Final Draft of LTA Assignment from Christine Ditchfield

What contribution can research into conceptions of learning and teaching make to future developments in teacher education?

This is one of a set of papers and work in progress written by research postgraduates (MPhil and PhD) at Lancaster University's Department of Educational Research. The papers are primarily offered as examples of work that others at similar stages of their research careers can refer to and engage with

Abstract

Introduction

The growing problem of teacher shortage in the British education system means that an increasing number of adults will be encouraged to train for the profession. If these new teachers are to contribute to the raising of educational standards within our schools, they will need the skills to enable children to learn effectively. Entwistle suggests that ‘our approaches to teaching reflect previous experience of learning’ (Entwistle 1988 pg 4) and several studies of student teachers’ pedagogies (e.g. Powell 1992, Hollingsworth 1989 and Calderhead and Robson, 1991) have supported this view. New trainee teachers will thus embark on courses leading to qualified teacher status (QTS) with varied perceptions of their classroom role, perceptions which have evolved from their own reflections of their experiences of teaching and learning. At the same time these ideas are exposed to modification and challenge as students engage in ‘learning about learning’. Such learning opportunities will occur both through their academic work on the psychology of learning as well as through their observations of, and reflections upon, their own and others’ teaching and learning both in Higher Education (HE) and on school placement.

Higher Education students’ perceptions of teaching and learning and their effect on learning outcomes have been the focus of much recent research. This paper sets out to identify a diverse set of research literature which might inform further study of the perceptions of learning and teaching which trainee teachers develop as they progress through their courses. The focus will be on learning in the cognitive domain and will take the form of a review that will be used to formulate questions for further study. This paper draws on the research literature in the general areas of teaching and learning and includes those which focus on:

  • Students’ approaches to learning in Higher Education,
  • Higher Education teachers’ conceptions of learning and teaching,
  • School teachers’ beliefs and knowledge about teaching and learning
  • Student teachers’ conceptions about teaching and learning.

Kelly (1955) proposed his ‘personal construct theory’ to explain how humans develop differing interpretations of the world around them. According to his theory, people act as scientists in trying to understand phenomena by building up idiosyncratic sets of ‘personal constructs’ based on their analysis of their experiences.

Kelly’s ideas were mainly concerned with interpersonal behaviour but it is possible to extend his theory to the way that people construct a wide range of personal meanings of their world. For example, Entwistle (1988) argues that people’s meaning of abstract concepts such as ‘justice’, ‘learning’ and ‘education’ are unlikely to be identical since they are built up from an individual’s own experience of instances of that phenomenon. He uses the term ‘conception’ to make the distinction between an individual’s personal meaning and the formally defined ‘concept’ of a phenomenon. He concludes that:

‘With people from the same culture, there is usually enough overlap in meaning to allow communication of the idea, but also sufficient differences in personal interpretation to be a source of disagreement’. (Entwistle 1988, pg 127)

The term ‘conception’ will be used throughout the paper and is a word which is often not defined in research papers. I will work with Pratt’s definition:

‘Conceptions are specific meanings attached to phenomena which then mediate our responses to situations involving those phenomena. We form conceptions of virtually every aspect of our perceived world, and in so doing, use those abstract representations to delimit something from, and relate it to, other aspects of our world. In effect, we view the world through the lenses of our conceptions, interpreting and acting in accordance with our understanding of the world.’ (Pratt 1992 quoted in Kember 1997 pg 256)

The variation in conceptions between different individuals has been the focus of research in several fields including ideas about scientific phenomenon (e.g. Brook & Driver, 1984) and social science concepts (e.g. Furnham, 1988). Perry (1970) investigated the development of students’ conceptions of ‘knowledge’ as they progressed through HE and identified a progression of epistemological levels from simple ‘dualistic thinking’, where student’s believe that the teacher has ‘the right answer’, to ‘relativistic reasoning’, which expands student’s awareness of the complexity of knowledge itself and appreciate the importance of making a personal commitment. Entwistle et al (2000) describe this progression as:

‘a nested hierarchy of categories, indicating that the more sophisticated conceptions emerge out of the earlier ones, while retaining certain elements of them.’ (Entwistle et al 2000 pg 6)

They represent this progression in thinking diagrammatically:

paper 1999

Fig 1 Development trends in thinking based on Entwistle et al 2000 pg 7

The epistemological level of student teachers will influence their conceptions of ‘learning’ which in turn will influence how they approach their own learning. It is to this area of the research literature that I now turn.

Much of the research into learning until the late 1970s used experimental science methodologies to investigate learning and thus presented what Entwistle terms an ‘external view’ of the learner whose learning was thus judged from the researcher’s perspective (quoted in Marton and Booth, 1997 pg 15). Pioneering using qualitative research methods by Marton and Säljö at the end of the 70s (e.g. Marton and Säljö, 1976) into students’ approaches to learning led to the development of research methodologies which began to transcend the person–world dualism (Marton and Booth, 1997). In this research and the body of research that has developed internationally since then, the dividing line between ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ worlds of the learner disappears. Marton terms the set of beliefs underpinning this approach to researching learning ‘constitutionalism’ explaining that:

‘The world is not constructed by the learner, nor is it imposed upon her; it is constituted as an internal relation between them. There is only one world but it is a world that we experience, a world in which we live, a world that is ours. …We are all different, and we do experience the world differently because our experience is always partial.’ (Marton and Booth, 1997, pg 13 emphasis in the original)

The unit of focus in these studies is ‘the way of experiencing something’. That is, researchers seek to identify the variation in the way individuals experience teaching and learning within real contexts ‘from the inside’. It is an approach, which acknowledges that in any act of learning and teaching, prior experiences, perceptions, approaches and outcomes are simultaneously present within teacher and learner (Marton and Booth, 1997). This holistic approach presents a challenge for me since in order to structure this paper, it will be necessary to examine some of these as separate entities even though they do not exist in this way within the learning context. To facilitate this, the next two sections of the paper focus separately on ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’. The subsequent section examines specific work related to the ideas of student teachers while the final section suggests ideas for further research and development in the field of initial teacher education and continuing professional development.

Learning

Much of the literature on learning in HE makes the broad distinction between conceptions of learning which are ‘reproducing’ as opposed to ‘transforming’. These descriptions have their genesis in the early work of the Gothenburg research group (e.g. Marton and Säljö (1976) and Svensson, 1977). Marton and Säljö researched the ways in which students approached reading an academic text and used the terms ‘deep’ and ‘surface’ approaches to learning to capture the differences they found. With a surface approach, the learner focuses on what Marton calls ‘the sign’ (the text itself) whereas the learners with deep approaches focus on that which is signified (the meaning of the text). In other words, deep approaches are related to grasping the author’s message (transforming approaches) whereas surface approaches missed the message but collected details or facts (reproducing approaches). Similar approaches were identified in independent work in Britain (Entwistle, 1979) and Australia (Biggs 1979) using different research methodologies and served to establish the use of ‘deep’ and ‘surface’ learning as descriptions of approaches to study.

Marton talks about the correlation between the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of learning (Marton and Booth 1997, pg 33). For example, if a student perceives the ‘what’ as being about developing an understanding of an author’s arguments because their view of knowledge is within a relativist framework (as in Perry’s categories referred to on page 4*) then they will adopt a ‘deep approach’ (the how) to the learning task. This simple correlation is challenged by some studies which demonstrate that students may adopt different strategies depending on external constraints such as time and assessment systems.(Marton et al, 1997)

Säljö (1979) carried out an interview study into the perceptions of the ‘what’ of learning in a group of adults. He asked them what learning meant to them and identified five qualitatively different conceptions of learning as follows:

  1. A quantitative increase in knowledge
  2. Memorising
  3. The acquisition, for subsequent utilisation, of facts, methods, etc.
  4. The abstraction of meaning
  5. An interpretative process aimed at understanding reality

Säljö used the process of phenomenography to identify the categories. Marton describes the process by which categories arise through phenomenography as follows:

‘The description we reach is a description of variation, a description on the collective level, and in that sense individual voices are not heard. Moreover, it is stripped description in which the structure and essential meaning of the differing ways of experiencing the phenomenon are retained, while the specific flavours, the scents, and the colours of the worlds of the individuals have been abandoned.’ (Marton and Booth 1997 pg 114)

Richardson (2000) points out that several authors have noted the similarity between phenomenography and grounded theory although Trigwell (2000) asserts that the hierarchical nature of the categories make the phenomenographic approach distinctive.

This methodological approach can be contrasted with that employed by Biggs and Collis (1982) who developed their analytical categories prior to empirical study using cognitive development theory. Their taxonomy called the ‘Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome’ (SOLO) was used as the analytical tool which had five levels ranging from incompetence to expertise in a hierarchical order based on the structural organisation of the field of knowledge which was being investigated. Biggs and Collis were unaware of Marton’s work when they developed this taxonomy (see Entwistle, 1988 pg 102) but despite the methodological differences, Biggs (1979) concluded that the Marton and Säljö (1976) levels of outcome were almost the same as his first four SOLO-levels (quoted in van Rossum 1984 pg 75).

Säljö’s later study (1982) demonstrated the relationship between the students’ approaches to learning, their purposes in reading and their conceptions of knowledge. His study was based on only six case studies but Van Rossum and Schenk (1984) later corroborated his work using a much larger sample of students. Their study demonstrated that students who used deep approaches were far more likely to describe their learning conceptions in terms of ‘transforming’ conceptions, that is Säljö’s categories 4 and 5, while the surface learners were almost entirely associated with ‘reproducing’ conceptions (Säljö’s categories 1,2 and 3).

Van Rossum and Schenk (1984, pg 82) pose questions about the origins of these conceptions about learning and conclude that students’ upbringing and previous educational situations are plausible sources of influence. Likewise, Entwistle et al quote several studies which suggest that student teachers’ lay theories about teaching and learning are established before individual’s begin to train for the profession. (Entwistle et al, 2000 pg 8 ).

Perry (1970) suggested that it was higher education itself that brought about changes in students’ conceptions of knowledge in his study. However his research was carried out in early times prior to mass HE and in an elite American institution. Evidence for changes to conceptions of learning in some students through HE study comes from a five year longitudinal study with Open University students in Britain (Marton et al, 1993). Their categories mirrored those developed by Säljö (1979) with the addition of another category as follows:

A Increasing one’s knowledge

B Memorising and reproducing

C Applying

D Understanding

E Seeing something in a different way

F Changing as a person

Marton identifies the first three categories as ‘reproducing’ conceptions and the latter three as ‘seeking meaning conceptions’ (equivalent to my use of ‘transforming’ in this paper). He relates this to approaches to learning as follows:

‘This is directly analogous to the difference between surface and deep approaches to learning: the former focusing on the tasks themselves and the latter going beyond the tasks to what the tasks signify’ (Marton et al, 1993 pg 38 emphasis in the original).

Again the sample was small and atypical of HE students and not all students appeared to change conceptions. Work in non-Western countries has also highlighted dangers of generalising results without regard to culture and context in this research field. For example, Marton et al (1992) shed light on the relationship between memorisation and understanding for Chinese HE students in his description of the explanations Chinese teacher educators used to talk about their learning approaches. Many in his study explained how they used ‘memorisation’ as a way of deepening understanding which has quite different meaning to that of the ‘reproducing’ conceptions in the early Gothenburg work (e.g. Säljö, 1979 and 1982). Even in Western cultures, students on courses with less academic focus might exhibit rather different conceptions of learning (Eklund-Myrskog, 1997 & 1998 quoted in Richardson, 2000 pg 40).

Boulton-Lewis et al (1996) looked at the learning conceptions of adult learners who were teachers from a variety of educational institutions from primary to HE and who had enrolled on an in-service Bachelor of Education course in an Australian university. The research group worked with the hypothesis that

‘One would assume that (the teacher learners) would be better informed about learning than tertiary students in other disciplines and that they would have organised their knowledge into an overarching structure that they could apply selectively to different aspects of learning and teaching.’ (Boulton-Lewis et al 1996 pg 89)

Their research did not support this hypothesis however. They used the SOLO taxonomy (Biggs and Collis, 1982) and found the most dominant belief about learning within the group of 40 teachers entailed the acquisition of facts, data and information with few responses referring to understanding. Boulton Lewis et al suggest that this rather limited view of learning (equivalent to the ‘reproducing’ descriptors employed by Marton) resulted from

‘years of being responsible for the learning of others, in institutions where fairly rigid curricula and examination requirements are influential.’ (Boulton Lewis et al, 1996)

Säljö (1982) comes to similar conclusions about the surface approach to learning which he proposes is not a ‘malfunction per se’ but in fact ‘a rational way of proceeding’ if this is the dominant culture of an educational establishment. Viewing surface learners as holding ‘absolutist views of knowledge’, he quotes Douglas (1971) to suggest a wider cultural phenomenon:

‘Absolutist (nonsituational and noncontextual) thought is not the product of some mad scientist. Absolutist thought is a fundamental part of Western thought’. (Douglas, 1971 quoted on pg 198 of Säljö, 1982)

Work with lecturers in HE institutions (Prosser et al, 1994) found that the categories they identified with regard to into approaches to teaching had elements in common with those recognized for students’ approaches to their learning described in this section. It is this aspect of the literature which is the focus of the next section of this paper.

Teaching

In the early 90s there was a flurry of research into university academics’ thinking about teaching. In his comparison of thirteen independent studies, Kember (1997) revealed a high degree of commonality with regard to the descriptive categories of conceptions of teaching in these studies. From his analysis of this research, Kember created a framework based on the relationships between teacher, students and the content of learning which ranged from what he termed the ‘teacher-centred/content-oriented pole’ to the ‘student-centred/learning-oriented pole’ (Kember 1997 pg 259). Kember identified five dimensions which he used to locate five different conceptions of teaching. His matrix is reproduced below:


Dimension / Imparting information / Transmitting structured knowledge / Teacher-student interaction / Facilitating understanding / Conceptual change
Teacher / Presenter / Presenter / Presenter and tutor / Facilitator / Change agent/developer
Teaching / Transfer of information / Transfer of well-structured information / Interactive process / Process of helping students / Development of person and conceptions
Student / Passive recipient / Recipient / Participant / Lecturer responsible for student learning / Lecturer responsible for student development
Content / Defined by curriculum / Lecturer needs to order and structure material / Defined by teacher / Constructed by students within teacher framework / Constructed by students but conceptions can be changed
Knowledge / Possessed by lecturer / Possessed by lecturer / Discovered by students but within lecturer’s framework / Constructed by students / Socially constructed

Table 1 Dimensions used to delimit conceptions of teaching from Kember , 1997, pg 262

Kember (1997) suggests that the different categories of conceptions of teaching should be:

‘Regarded as an ordered set of qualitatively differing conceptions. When change does occur, lecturers seem to move from one belief to another and do not retain all elements of previous beliefs.’ (Kember 1997 pg 263)

Kember’s notion of conceptual change about teaching by HE teachers is of a continuum which he represents as follows: