This article describes two approaches to learning (in addition to the classic deep and surface approaches) identi®ed in studies of student learning in engineering contexts. The ®rst study identi®ed the`procedural deep' approach in a group of engineering foundation programme students in the UK, while the second study identi®ed the`procedural surface' (originally termed algorithmic) approach amongst second-year South African chemical engineering students. Both these approaches involve a strategy of focusing on problem solving, but they have respectively deep and surface intentions (the former involving the intention to understand and the latter not). From both studies it was clear that the approaches students use are adaptations to particular course contexts, and it is suggested that a course focus towards a procedural deep objective might preclude the adoption of a deep approach.
The learners' experience of variation: Following students' threads of learning physics in computer simulation sessions.
AbstractThis article attempts to describe students' process of learning physics using the notion of experiencing variation as the basic mechanism for learning, and thus explores what variation, with respect to a particular object of learning, that students experience in their process of constituting understanding. Theoretically, the analysis relies on analytic tools from the phenomenographic research tradition, and the recent group of studies colloquially known as the variation theory of learning, having the notion of experiencing variation as a key for learning at its core. Empirically, the study relies on video and audio recordings of seven pairs of students interacting in a computersimulation learning environment featuring Bohr's model of the atom. The data was analysed on a micro-level for the emergence of student-recognised variation, depicted in terms of 'threads of learning'. This was done by linking variation around aspects of the object of learning present in the situation and attended to by the students to new ways of seeing -characterised as an expanding anatomy of awareness, and hence as learning.The students' threads of learning are characterised in terms of two stages of learning progress: (1) discerning variation, and (2) constituting meaning from this experience of variation (experienced as holistically relevant in the students' conceptual domain of physics and the Bohr model). Two groups of threads of learning were identified: one where the variation experienced by students was within an aspect of the object of learning, and one where variation was across several aspects.
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