A Scenario
Professor Randal Langridge had just received an award for outstanding teaching from his university. He was asked in an interview to talk about his teaching, and his response included the following:
My role is to get the material over to students in manageable chunks that motivate the students, in a way that is understandable and at the same time making it interesting. I have it fixed what I want to cover in the lectures because I divide up the syllabus into a number of lectures and cover that over the semester. In each lecture I first go over what I have done in previous lectures, then introduce the theme of the current lecture, elaborate on that theme, move through material to be covered, then summarise the previous 50 minutes and finally invite questions. I know what notes I want students to get from the lecture, so I have handout notes prepared that contain gaps, and I expect students to fill those gaps during the lecture. This way they do not have to worry about when to take notes. My hope is that students get an understanding of descriptive material and its application as they need to know this in order to pass formal examinations.
In a similar science subject area, and in her teaching award interview, Professor Rita Spurling described her lectures and note-taking in a very different way.
I start lectures by asking students what they think and take 5 or 6 responses. In the lecture I will walk around the theatre among the students as I point out information on the screen and it is my intention to keep them engaged with what I am saying rather than just slavishly writing down what I am saying. It is important that they take their own version of notes, not mine, if they are going to be conversant in the topic. This comes from my general philosophy of teaching that it is not about lectures being the presentation of a whole lot of information, or as something to be gotten through. The real value of lectures is not about information giving, but rather to provide a sense of intrigue. When you start to investigate something that is taken for granted, I think this challenge sparks inquiry. It is intriguing and leads to real understanding. Regurgitating provided information for assessment reasons is not what I call education.
While both teachers have received awards for their teaching, their approaches, in this small component of their teaching at least, are quite different.
A similar variation is also found in other disciplines. For example, in large class teaching in the social sciences, Teacher A says:
… we do run classes with 200 to 300 students in them, so we’re never going to get into full-on discussion situation. The best that we’re going to do is to have five minute windows of chaos in the middle of the lecture where the students are working with a neighbour … I’m waking them up, so waking them up is the number one objective. Two, let them let off a bit of steam, so instead of having the constant low chatter running through the lecture, they’re going to vocalise something. … no-one can concentrate for 20 minutes. Ask them to concentrate for 3 minutes of doing something else. (Prosser & Trigwell, 2014, p. 793)
Teacher B, on the other hand, describes social science lectures as follows:
What I mean I guess is, some years for whatever reason, students grasp the basic concepts more readily, usually under conditions where the first two lectures, which are the most difficult conceptually, go well. … So, what I try to do is get people to think about an idea with some sort of catchiness, ‘Oh I wonder why that happens?’ They will actually then reconstitute into, and reinvigorate, the knowledge that they were getting, and discuss it. (Prosser & Trigwell, 2014, p. 793)
Here, again the distinction between the two approaches is clear. In the first quote, Teacher A is worried about concentration times and giving students a break so they can return to the lecture ‘refreshed’ and can retain the information or acquire the concepts. In the second quote, Teacher B focuses on students’ conceptual understanding and changing or developing the way they think about something. Again, it is where the activity is directed that distinguishes the two approaches.
The question that interested us and has been the focus of the last thirty years of our research, is: ‘Do the differences in these approaches evoke differing responses from students?’. As we will show in this book not only is yes the answer to this question, but that most of the students in the classes of Teacher B or Professor Spurling are more likely to be adopting higher quality learning approaches than the students taught by Professor Langridge or Teacher A.
In 1999 we first reported these relations between teaching and learning in the results of an empirical study (Trigwell, Prosser, & Waterhouse, 1999). Teachers in 48 different first year science classes were asked about their approaches to teaching. The students in their classes (an average of 82 per class) were asked about their approaches to learning. When teachers reported use of a more transmission-based intention, their students were more likely to report adopting more superficial or reproducing learning methods. An intention in teaching to challenge students’ conceptions was found to be positively associated with more meaningful study and negatively associated with superficial approaches.
In a second study (Prosser, Ramsden, Trigwell, & Martin, 2003), clusters of classes in 51 disciplinary varying first year courses were surveyed. The results from a total of 408 teachers and 8829 students confirmed the associations found in the first study. We will return to these studies in Chap. 3.
The way students perceive and understand their learning context and the way they approach their learning in relationship to these perceptions have been found to be major mediating factors between teachers’ teaching and students’ learning outcomes. Similarly, the way teachers perceive and understand their academic context is related to the way they approach their teaching. These studies also establish the presence of an important association between teaching and learning. Without an association between teaching and learning, efforts to change teaching approaches as a means to improve learning would be pointless. Because of it, attempts to better understand the teaching context and to constitute principles for teaching practice have continued. In this book we explore the research studies that have contributed to the empirical evidence that addresses the following question:
- Do university teachers experience aspects of the academic context (such as leadership, research, perceptions of workload and class size) in different ways and if so in what ways do those differences impact student learning?
We then show through a series of principles of practice in each chapter how this research might be applied to enhance the quality of teaching and students’ learning.
A Model Linking Teaching and Learning
In approaching an answer to the question posed above, we use a model or heuristic device that links aspects of teaching and learning. The chosen model is based upon Dunkin and Biddle’s (1974) and Biggs’ (1979) 3P (presage-process-product) models. Their models included only student learning in an academic context. The model we developed for this analysis is in two related parts: one focused on students and their learning and the other focused on teachers and their teaching.
The two parts of the model are related through the teachers’ approaches to teaching and students’ approaches to learning. The model is used as an organising device for the following chapters and to provide a coherent structure for the book as a whole. In each chapter the model acts as a visual map for the research conducted into the set of relations that constitute each part of the model. In doing so, it builds a coherent framework for the understanding of relations between teaching and learning in the context of academic environments, including curriculum design, research and leadership.
Research from the Student Approach to Learning (SAL) perspective has repeatedly revealed logical, systematic relations between four elements of the students’ learning context: their conceptions and understanding, their perceptions of their learning context,...