ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the task of forming the bridge between what we know about student learning and what we should therefore do as teachers. That ‘therefore’ contains the assumption that there is some kind of logical link between the two. At the end of every study of student learning, and indeed of instructional psychology, educational psychology, and even sometimes cognitive psychology, there is an ‘implications for teaching’ section, which sets out the supposed link. In this chapter, we shall look at some of these links and their resultant implications. However, I feel I should issue a warning at the start that although this can be a respectable analytical process-going from what we know about student learning to what this means for teaching-it is not a logical one. It is clearly important to base a teaching strategy on an understanding of learning, but the relationship is fuzzy. The character of student learning is elusive, dependent on former experiences of the world and of education, and on the nature of the current teaching situation. What we learn from this will have an uncertain relation to what will happen in a new teaching situation. The dialectical character of the teaching-learning situation means that the connection will not transfer exactly to the different context of a new teaching strategy. We cannot tweak the teaching without altering the way that learning relates to it. The nature of student learning described in all the previous studies embodies within it the nature of the teaching situation the students were experiencing. That is why it was important not to decouple the description of learning from its content. However, it was usually decoupled from its context. In the one example I quoted in Chapter 3, p.59, where the context was taken into account (students on the microelectronics course), it became clear that there was a dissociation between the content and the context of the learning process (Laurillard, 1984b). The students’ problem-in-context had little relation to the substantive problem set by the teacher. This remains an unresolved issue for educational design, and I believe it is an important one. The epistemological position laid out in Chapter 1, and everything that has followed, requires a relational view of knowledge and of learning, and emphasises the situated character of all types of learning. The bulk
of the research we have to call upon, if it adopts this epistemology at all, does so in relation to content, rather than context. I do not wish to suggest that with funds and enough time we could establish complete and reliable connections between learning, content and context that would enable us to define reliable prescriptions for teaching strategies. Rather, the absence of research on the context of learning gives us an over-simplified view of student learning. Therefore, we are basing the design of a teaching strategy on a minimal analysis of student learning. It can still be principled, however, and in this chapter I hope to clarify what makes it principled.
