Abstract:

This case study will show how students’ perception of their own learning can be a useful predictor of their final performance on a course.

Attendees will learn about how to measure and increase students’ perception of their own learning using classroom polls and pre-class preparation.

At the end of a course, students are often asked to rate the effectiveness of their instructors, but they are seldom invited to regularly reflect on whether they have made progress in their own learning. However, even if we did so, would students’ perceptions of their own learning have predictive value?

Several studies investigate students’ perception of their learning environment, e.g., in medical teaching (Roff et al., 1997; Roff, 2005; Veerapen & McAleer, 2010), problem-based learning (Jaeger & Adair, 2014; Senocak, 2009), or in experiential learning (Lee, 2008). However, we cannot find any prior studies investigating students’ perception of their own increase in learning over an individual lesson.

Our setting is a series of 6 workshops for a large first year undergraduate finance course with over 1000 students. We ask students at the start of the workshop whether, and to what extent, they have prepared for the workshop, and at the end of the workshop, about their own perceived increase in learning that day. We also use in-class quizzes, asking all students one quantitative and one qualitative question each workshop. We link this to a pre-course demographic questionnaire and students' final exam results. Students are traceable through the study.

We offer students five different levels of perceived learning to choose from, from the highest, “I have gained a lot of new knowledge,” to the lowest, “I have not learnt anything new today,” rather than a standard Likert scale.

We find:
1. Female students (students from East Asia ) are more likely to report higher perception of their own learning than male students (students from other locations).
2. Students who prepare before workshops at the highest level, attempting all the questions, report significantly more learning, at the both the highest level (I have gained a lot of new knowledge) and the second highest level (I have gained good new knowledge); this persists even when accounting for gender and geographical location.
3. Students who answer more in-class quizzes correctly, report significantly more learning at the top three levels. The effect is stronger when students answer qualitative questions correctly, rather than quantitative questions, and persists even when accounting for students’ preparation. Interestingly, the effect is weaker when we consider simply responding to the in-class quizzes; it seems that students need to see that they have answered correctly. Answering quizzes in the last three workshops matters more than the first three workshops of term.
4. Students who report learning at a higher level achieve significantly higher grades at the end of the course. The effect is stronger when students report learning at a higher level: for instance, if a student reported learning at the third highest level (gaining some new knowledge) in each of the six workshops, we would expect them to achieve a grade of 68, a mid-merit grade; but if they reported learning at the highest level (gaining a lot of good new knowledge), we would predict a mark of 80, a high distinction. Students’ own perception of learning does seem to be a reliable indicator of eventual performance on the course.

Keywords:

Formative assessment, student engagement, perceptions of learning.