I often refer colleagues to this article by Tamsin Haggis Haggis, T. (2006) Pedagogies for diversity: retaining critical challenge amidst fears of ‘dumbing down’ Studies in Higher Education 31, 5 pp.521-535<http://hdl.handle.net/1893/457> Best wishes Pauline ------------------ Pauline Ridley, Centre for Learning & Teaching, Mayfield House, Falmer Campus, University of Brighton Email [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> CLT website; www.brighton.ac.uk/clt<http://www.brighton.ac.uk/clt> Visual Practices Coordinator, LearnHigher, Association for Learning Development in Higher Education (ALDinHE) Visual Practices: www.brighton.ac.uk/visuallearning<http://www.brighton.ac.uk/visuallearning> ALDinHE: www.aldinhe.ac.uk<http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/> Please note that I now work part-time. My regular days in the CLT are normally Monday & Wednesday; I will do my best to answer emails promptly, but for urgent matters please contact the CLT office on 643115. From: learning development in higher education network [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Lynne Gornall Sent: 03 June 2013 18:50 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: hhhmmm? Hi all – I am new to this list and this is my first contribution. Very grateful to Gordon and Steve for the Gibbs article which I hadn’t come across – Claudine, here are a couple more that also have something to say about study skills provision: Lea, M. & Street, B. (1998). Student Writing in Higher Education: An Academic Literacies Approach. Studies in Higher Education, 11:3, 182-199 Wingate, U. (2006). Doing Away with ‘Study Skills’. Teaching in Higher Education. 11:4, 457-469 Wingate, U. (2007). A Framework for Transition: Supporting ‘Learning to Learn’ in Higher Education. Higher Education Quarterly. 61:3, 391-405 Best wishes Lynne Gornall Senior Lecturer Lancashire Business School Student Support team (Postgraduate & International) Greenbank 061 Ex 4615 From: learning development in higher education network [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Claudine Provencher Sent: 03 June 2013 17:30 To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: hhhmmm? Many thanks for all these comments and for circulating the article in the first place. I’m relatively new to the field of learning development. Could anyone point me towards key academic articles that summarise the critique that has been made by Gibbs and others at the study skills model? Many thanks in advance for your help. Best wishes, Claudine Dr Claudine Provencher LSE Teaching and Learning Centre T: 020 7852 3715 | E: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> LSE Teaching and Learning Centre London School of Economics and Political Science 20 Kingsway, London WC2A 2AE T: 020 7955 6624 | E: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | W: lse.ac.uk/tlc<http://www2.lse.ac.uk/intranet/LSEServices/TLC/Home.aspx> | Twitter: @LSETLC<https://twitter.com/LSETLC> | Blog: lse.ac.uk/teachingblog<http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseteachingblog/> Latest … Photographs from the recent Research Festival exhibition<http://www.flickr.com/photos/93247863@N04/sets/72157633203494772/> From: learning development in higher education network [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Diana Aronstam Sent: 03 June 2013 17:02 To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: hhhmmm? This piece is indeed very helpful, and articulates the issues very clearly. Gibbs has been critiquing the study skills model since the 70s and, if my memory serves me correctly, drew attention in the early 80s to the (then) groundbreaking ‘phenomenographic’ approach of the Goteborg Group, led by Marton. They too provided a robust critique of this model, and their perspectives were transformational for me in relation to my understanding of effective learning in higher education. Many thanks, Gordon. Diana Diana Aronstam London College of Fashion From: learning development in higher education network [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of M. Gough Sent: 03 June 2013 16:22 To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: hhhmmm? I am new to this list (hello all!) This encompasses so much of what I have found and have been trying to convince others of so it is very helpful. Thank you for sharing Mandy (Kingston university) ________________________________ From: Janette Myers <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> Sent: Monday, 3 June 2013, 15:32 Subject: Re: hhhmmm? 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 ________________________________ This email and any attachments are intended solely for the addressee and may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this email and/or its attachments you must not take any action based upon them and you must not copy or show them to anyone. Please send the email back to us and immediately and permanently delete it and its attachments. 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