phenomenography for helping students

8/14/2019 Phenomenography for Helping Students

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/phenomenography-for-helping-students 1/7

Using Phenomenographic Perspectives in the Classroom

Chris CopeDepartment of InformationTechnologyLa Trobe University, Bendigofax: (054) 44 7998email: C.Cope@ latrobe.edu.au

Mark Garner Educational Services UnitLa Trobe University, Bendigofax: (054) 44 7373email: [email protected]

Michael Prosser Academic Development UnitLa Trobe Universityfax: (03) 9479 2996email: [email protected]

Abstract

Phenomenography is a research approach used to investigate the different ways in which people conceptualise phenomena in the world around them, as a means of studying thinking and learning. This paper proposes using phenomenography as a classroom teaching technique. The most consistent finding of phenomenographic researchis that there are a varied but limited number of qualitatively different ways in which a concept can beunderstood. This means that in a classroom, lecturer and student may have quite different conceptions of thetopic in hand. If this difference remains implicit, it is unlikely that teaching and learning will be effective. As ateaching technique phenomenography can make students aware of their own and others’ conceptions of the same phenomenon. Examples are given from courses about communication, information systems and physics. Ingeneral, students’ descriptions of their conception of the phenomenon of interest are displayed to the class. Aclass discussion then aims to categorise the descriptions and compare level of understanding. The paper

highlights the benefits of this teaching technique which include: making students aware that there are differentways of conceptualising a phenomenon; encouraging students to compare conceptions, as a starting point for developing better levels of understanding; and indicating to the lecturer the level at which the learners areoperating. These benefits can lead to improved teaching practices.

Introduction

Over the last half century there have been a number of theoretical perspectives on which

teaching and learning in higher education have been based. Behaviouristic theories of teaching

and learning led to the development of Keller Plans or Individualised Systems of Instruction in

higher education (Keller, 1968). Individual constructivism led to the ideas of setting up

situations designed to help students confront their prior conceptions and to change those

conceptions (Strike and Posner, 1985). Information processing models led to ideas such as

concept mapping as ways of helping students structure concepts and ideas in long term

memory (West, Fensham and Garrard, 1985). Each of these perspectives were based upon the

idea that individuals were constituted independently of the world in which they lived.

Phenomenographic perspectives, on the other hand, are based upon the idea that individuals

are not constituted independently of the world in which they live. It does not see knowledge

existing outside the individual, to be brought in as behaviouristic and information processor

theories seemed to suggest, or that it is constructed inside the individual as the constructivist

theories seem to suggest. It sees knowledge as relating individuals to the world. It does not

treat the individual as a black box into which knowledge is poured, nor as an information

processor in which knowledge is stored, but constitutes individuals’ relationship with the

world in terms of their experiences and awareness of the world. People experience the world in

qualitatively different ways, many of which individuals are not aware. A phenomenographic

perspective takes this qualitative variation as central, and sees learning as individuals becoming

more aware of this variation, and, in the process, changing their experience of the world

(Marton and Booth, In press).

While phenomenography is an approach to researching the variation in individuals’

experiences of phenomena in the world in which they live, it does have underlying it, a set of

principles upon which classroom teaching practices can be based Marton and Booth (In

press). In the three cases reported below we have used these principles to design teaching

activities aimed at promoting more efficient learning through bringing a closer educational



awareness between the lecturer and students. More specifically our teaching activities were

designed:

1. to provide relevance to the learning by focussing the students' attention on the conceptual

aims and the learning demands of the subject. Through participation in activities which

demonstrate the limitations of their understanding of the content matter and learning itself,

the students can be made aware of the need to apply learning approaches which lead to a

more complete understanding of the content. 2. to promote awareness in the students of the different ways they, and their fellow students,

conceptualised the content matter and also learning. The development of more

sophisticated concepts can be encouraged through contemplation of this variation. 3. to allow the lecturer to become aware of the way students conceive of the content matter

and of learning, as a precursor to providing teaching approaches designed to improve

understanding.

Cases

We now report three recent cases in which phenomenographic perspectives were used in

classroom teaching.

Student learning about computer programming

This case concerned second year undergraduate students taking a computer programming

subject featuring the COBOL programming language. The students had previously completed

two other programming subjects involving the C++ language and two subjects on informationsystems (IS) development.

Booth (1992) investigated students’ conceptions of computer programming. She found three

conceptions of computer programming forming a hierarchy based on logical inclusiveness. The

three conceptions were computer programming as a computer oriented activity, a problem

oriented activity and product oriented activity. Product orientation logically includes the

problem orientation and both include the computer orientation.

In the programming subjects already completed by the students in this case, the emphasis was

on programming as a computer-oriented activity. The COBOL subject was intended to changethe students’ perception of computer programming to that of a problem oriented activity. A

third year major project where students develop and implement a computer program for a

client is intended to introduce the conception of computer programming as a product oriented

activity.

The COBOL subject emphasises problem solving and understanding the capabilities of the

COBOL language rather than memorisation of the language syntax. Students need to apply a

deep learning approach in order to succeed so their conception of learning is important. Säljö

(1979) identified a hierarchy of five different conceptions of learning for a group of adults: a

quantitative increase in knowledge, memorising, the acquisition of facts which can be retainedfor use when necessary, the abstraction of meaning and an interpretive process aimed at

understanding reality. Only students holding the last two conceptions are likely to adopt a

deep learning approach.



In the second lecture of a series of 27 lectures on the topic, the students were asked to engage

in a ‘buzz group’ and plenary discussion focussed on their understanding of the fundamental

concepts. In the buzz group students were asked to individually draw a diagram of all the

forces on a car going up a hill at a constant speed. They were asked to compare their diagram

with the student next to them and to arrive at an agreed diagram. They were given five minutes

for this task. It was a task which they felt they were able to achieve.

At the end of the five minutes, the lecturer asked pairs of students at each end of the back

row, middle row and front row to describe their diagrams. The diagrams were drawn on the

board without comment by the lecturer. The students were then asked to examine the diagrams

and to identify the major differences between them. It soon became clear to the students that

the diagrams were fundamentally different, and that there was substantial variation within the

lecture group on the nature and relative sizes of the forces acting on the car. Similar activities

were engaged in by the students throughout the teaching of the topic.

A subsequent evaluation of the topic in this case, based upon pre and post interviews with 24

students showed that at the end of the topic there was substantial variation among thestudents on what they focussed on during the teaching of the topic (Prosser and Millar, 1989).

For a substantial number of students, while they found activities such as the buzz sessions

interesting, they were not the focus of their attention. These students showed little change

and, in some cases, regression in their understanding of the fundamental concepts. For those

students for which these activities were focal, they showed substantial change and

improvement.

Students taking a communication skills course

With this case, the phenomenographic approach was tried on two occasions with the samegroup of students. The students were studying a unit in introduction to communication. The

unit focuses on communication and learning skills, but there is some coverage of theoretical

aspects of communication. The students were in the first semester of their courses; the majority

were taking Manufacturing Technology and the remainder Computer Science. In the first lecture

of the unit, all students in the unit (about seventy-five in all) were asked to represent, in words

and/or pictures, their conceptions of communication. They were given ten minutes to do this,

and then asked to discuss their representations with the person sitting next to them. Volunteers

were asked to suggest how the various representat ions differed. About nine or ten students were

willing to make comments, which were written on the blackboard by the lecturer without

comment.

There was very little variation in the representations offered. All except one simply represented

or described two participants in conversation. There was no comment on how or why

communication takes place. The one exception included the notion that the listener must

understand what is said before communication can occur. When other students were asked for

their comments, they were content to say that their own concepts were essentially the same as

those on the board. The second attempt at using the approach involved one workshop group of

twenty-four students taking the unit. It was the seventh teaching week of the semester, about

ten weeks after the first t rial. The majority of students app eared to have forgotten the first

occasion. In this later attempt, the students were explicitly told that the lecturer was interestedin how their views of communication differed. The same procedure was adopted as in the first

lecture.



The representations were more complex on this second occasion. All involved some idea of

mutuality of interpretation as the essence of communication - an improvement on the notion of

sending messages - but there was no greater variety of concepts than on the first attempt. The

students had clearly adopted a different concept over the previous seven weeks of the unit, but

there was little evidence from this experiment to suggest that they had developed the capacity to

reflect on their own conceptions of communication.

Discussion and Conclusion

We will reflect on each case separately, then draw general conclusions.

The Student learning about computer programming case explored two concepts, computer

programming and learning. When discussing the variation within the two conceptions, one

group of students noted that particular conceptions of learning were associated with particular

conceptions of computer programming. In particular students who viewed learning as

remembering or cramming, viewed programming as a computer related activity while those

who viewed learning as improvement in understanding held problem solving or product related

conceptions of computer programming. From a phenomenographic perspective this was an

exciting revelation. There are two major phenomenographic principles on which our teaching

activities were based. First, learning involves a change in understanding rather than simply an

acquisition of facts. Secondly, the approach to learning students’ adopt depends on an

interaction between the students’ perception of the nature of the task and their prior

experience and is strongly related to qualitative outcome. A surface learning approach involves

an intent to simply complete the task at hand whereas a deep approach seeks to understand

what is being taught. Only through applying a deep approach to learning (an intention to

understand what is being taught) can a better understanding of the content be achieved

(Ramsden, 1988). In the case, a group of students had noted the relationship between concept

of learning and concept of computer programming. The lecturer was able to elaborate on this

‘discovery’ as a means of sharing with the students the conceptual aims and learning

requirements of the subject. The teaching of the subject had begun with the lecturer and

students sharing an educational awareness.

The Student Learning in Physics case used solutions from the student body to a specific

problem to demonstrate the existence of fundamentally different ways of understanding a

topic. The recognition of this by the students allowed the lecturer to spend some time

explaining that the understanding of why the diagrams were dissimilar was a fundamental

learning outcome for the topic. Demonstration to students of the limiting nature of a particular conception (its inability to explain a full range of scenarios) can be an important stimulus to

students seeking a better understanding. As in the Student learning about computer

programming case the lecturer was able to make explicit the educational rationale for the buzz

group teaching activity, at least to a number of students. Many students still did not focus

their attention on the buzz groups, possibly because their conceptions of learning were not

addressed by the teaching activity. The previous example highlighted the issue of addressing

students conceptions of learning and approaches to learning simultaneously with their

conceptions of the subject matter.

Little was gained from the Students tak ing a communication skills course case apart from thegeneral benefit of focussing students’ minds on the topic and alerting the lecturer to the poor

understanding of communication in the group. Why should this be so? Three factors may have

influenced the outcomes:



1. As a few communication researchers (e.g., Reddy, 1979; Garner, 1995) have remarked,

concepts of communication, even amongst many academics and professionals working in

communication areas, are almost universally simplistic and unrelated to reality. These

concepts tend to be very uniform, and are based around the notion of a message being sent

and received. There does not appear to have been any phenomenographic research in

communication, but it is likely that there is very little understanding of the p rinciples of

communication among the general populace, and also that there is very little variation in the

concepts people hold of communication. Communication is a very complex and multi-faceted

thing and many phenomena which are referred to as “communication” have so litt le in

common that it may be misleading to use a single word to refer to them all (Garner &

Johnson, 1994). Whilst there may appear to be different concepts of communication, it is

possible that these are in fact concepts of fundamentally different p henomena. 2. It may be that with such a broad concept as communication, the task put to students may

need to be further focussed and differentiated, and related more closely to studentsexperiences of communication. In the computer programming case, students had been

studying the topic for some time. In the physics case, students were asked to focus on a real

life example of the p henomenon. In the communication case, students had little experience of

thinking about the phenomenon. 3. Communication itself is fundamental to learning, developing concepts, and thinking about

them. It is very difficult to distance oneself from the processes of communication enough to

develop any clear sense of what those processes involve. For this reason, the question,

“What is your concept of communication?” is an unusually difficult one to answer. The

students in this case resorted to simply representing obvious external features of peopletalking, rather than trying to fathom what was actually occurring between them.

The impact of phenomenographic perspectives in the three cases outline was obviously

varied. In all three cases the lecturer was made aware of the conceptions held by the group.

This is of value to the teacher but does not improve the educational awareness shared by the

lecturer and students. In two cases the students were made aware of the variation in levels of

understanding within the group. In one of these cases this awareness was used to demonstrate

the need for a deep learning approach if better understanding (a more sophisticated concept)

was to be achieved. In the other case the students were made aware of the need to understand

this variation as a means to better understanding. In both of these successful cases the phenomenographic perspectives incorporated into the teaching approaches brought a clearer

educational awareness between the lecturer and students.

The nature of the conception being studied was an important factor in determining the success

of the approach. Better results can be expected where the conceptions involved are clearly

defined as in Newtonian Mechanics or well researched as in computer programming and

learning but not where a poorly defined, complex conception such as communication is

involved.

In conclusion, we would argue that from a phenomenographic perspective, continued attemptsto help students become aware of their ways of thinking about the phenomenon and concepts

they are studying is warranted and likely to lead to success. Telling students the correct

answers or confronting students with their misunderstandings are not likely to be successful

phenomenography for helping students

Documents