Learnings from LTAG - Dr Alistair Standish
Educators often reflect on their teaching to improve their pedagogy, however, what about getting students to reflect on their learning and how they can improve?
In this project, Associate Professor Beth Loveys and I looked to encourage student metacognition on their learning and assessment to improve both their learning and our teaching. Students across multiple Honours, Postgraduate and Undergraduate STEM courses were asked to think about how they learn, where they were having difficulty and potential ways that they might change their behaviour to improve learning.
De-identified student responses were analysed in different ways in order to determine effective methods for encouraging metacognition in order to determine common themes in answers, examine groupings (gender/PG vs UG/ International vs Domestic) and to use what students tell us to improve student learning.
What was the impact of your project?
This grant enabled Dr Nicholas Maczuga to analyse responses that students gave from the different courses to identify similarities and to see what we could learn. We asked students open ended questions to encourage them to have deep reflections.
For instance, one example question which was integrated at the end of a multiple choice quiz was:
“Think about the content we have covered over the last two weeks. In no more than 2 or 3 sentences tell us how you are going?”.
Common responses amongst all the cohorts included:
- Students feeling challenged
- Desire to improve study habit,
- General enjoyment in participating in courses..
Interestingly, follow up questions later in the semester indicated that students were willing to adapt their study approaches and make improvements for future assessments in the course. This fits with the literature, which suggests that metacognition improves student learning, with the ability of the students to identify their own strengths and weaknesses increasing their higher order thinking and ability to crease, evaluate and analyse. There was also useful student feedback on course content that we can use in the future to modify our teaching to help the student experience.
What is your key learning from this activity?
It actually worked! It was simple to integrate, with little effort for both teacher and student. Indeed, student participation was high with close to 80% doing this. Student feedback indicated that as a result of participation they thought about their study habits and made changes that actually helped their learning. This improved their experiences within the courses and their programs as a whole.
We even saw evidence of an increase in marks from one quiz to the next which students said that the reflection helped!Alistair Standish
How could colleagues use your learnings in their practice?
With this being so simple to integrate, I would encourage others to get their students to reflect on their learning and how the students can work to improve their learning. For little outlay, improvements can be seen, and there is also a chance to get to know your students in more depth, which can also help you to modify your teaching to enable a greater student experience.
How do you plan on building upon the results of this activity/ learnings from your activity?
From this preliminary study, we plan on obtaining human ethics approval such that we can delve deeper into student metacognition including setting up collaborations with other higher education institutions. We are also looking to expand the study and modify how we ask questions such that more meaningful comparisons can be made between the different cohorts.
How can people learn more about your project?
This work has already been shared by Associate Professor Beth Loveys at the Australian Society of Plant Scientists conference in 2023, and we look forward to sharing this more widely in the future. If anyone has more questions please feel free to reach out to me.
Other team members:
| Staff | School |
|---|---|
| Associate Professor Beth Loveys | School of Agriculture, Food and Wine |