Keith Trigwell and John's presentations
Mood:  a-ok
Now Playing: Sooner or Later (Supertramp)
Topic: Seminars
Thought the last entry was getting too long so decided to post it in a next entry.

Keith presentation although alright didn't engage my attention as much as Noel's (which is quite surprising since I was more interesting in Trigwell and Prosser work in the MSc!). I think perhaps because he was looking at students' perceptions and approached to learning from Oxford University and since I'm somewhat prejudice towards them decided to not pay much attention :). He talked mostly of the development of the model for student learning, particularly the 3P model (Presage, Process and Product) and how each part of the model relates to 'real' life such as degree result, deep and surface approach, teaching workload etc.

He did mention that in the Oxford undergraduate system, the humanities/social sciences tended to a lot more preparation for their work before a tutorial (and this perhaps increased their deep approach??). He also mentioned something called adoptive and adaptive learning by Blackmore which seems as something that might be of some interest to look up just to check what it is about.

Keith did have something interesting in his findings, that students had 1st class honours tended to perceive their workload as being appropriate and the same for good teaching. Which perhaps just means that students who are probably bright/ intelligent just think workload and teaching are good because the work is easy enough for them :)

They looked at the perception of students, their approaches to teaching and their motivation and conception. Keith was able to identify two clusters from these results. He found that for English, law, maths, history and physics students that the clusters were significantly different for each other for all the scales. However for engineering students the "good teaching" and "clear goals and standards" for perception was not significant between the clusters, and for the languages the deep approach clusters were not significantly different and for the Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) students, the clear goals and standards were not significant either.

In John's presentation he employed the use of path analysis (wasn't quite sure how this was different to structural equation modelling - SEM - but found a chapter on it on the internet - it seems that SEM is an extension of path analysis which includes the latent variables). So, John decided to test the causal relationships between demographic background (age, sex etc), perceptions of academic environment, and study behaviour for predicting outcome measures (he used marks I believe for this one) by controlling the effects of each of the predictor variables, and test whether they were acting as mediating variables. His path analysis obviously assumes that these are the only variables that affect outcome measures. In the end his results suggest that perceptions of academic environment and study behaviour both individually act to predict (or cause) the outcome measures and also, that both the perceptions of academic environment and study behaviour act through one another to cause the outcome measure.

This finding was not wholly accepted by Keith as one should expect since his framework suggested that Perceptions of academic environment and study behaviour was acting together to make the reality or perspective of a student and does not have a causal relationship between them.

In the discussion forum, John, Keith or Noel mentioned that Meyer was putting together an ASI bibliography for group disciplines. This sounded as something interesting to get my hands on.

I think this session was really good, just got to meet Ramsden and Meyer and would have met all of the famous people from my MSc research :).