Principle four - develop autonomous learners

Why is this important?

It is often said that one reason students tend to express a relatively high level of satisfaction with lectures, is the fact that they don’t need to do anything during a lecture.

The remark is not entirely tongue-in-cheek. Tutors frequently complain that students see themselves as passive recipients of learning content. Similarly, in relation to assessment, some learners view it as the tutor’s role to deliver feedback to them.

Developing students’ ability to self-regulate and manage their own learning is a key goal of effective learning and assessment design. We also touch on this in relation to principle number one help learners understand what good looks like and principle number three foster active learning.

Activities that involve reflection and self, peer and group evaluation all work towards this goal.

The power of comparison

Many studies have observed that students appear to learn more from generating feedback for their peers than they do from engaging with peer feedback comments provided for them.

Research by Professor David Nicol, at the University of Glasgow, suggests this is because when students review their peers’ work, after producing their own, they make comparisons of the peer’s work with their own and this activates powerful internal feedback. Such comparisons can generate valuable learning whether the work of the peer is stronger or weaker than the reviewer’s own.

A study comparing peer and tutor feedback (Nicol and McCallum 2021) found that students of all abilities were able to identify all areas for improvement that the tutor identified as well as areas that the tutor did not mention. However, to match the tutor feedback, the students had to make multiple sequential comparisons (ie compare more than one peer work with their own).

This research suggests that well-structured peer review activities can reduce teacher workload and generate more and better feedback for learners.

"A basic recommendation is that teachers reserve their comments until after students have made comparisons against other information sources, as this will reduce teacher workload, ensure that what they provide is maximally relevant and necessary, while at the same time it will foster student independence." 
Professor David Nicol, University of Glasgow

Self-paced learning

Most educators recognise the importance of developing learners’ capacity to self-regulate and the role that engagement with feedback plays in this. Our efforts in this area are however, sometimes at odds with a fixed regime of content delivery via lectures and a rigid assessment schedule. Inevitably, some learners struggle to keep up whilst others are insufficiently challenged.

Higher education could do more to encourage self-pacing within bounded limits, such as an individual module. Students could be allowed to test their knowledge when they feel ready and resubmit until they have mastered a topic.

There may be lessons to be learned in this area from the school sector. The modern classroom project suggests the following classification of learning and assessment activities:

• Must do: non-negotiable tasks covering core concepts and essential skills
• Should do: valuable opportunities to develop skills that will not prevent the student transitioning to the next stage of learning if there is a good reason for them to be excused
• Aspire to do: extensions for students who have already mastered the normal scope of the topic

Analytics to track progress help ensure that the group as a whole is on track. Sharing of aspects of goal setting and tracking can help students identify others to collaborate with or who can provide help.

Policies such as ‘ask three (peers) before me’ can encourage peer learning.

Similarly, assignment briefs can be split in two with half of the group addressing each aspect of the topic then teaching and learning from peers who did the opposite assignment.

Some of the ways technology can help

Early attempts to implement peer review found it could be time consuming to administer. Digital tools make it possible to implement peer review activities at scale.

Features such as allocation of reviews, linking to assessment criteria, managing anonymity and tracking which students have completed the work, are all easier in the digital environment.

Use of the open standard LTI means that tools supporting self, peer and group review can be seamlessly integrated into the learning management system.

Putting the principle into practice

Two stage examinations

It is not unusual for a learner to walk out of a formal examination and immediately think of something they should have done differently. Normally it’s too late but what if you had the chance to put it right?

Research by Professor David Nicol and colleagues at the University of Glasgow has taken this idea step further and researched the impact of a two-stage examination structure3.

In their model a student takes an exam and then completes reflective questions to surface their internal feedback about their performance. They are asked to identify any weaknesses they are aware of and any aspects of their work on which they would like to have expert feedback.

The students then take the same exam again but this time working in groups.

At the end of this stage, they answer another set of reflective questions, for example, about how the group answer differed from their own, whether the group discussion made them aware of strengths and weaknesses of their own answer that they hadn’t identified and which answer they thought was better.

The purpose of this study was to find out more about how students generate inner feedback through comparisons. The finding was that this process is very powerful.

"Invariably students’ self generated feedback comments based on the reflective questions were more elaborate and specific than the teacher’s comments. While the teacher gave general comments about the strengths and areas in need of improvement, the students were more likely to state exactly how the improvements could be made."
Nicol and Selvaretnam (2021)

The fact that students undertook the work individually and reflected on their performance before engaging in dialogue, served to start them generating inner feedback so they gained greater value from the group discussion. The key to harnessing inner feedback is to make the process explicit using reflective questions to which students must respond in writing.

The researchers believe that the findings have broad applicability and that providing a rubric or high-quality exemplars as comparators could equally help students better evaluate the quality of their own work.