Session Information
Contribution
Description: All students entering university have had years of experience in education, and their mental models - more or less coherent systems of conceptions about knowledge and learning, themselves as learners, learning goals and tasks, the roles and responsibilities of participants in the teaching/learning process have already been formed. With these mental models and learning orientations - personal goals, motives, expectations, doubts… - they enter various learning situations and interpret them accordingly. These interpretations and the learners' repertoire of learning strategies determine how the learners will use various learning strategies and act in a certain situation, which in turn determines the quality of their learning process and resulting knowledge. The teacher's assessment criteria and the learners' self-evaluation of learning effectiveness have a reverse effect on the learners' mental models of learning and learning orientations. The main goal of the present study was to uncover how students of pedagogy interpret various messages and demands of their university teachers and whether four years of undergraduate studies bring about any changes in the students' conceptions of knowledge and learner/teacher roles.
The study is grounded in modern cognitive-constructivist notions of knowledge, learning and teaching, which stress the dynamic nature of knowledge and its constant construction and reconstruction. Dahlgren, for example, (1984: 34) contrasts the quantitative and reproductive model of knowledge, focused on familiarity with external or concrete characteristics of a phenomenon, with an understanding of the nature of the phenomenon, which is not possible without understanding the relations between this phenomenon and its context.
We attempted to find out how students perceive knowledge and teacher/student roles in the process of undergraduate studies; whether there are differences in this respect between 1st and 4th year students and which of the differences are the most salient. We particularly explored whether students feel their undergraduate studies (their content, process and organization) have played any role in shaping their conceptions, and whether 4th year students who experience changes in their perceptions can identify the key factors to contributing to these and what these factors are.
Methodology:
The main instrument was a questionnaire with a combination of open-ended and closed questions. The sample included 60 1st year students and 60 4th year students of pedagogy at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana. The responses to the open questions have been categorized. All data has been processed using the SPSS statistics package.
Conclusions:
The study will try to pinpoint the prevalent conceptions of knowledge, learner and teacher roles in 1st and 4th year pedagogy students and identify the key factors contributing to perception changes needed for a higher quality of university study.
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