Fractured Realities and Connected Curriculum

UCL’s Connected Curriculum identifies  dimensions of ‘learning through research and enquiry’. My research project as CC Fellow focusses on perceptions of these dimensions among students and how these perceptions are affected by the context within which they learn and study. Why would such perceptions matter? And why today maybe more than ever?

Student Perceptions and Learning

When students enter the classroom they come not only with more or less preparation for the upcoming session, not only with varied degrees of motivation for learning or diverging preferences regarding how and what to learn. They will also take with them perceptions of what constitutes learning and what defines success in that activity. In our day-to-day activities as teachers, supervisors and mentors we rarely really address these questions in class or tutorial, despite the fact that we to bring our set of perceptions with us when we prepare and teach. One example of a situation in which this issue often underlies a difficulty of communication between teacher and student is when a student asks ‘what they need to do in order to get a good mark’ and a teacher tries to formulate on-the-spot marking criteria. Another, no less important, example is when we ask a student as well as the lecturer what ‘the point’ of an assignment is in terms of what the student is supposed to learn from it.

Some students will complete exams with good or very good results, yet stare at their results worried about the feeling they must have been lucky because in their view they didn’t properly understand the material.  Other students have the opposite experience. Some markers will quiz their conscience about some candidates who seem to get good results despite the doubt in the markers mind as to whether the candidate actually thoroughly understands the material. In other cases a marker may sense some disappointment seeing a poor result of a candidate of whom they ‘know they can do better’. An analysis of a similar dissonance between teachers and students can be found in, for example, [1] and [2] where teacher- and student-perception of a teaching innovation were nearly diametrically opposed. As in [3] students usually also have distinct perceptions of the learning methods and their learning aims. The study and analysis of such perceptions, for example perceptions of teaching-student interactions [4] is non-trivial and sensitive to the level at which such perceptions are measured, i.e. individual- or group-perceptions for example.

When thinking of teaching innovations, use of new media and teaching methods or when incorporating a particular teaching- or educational philosophy in the construction of curricula it is important to account for perceptions of students, and the manner in which these perceptions change as a result of their exposure to academics, to learning resources as books or online materials, to the type and format of assessments and even infrastructure and logistics. This is particularly important as the perceptions, including perceptions of ‘control’, affect learning outcomes [5].

A Fractured Reality

We have entered a turbulent era as exemplified by the outcomes of the recent Brexit- and US Presidential election votes and the attempts at analysing these events [6]. A common feature of these analyses, both in the popular press as well as in first attempts from academia, is the notion of ‘fact-free’ politics. What it represents however is, in my view, not so much a ‘fact-free’ reliance by one side or the other on perceived reality but rather a fracturing of reality. Such a fracturing is not only something that is imaginable within our factual world but there are excellent examples, such as [7], of a re-telling of fictional events in fictional worlds along the same lines. Such a re-telling of a narrative from fiction typically results from an attempt at entertainment. What it does however is give the re-teller a measure of (perceived) control over otherwise seemingly uncontrollable content.

The desire of human beings to recognize patterns and to re-tell the standard narrative about their reality is deeply affected by their perceptions of how much control they can exert within their reality.  There are deep, though not yet fully understood, connections between the struggle of humans with uncertainty affecting their lives and the temptation of conspiracy theories [8]. The construction of such theories requires significant effort, learning them often requires the adoption of particular vocabulary and the acquisition of the tacit knowledge that marks one an ‘insider’. Sunstein asks in his Essay on Conspiracy theories [9]:”Why do intelligent people believe in conspiracy theories, even when they are utterly baseless?” One of the most common things I have heard from believers in such theories in response to my scepticism was “I have done my own independent research” or “You should be more critical and not just accept the mainstream opinion”.

The “Connected” in Connected Curriculum

Perceptions of the meaning of words such as “research” and “critical thinking” have undergone a shift in our world. I have been teaching now at university for 3 decades in roles from tutorial tutor to designing and lecturing my own modules. In that setting have I encountered intelligent people, students and staff, whose perceptions of ‘critical thinking’ and ‘independent research’ or ‘enquiry-based learning’ led them to believe that one part or the other of a curriculum was the result of a suppression of critical thought or independent enquiry. I vividly recall many discussions about diverse topics such as whether the ‘dominance of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics’ or the ’emergence of String Theory’ in Physics, or the ‘dominance of neoclassical thought’ or the ‘excessive mathematization’ in Economics were sociological or political in nature rather than ‘scientific’. I have seen my share of intelligent people performing extraordinary feats of intellectual elasticity in order to hold on to a pattern they perceived in the world and held to dear to sacrifice it to the uncertainties of our world.

Uncertainty, perceived (lack of) control and perceptions of safety all impact on student learning outcomes [10]. When we want the Connected Curriculum to contribute to connecting pieces of a reality that so often appears fractured, we need a dialogue about what independent research, enquiry-based learning and critical thinking are. Hard as it may be, instead of pointing towards dictionary-type definitions it seems relevant to me that we start at what students and staff perceive them to be, which role they are perceived to play in their daily activities of learning and teaching and how the interactions between teachers and learners shape these perceptions. I hope that the outcomes of my project can add something worthwhile to that dialogue inside UCL and beyond.

References

[1] Nijhuis, J.F., Segers, M.S. and Gijselaers, W.H., 2005. Influence of redesigning a learning environment on student perceptions and learning strategies. Learning environments research, 8(1), pp.67-93.

[2] Hughes, M. and Daykin, N., 2002. Towards constructivism: Investigating students’ perceptions and learning as a result of using an online environment. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 39(3), pp.217-224.

[3] Forbes, H., Duke, M. and Prosser, M., 2001. Students’ perceptions of learning outcomes from group-based, problem-based teaching and learning activities. Advances in Health Sciences Education, 6(3), pp.205-217.

[4] Den Brok, P., Brekelmans, M. and Wubbels, T., 2006. Multilevel issues in research using students’ perceptions of learning environments: The case of the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction. Learning Environments Research, 9(3), pp.199-213.

[5] Lizzio, A., Wilson, K. and Simons, R., 2002. University students’ perceptions of the learning environment and academic outcomes: implications for theory and practice. Studies in Higher education, 27(1), pp.27-52; López-Pérez, M.V., Pérez-López, M.C. and Rodríguez-Ariza, L., 2011. Blended learning in higher education: Students’ perceptions and their relation to outcomes. Computers & Education, 56(3), pp.818-826; Fraser, B.J. and Fisher, D.L., 1982. Predicting students’ outcomes from their perceptions of classroom psychosocial environment. American Educational Research Journal, 19(4), pp.498-518; Christensen, L.J. and Menzel, K.E., 1998. The linear relationship between student reports of teacher immediacy behaviors and perceptions of state motivation, and of cognitive, affective, and behavioral learning; Chan, D.S., 2002. Associations between student learning outcomes from their clinical placement and their perceptions of the social climate of the clinical learning environment. International Journal of nursing studies, 39(5), pp.517-524.

[6] Fischer, T.B., 2016. Lessons for impact assessment from the UK referendum on BREXIT; Beasley-Murray, T., 2016. Brexit, or How to be Serious after the Referendum. The European Legacy, pp.1-9; Green, S., Gregory, C., Reeves, M., Cowan, J.K., Demetriou, O., Koch, I., Carrithers, M., Andersson, R., Gingrich, A., Macdonald, S. and Açiksöz, S.C., 2016. Brexit Referendum: first reactions from anthropology. Social Anthropology; Luke, T.W., The Dissipation of American Democracy in 2016: On the Emptiness of Elitism and the Poverty of Populism in the Trump Zone.

[7] The Death Star conspiracy – was it an Inside Job? , 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEPazLTGceI

[8] Whitson, J.A. and Galinsky, A.D., 2008. Lacking control increases illusory pattern perception. science, 322(5898), pp.115-117; Prooijen, J.W. and Jostmann, N.B., 2013. Belief in conspiracy theories: The influence of uncertainty and perceived morality. European Journal of Social Psychology, 43(1), pp.109-115; Sullivan, D., Landau, M.J. and Rothschild, Z.K., 2010. An existential function of enemyship: evidence that people attribute influence to personal and political enemies to compensate for threats to control. Journal of personality and social psychology, 98(3), p.434; Sterman, J.D., 1994. Learning in and about complex systems. System Dynamics Review, 10(2‐3), pp.291-330.

[9] Sunstein, C.R., 2014. Conspiracy theories and other dangerous ideas. Simon and Schuster.

[10] Perlmuter, L.C. and Monty, R.A., 1977. The importance of perceived control: Fact or fantasy? Experiments with both humans and animals indicate that the mere illusion of control significantly improves performance in a variety of situations. American Scientist, 65(6), pp.759-765; Guskey, T.R., 1982. Differences in teachers’ perceptions of personal control of positive versus negative student learning outcomes. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 7(1), pp.70-80; Fazey, D.M. and Fazey, J.A., 2001. The potential for autonomy in learning: Perceptions of competence, motivation and locus of control in first-year undergraduate students. Studies in Higher Education, 26(3), pp.345-361; Ashford, S.J. and Black, J.S., 1996. Proactivity during organizational entry: The role of desire for control. Journal of Applied psychology, 81(2), p.199.