Dear Kal,
this is a really interesting point which kept me occupied on my new
exercise regime which involves walking to a much further tube station!
I think you're right in that part of my problem with 'remedial' is that
I simply don't like it, it is a knee jerk reaction. It has all sorts of
connotations which a background in adult ed brings up. It's used a lot
in medical education and also in dealing with doctors whose performance
is sub standard. (incidentally it's interesting that the discourse
around underperforming doctors is around identification in order to
remediate, whereas that around underperforming teachers is of
identification in order to sack- but that's another story)
However, I would take issue that difference in what people are able to
do leads to remediation issues. I think that many of the things students
have to do in HE are new, we wouldn't expect them to have acquired high
level criticality through pre HE study, or knowledge about certain
discipline areas and we wouldn't expect them to have certain practical
skills, such as suturing. This doesn't make them 'remedial', but
'lacks' in other areas do, and I don't know how or why we choose those
areas as the ones we expect them to already know, but not others. At the
very least we should be able to clearly articulate that and we by and
large don't. Does it make a difference in an Eng lit course if students
are already familiar with texts? Does being unfamiliar make you
remedial? Does not knowing that you don't just talk about what you liked
and hated in a text make you remedial? What is the role of the programme
of study in conveying a body of knowledge production and outcomes?
I'm starting to burble now, so will stop. Many thanks for posing such a
provocative question
Regards
Janette
On 03/06/2013 16:51, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm also relatively new to this list, and enjoy the conversations and
> resource sharing.
> I agree that this article makes good points, and with the sentiments
> about the embedded, metacognitive and transformative nature of the work.
> I have a question though.
> I'm guessing that most would agree that some students are in more
> needed of learning development than others - some are already
> competently reflective, self-regulatory, critical learners; others are
> less so.
> So surely, the remedial piece is a part of LD work. Not all, clearly,
> but surely 'remediation' is a term that shouldn't be considered a
> dirty word, isn't it? After all, helping those students who have
> encountered barriers they struggle to overcome, or who have failed
> courses, is perhaps the most challenging and interesting aspect of
> learning development work. And if we don't help them, who will?
> Why is it so common to deny the remedial part of LD?
>
> Really curious,
>
> Kal Winston
>
> Study Adviser,
> Bangor University
>
> Quoting Janette Myers <[log in to unmask]>:
>
>> Thanks for circulating this Gordon. I thought it a very positive
>> piece, making some succinct key points. It will be of use to me in
>> supporting some of the things I try to convey about embedding,
>> metacognition and the non-remedial (and transformative Sandra!)
>> nature of LD
>> regards
>> Janette
>>
>> On 03/06/2013 13:11, Gordon Asher wrote:
>>>
>>> *Raising awareness of best-practice pedagogy*
>>>
>>> 30 MAY 2013
>>>
>>> Graham Gibbs asks what ‘study skills’ consist of and whether they
>>> can actually be learned by students
>>>
>>> http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/raising-awareness-of-best-practice-pedagogy/2004204.article
>>>
>>>
>>> SOURCE: *ALAMY*
>>> <http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/raising-awareness-of-best-practice-pedagogy/2004204.article>
>>>
>>> Tunnel vision: giving students ‘how-to’ guides to learning does not
>>> encourage the kind of flexible thinking that is required to get the
>>> most out of higher education
>>>
>>> When I was at The Open University in the 1970s, I tried to teach
>>> adults who were studying for the first time in their lives what they
>>> needed to do in order to learn effectively. When I was based at
>>> Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University) in the 1980s, I
>>> was teaching students whose study habits had got them through their
>>> A levels but were unequal to the larger and more complex tasks of
>>> higher education. And when I later worked at the University of
>>> Oxford, students were still asking for help with “study skills”.
>>> Their intelligence and achievements were intimidating, so what was
>>> the problem?
>>>
>>> The educational interventions that make most difference to student
>>> performance are not to do with improving teachers or curricula, and
>>> certainly not with policy or organisational changes, but involve
>>> improving students: changing what it is they do in order to learn.
>>> For example, teachers can often help students more by encouraging
>>> them to tackle feedback differently than by altering the feedback
>>> itself.
>>>
>>> So what does “improving students” actually consist of? “How to”
>>> guides on study skills – how to take notes, how to structure an
>>> essay and so on – contain what appears to be sound enough advice
>>> (although the similarity between them is both striking and
>>> suspicious).
>>>
>>> However, attempts to back up this consensus with evidence of the
>>> effectiveness of the techniques described have had little success.
>>> Students’ scores on “study habits inventories” – questionnaires made
>>> up of lists of the kinds of things contained in these books – hardly
>>> correlate with examination performance at all. An exception is how
>>> to be organised (by managing one’s time, for example).
>>> “Organisation” predicts performance where the use of most “skills”
>>> does not.
>>>
>>> Students also rarely use the methods they read about in how-to-study
>>> books or are taught on study skills courses, and for all kinds of
>>> reasons. Most importantly, the skills may be too rigid to span the
>>> range of demands that students actually face.
>>>
>>> For example, lectures may primarily convey facts, or explain
>>> procedures, or exemplify the use of the discourse of the discipline,
>>> and so on. Each requires a different kind of note-taking, and
>>> students have to be able to spot these varied demands and do
>>> something different in response, not simply use the same methods
>>> every time. Disciplines also vary in their demands and conventions:
>>> a student studying sociology and history may find that their
>>> writing gains good marks in one but not the other.
>>>
>>> *Fit for purpose*
>>>
>>> It appears that successful students (and successful academics for
>>> that matter) do an extraordinary variety of things when they take
>>> notes or set about writing. They have found, often through trial and
>>> error, idiosyncratic ways that work well enough for them, given
>>> their purposes and the particular learning tasks in front of them.
>>>
>>> It is possible to train students to use specific technical skills,
>>> but they transfer very poorly from one context to another (for
>>> example, from a training course back to everyday study, or from
>>> studying one subject to another). It is much better, instead, to
>>> develop a learner’s ability to study a subject within that subject.
>>>
>>> For example, efforts at some Ivy League universities to improve
>>> students’ writing by hiring experts in communication who run generic
>>> courses in how to write have tended to be abandoned. Instead,
>>> postgraduates within subjects are trained to give feedback on
>>> assignments that leads students to reflect on their writing, rather
>>> than only on the content of the assignment.
>>>
>>> When I acted as a “study skills counsellor” at Oxford Polytechnic, I
>>> noticed that many of the bewildered students in my caseload were
>>> unable to describe what they did when they were studying (such as
>>> reading a chapter in a book, for example). Their studying was
>>> habitual and unreflective. In contrast, effective students can tell
>>> you all about how they go about their task, have a sensible
>>> rationale for doing so and change what they do when they notice that
>>> the context or task demands are different.
>>>
>>> In the educational literature, this is termed “metacognitive
>>> awareness and control”, and it is the most influential of all
>>> aspects of “study skills”. Improving students appears to involve
>>> raising their awareness of what they are doing, increasing their
>>> repertoire so that they can choose to do different things when it
>>> seems appropriate and tuning them in to task demands so that they
>>> can recognise what is required.
>>>
>>> *Right answer, wrong approach*
>>>
>>> Two crucial aspects of studying effectively are not about “skills”
>>> at all but about understanding. Research at Harvard University into
>>> why its very bright students sometimes study in unintelligent ways
>>> has revealed how important it is for students to understand the
>>> nature of knowledge and what they are supposed to do with it.
>>>
>>> The study found that unsophisticated students would try to spot the
>>> right answers in lectures, which they would note down in order to
>>> memorise for a test, a method described in the literature by the
>>> phrase “quantitative accretion of discrete rightness”. They were
>>> fantastically efficient at this and it had served them well at
>>> school, but it was the wrong thing to do at Harvard.
>>>
>>> Similarly, studies at the University of Gothenburg have revealed
>>> that students have quite different conceptions of what “learning”
>>> means, and these conceptions evolved through experience until,
>>> ideally, learning is seen as attempting to “apprehend reality”.
>>>
>>> Skills have to serve the purposes associated with these evolving
>>> conceptions of knowledge and of learning: without appropriate
>>> purposes, the skills can be worse than useless.
>>>
>>> PRINT HEADLINE:
>>>
>>> Article originally published as: /Self-reflective improvement/ (30
>>> May 2013)
>>>
>>> AUTHOR:
>>>
>>> Graham Gibbs is professor of higher education at the University of
>>> Winchester.
>>>
>>
>> --
>> I work Mon-Thur at St George's
>>
>> Dr Janette Myers SFHEA
>> Senior Lecturer in Student Learning and Support,
>> Division of Population Health Sciences and Education,
>> Section for Medical and Healthcare Education,
>> 6th floor Hunter Wing,
>> St George's, University of London
>> Cranmer Terrace
>> London
>> SW17 0RE
>>
>> 020 8725 0616
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
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--
I work Mon-Thur at St George's
Dr Janette Myers SFHEA
Senior Lecturer in Student Learning and Support,
Division of Population Health Sciences and Education,
Section for Medical and Healthcare Education,
6th floor Hunter Wing,
St George's, University of London
Cranmer Terrace
London
SW17 0RE
020 8725 0616
|