New research maps the way forward for young learners
by Thel Krollig
Leading educational researcher and winner of the prestigious US Paul R Pintrich Outstanding Dissertation Award for 2008, Dr Lyn Arnold shows that creating positive self-regulated learning classrooms promotes higher levels of academic success.
In her research Dr Arnold, Senior Research Fellow: Professional Education at UniSA, developed seven simple guidelines, based on classroom research, which provide reference points to help students stay on track with their learning and achieve academic success.
“For a teacher in a classroom this means providing a scaffolded framework in which children can explore different ways to achieve academic goals and outcomes,” Dr Arnold says. “It means helping children understand the context of how and why they are learning and what works best for them.”
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Dr
Arnold’s research supports two notions. Firstly, differing classroom
contexts effect students’ academic achievement and understandings of
self regulated learning. Second, students’ academic regulatory and
meta-cognitive processes can be enhanced when teachers provide
timely and appropriate scaffolding and authentic opportunities for
collaboration and co-regulation.
In support of these notions, Dr Arnold worked with teachers and students in five, Year Five classrooms across two schools to develop a course of study in the area of Society and the Environment. Teachers were supported by Dr. Arnold to work collaboratively with their students to select topics, map a course of study, and devise ways to measure achievement. This approach varies significantly from the widely adopted approach where teachers take responsibility for determining the content, guidelines and assessment criteria and convey this to students. Importantly in the study, teachers were highly supportive of the approach as it required only small but manageable changes in their teaching and classroom practice.
“The students knew that they needed to: stay within a parameter; work on a project that was relevant to the theme; show what they had learned; and devise a process to measure their learning against the curriculum standards. In each case the teachers were amazed to find that the children devised a program that closely mirrored what they, as teachers had planned. The key difference was the level of student enthusiasm, which translated into outstanding results”.
Dr Arnold devised a series of questions for students to ask themselves throughout the course of working on a real-life problem. “Instead of waiting for teacher feedback, by continually returning to these points of reference students independently assessed their progress, sought help if they were floundering, and redirected effort if they were not progressing towards identified goals.”
Dr Arnold said the most notable academic improvements came from the normally lower and middle achieving students. Much of Dr Arnold’s research results fly in the face of the push for getting back to old-fashioned education methods of teaching and assessment.
According to Dr Arnold, academic success is linked with students’ abilities to regulate and meta-cognitively reflect upon their learning effectively and strategically. Children need to be supported in determining what they know, and more importantly what they don’t know, so they can take responsibility and set targets for their own learning on an individual basis.
“By all means the fundamentals of the three R’s are crucial to foundation learning but when we focus primarily on outcomes and children’s performance, we fail to acknowledge the diverse complexities of their learning experiences. What happens is we ignore the value of knowing ‘how to learn’ and how students perceive themselves as competent learners, which are important personal benchmarks and skills for future success in life.
Quite simply put, the earlier children are exposed to developing problem solving skills and making authentic academic choices, the better they become at delivering consistently higher quality academic work.