What is it about?
Why do students sometimes perform poorly at university-level courses? A myriad of factors may be at play: the instructor's pedagogical approaches, students" investment on the course, and their understanding of the course's requirements. This article details an experiment on the instructor's pedagogical approach. By asking students to provide written meta-reflection on their assignment, the experiment found that students improved their grasp on the instructions of the assignments, thereby improving their grades.
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Why is it important?
Higher education can be challenging, and first-year students are often unprepared for the kind of tasks required of them. This article was inspired by a real case from a university in Sweden. The results of the experiment add to the growing literature on higher education suggesting that sometimes, when students find it difficult to grasp the course content, instructors should seek out measures that help them improve their learning process.
Perspectives
Many lament the idea that higher education is seen as simply a business, in which instructors are the service providers while students (and their parents) are their main customers. What happens when students get bad grades? Does the responsibility rest on the professors, or is it solely the fault of the students for not studying hard enough? Here, we do not provide a definitive answer to that question, but the solution suggested here may be useful to professors who would like to try their best on their side.
Professor Linus Hagström
Swedish Defence University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Using meta-reflection to improve learning and throughput: redesigning assessment procedures in a political science course on power, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, July 2013, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/02602938.2013.820822.
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