Learning School 2003
Student Perception of Effective Learning
The fifth year of Learning School has one group with eight student researchers and two student co-ordinators. Although their itinerary becomes slightly tight because of the number of participating schools, the group can keep the continuity of research and development as a group for ten months. The topic is Student perception of effective learning.
Research Topic - Student Perception of Effective Learning
Learning School 5 is investigating student perception of effective learning. In what ways do the students perceive their learning environment? What and how do they value most for their effective learning?
To answer these questions, LS5 looks at following four areas:
1 Resources (human, physical and technical, etc)
2 External Influences (people around the students, free time activities, living conditions and situations, etc)
3 Internal/personal Influences (fears, ambitions, hopes, dreams, satisfaction etc)
4 Learning Methods (exams, work experiences, homework, group work, class size, individual study, etc)
This year, the group decided not to use observation or Shadowing in order to focus on the students' voices. People's verbal expressions cannot be seen as the same things as people's real experience or even real opinions but are seen as the speakers' selective representations of experience. The group is aware of that one speech can be unreliable as data, and devised several kinds of data gathering tools using verbal expressions: Short Answer Questions, Individual Interviews, Group Discussions, Hot Chair, and Short Answer Questions, as well as quantitative data gathering tool: Student Questionnaire. Those involve individual speech, discussion, individual speech in a group, written text and selecting from the choices. The group thinks that this methodological collaboration of data collection maintains the research as valid as possible. |
|