The introduction text for the he topic 4 (’Design for online and blended learning’) stated that ”Enhancing community building and promoting student engagement and ownership in learning becomes essential for blended and online learning.” Consequently, I started to ponder what are factors and practices that support students’ engagement and ownership in learning.
I teach about behavior change thus, focusing on questions such as how to support people in doing behavior changes, what predict successful changes and what are possible obstacles for change. Doing behavior changes is not easy, not even when a current problematic behavioral pattern cause evident harm and suffering for the person. Think, for example, smoking, unhealthy eating habits leading to serious illness, work addiction, obsessive hand-washing or physical inactivity. Changing these behaviors needs a strong engagement. One needs to be committed with the goals and activities; committed to do things that can feel difficult or to resist doing harmful behaviors even when feeling strong urges to do them. Commitment can be enhanced by linking the current choice to personal values. It is easier to choose an action that is in line with what one finds important and meaningful even when doing it would be hard and (emotionally) painful.
Accordingly, engagement with some goals, whether it is about learning new habits or learning new skills and knowledge, is always a matter of meaning and personal values.
Feeling engaged with some learning goals and activities is more or less explicitly connected with the questions, such as; “What is valuable for me?”,“How does my meaningful life looks like?”. And making a connection between the current goals and actions and values, thus asking a question; “What makes this course meaningful for me?”, “Why learning this is important to me?”, “ What consequences studying these things have in my life?”.
Integrating value-reflection to studying can enhance students’ engagement and ownership in learning. One study (Chase et al., 2013) showed that a simple task of asking students to reflect and write about their personally important educational values in addition to goal setting, significantly increased students’ academic performance, relative to a wait list, or to majors not responding to the invitation to participate in the study. Moreover, goal setting alone had no positive impact on academic performance.
Accordingly, asking students, why would they put their time and effort on particular course, could make a big difference on their learning experience.
Reference: Chase, J. A., Houmanfar, R., Hayes, S. C., Ward, T. A., Vilardaga, J. P., & Follette, V. (2013). Values are not just goals: Online ACT-based values training adds to goal setting in improving undergraduate college student performance. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 2(3-4), 79-84.
This is really interesting, I need to have a closer look at that study. Do you think that the students have skills to do this? I teach Academic learning skills among other courses and I have noticed that reflection skills are not something that the students have, but they need to be taught. This is of course more difficoult to some students than others. In my experience teaching the skills f-2-f was easier than now online.
Thank you for your comment Tiina! That’s a very point. Also in that referred study, students got a short training about ‘What is meant by values and how they are different from goals?’. So, it can be important to consider how reflection-task is presented for students. Providing some examples could be helpful too.
Thank you for this interesting and fascinating blog. I totally agree: “goal setting alone has no positive impact on academic performance” and I would like to add the importance of meaning as an essential aspect.
Thank you for your comment Vigdis!
Thanks for this blog post Essi, I fully agree that finding out how students’ values resonate with the topic(s) of a given course can be an excellent way to get them more involved in the course and contribute to both their own learning and other people’s learning on the course. Since I teach courses related to sustainability issues in a business school context, students often have a preconception that my courses are values-driven. I don’t want to be fully explicit as to whether they are or not (meaning, my aim is not to impose the same set of values to all), but asking the students to reflect about their values in the context of such courses makes sense. With two colleagues I wrote an article that engages with these questions (Fougère et al. 2014).
Fougère, M., Solitander, N., & Young, S. (2014). Exploring and exposing values in management education: Problematizing final vocabularies in order to enhance moral imagination. Journal of Business Ethics, 120(2), 175-187.
Thanks for your comment Martin! Your publication sounds very interesting. For me ‘value exploring and exposing’ sounds very important in the context of business education considering all social and environmental consequences related to ‘business world’. I will definitely take more careful look of your article, interesting indeed!
After reading your last blog, where you referred to the value-based teaching approach, I found it interesting and wanted to read this post. Thanks for sharing and the nice blog post!
I would definitely think of the integration of value-reflection to studying goal setting. I believe this would lead to purposeful learning and long-lasting knowledge retainment.