The latest issue of Australian Universities' Review, vol. 56, no. 1, is now available online. eBook: http://issuu.com/nteu/docs/aur_56-01.
By Dennis Bryant, University of Canberra. Expectations of student learning quality - An introductory study (Australian Universities' Review, vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 32-38)
Without a direct measure of learning, universities and lecturers do not have reliable evidence of changes, past or present, in the academic
merit of a unit. By using grade data to develop a variable called Academic Merit, all university units were measured for their percentages
of academic merit over one semester at an Australian teaching-intensive regional university. Although the results revealed units with
excellent percentages, there were others with percentages that were other than excellent. The implication is that an opportunity exists to
understand the quality of the learning merit in those units with a view to enhancing student academic learning.
Introduction
Discussions in higher education that uncritically link teaching and learning into a co-joined mass are simplistic in their acceptance of the assumption that educational improvements in one co-joined principal, stereotypically, the teaching principal, imply that those improvements affect equally the other co-joined principal, here, learning. In the co-joined teaching and learning model, quality assurance efforts that raise the quality of teaching by one point would be expected to raise the quality of learning by a similar margin of one point. Curiously, there is a dearth of published literature that empirically supports the teaching and learning co-joined model’s assumption of equivalent co-growth. However, there are claims, not merely against an assumed equivalence of teaching improvements to learning result:gain ratios, but more dramatically against the nature of some co-joined educational models. Biggs (2001) presents a number of impediments to the quality feasibility of cojoined models, arguing that educational success requires the alignment of not two but three principals, with the third principal being assessment. The Biggs constructive alignment model promises that adherence to teaching and assessment will result in student learning quality excellence; however, in both models the missing ingredient is how best to detect student learning quality excellence (abbreviated hereafter as merit), given that students start from different bases.
A commonly used method of detecting learning merit is to rely on surveys that measure a surrogate variable in place of directly measuring learning merit. In survey devices (Ramsden, 1991), students are invited to reflect on their satisfaction with teaching, from which results are extracted student perceptions of learning. But this approach relies on simplistic co-joined model assumptions and has critics (Denson et al., 2010; Edstrom, 2008; Shevlin et al., 2000).
An alternative approach is to eschew surrogate measures in favour of direct measures. Using a non-surrogate approach with an emphasis on empirical learning results, Bryant (2013a) proposed a variable called ‘academic merit’, whose values were ‘no merit shown’ and ‘merit shown’. A no merit shown value refers to students who achieved either a failure grade or a P (pass) grade. While it is intuitive that a failure grade be interpreted Discussions in higher education that uncritically link teaching and learning into a co-joined mass are simplistic in their acceptance of the assumption that educational improvements in one co-joined principal, stereotypically, the teaching principal, imply that those improvements affect equally the other co-joined principal, here, learning. In the co-joined teaching and learning model, quality assurance efforts that raise the quality of teaching by one point would be expected to raise the quality of learning by a similar margin of one point. Curiously, there is a dearth of published literature that empirically supports the teaching and learning co-joined model’s assumption of equivalent co-growth. However, there are claims, not merely against an assumed equivalence of teaching improvements to learning result:gain ratios, but more dramatically against the nature of some co-joined educational models. Biggs (2001) presents a number of impediments to the quality feasibility of cojoined models, arguing that educational success requires the alignment of not two but three principals, with the third principal being assessment. The Biggs constructive alignment model promises that adherence to teaching and assessment will result in student learning quality excellence; however, in both models the missing ingredient is how best to detect student learning quality excellence (abbreviated hereafter as merit), given that students start from different bases. More...
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