design, assessment practices and enduring traditional transmission modes of teaching in HE.

Apart from these developments, over 20 years ago, Barr and Tagg’s (1995) landmark article From Teaching to Learning – A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education proposed a paradigm shift from an “instruction paradigm” toward a “learning paradigm” in HE, underlining that the university’s purpose is to produce learning instead of merely providing instruction:

To say that the purpose of colleges [universities] is to provide instruction is like saying that…the purpose of medical care is to fill hospital beds. We now see that our mission is not instruction but rather that of producing learning with every student by whatever means work best.

(ibid., p. 13)

As a result of the developments outlined here, there has been a significant shift in interest (not necessarily practice) away from what instructors do to what students are thinking and learning. The learning focus shifted from receiving knowledge or memorizing content to higher-order thinking and demonstrating deep understanding and transferable skills (or cross-curricular competencies) such as focused analysis, critical reflection, knowledge application and knowledge creation in complex authentic contexts (Anderson & Krathwohl 2001). In his newest book, The Instruction Myth (2019), Tagg makes another case that “instruction alone is worthless” and that “universities should instead be centered upon student learning.” He points out that, although we have moved toward SCLT in many places, HEIs have not yet abandoned their central operating principle, that is the belief that education revolves around instruction. In contrast, Biesta in his book The Rediscovery of Teaching (2017) argues against the “marginalisation of teaching and the teacher” and for teaching to be re(dis)covered in response to the ongoing “learnification” of education, that is the redefinition of all things educational in terms of learning (Biesta 2010).

Learning takes time, practice and skill, and there is no substitute, no magic pill for the hard work of learning which has to be done by the individual in order to establish long-term memories that can be retrieved and acted upon. In SCLT it is the students who do the work, and thus the learning as compared to lectures with the instructor as the “sage on the stage” working the hardest as Weimer (2002/2013, p. 60) points out:

What happens in the typical college classrooms? Who’s delivering the content? Who’s leading the discussions? Who’s previewing and reviewing the material? Who offers the examples? Who asks and answers most of the questions? Who calls on the students? Who solves the problems, provides the graphs, and constructs the matrices? In most classrooms, it’s the teacher. When it comes to who’s working the hardest most days, teachers win hands down. Students are there, but too often education is being done unto them.

Along these lines Biggs submits that “many institutions or educators claim to be putting student-centred learning into practice, but in reality they are not” (1999, cited in Lea, Stephenson & Troy (2003, p. 322). A SCL approach requires both a change in mindset and behavior on the part of the instructors and students who are the ones who have to enact SCLT in their respective classrooms. Compared to a teacher-centered approach focusing on the instructor as the only authority and expert, or to a content-centered approach focusing on the disciplinary knowledge being taught, its structure and methods of knowledge generation, a student-centered approach much more focuses on students’ learning needs, abilities, interests, aspirations, and cultural backgrounds – it is “personal...