Procedural advice on self-assessment and task selection in learner-controlled education

Taminiau, E. M. C., Corbalan, G., Kester, L., Van Merriënboer, J. J. G., & Kirschner, P. A. (2010, March). Procedural advice on self-assessment and task selection in learner-controlled education. Presentation at the ICO Springschool, Niederalteich, Germany.Learner-controlled education gives learners control over their learning pathways. They assess their own performance and select a task out of a large set of learning tasks, accommodating their own learning needs. However, novice learners often do not possess the self-assessment and task-selection skills necessary for determining an appropriate path. Especially if they are novices in the learning domain too, it is even harder to set an appropriate path. They will be overloaded by both the unfamiliar learning environment and the unfamiliar domain. Moreover, they will not know what performance standards are relevant for performance assessment, and what task characteristics to take into account for task selection. Consequently, they probably will neither gain a great deal of knowledge nor improve domain-specific skills. This is an explorative study to test the effect of a procedural advisory model providing self-assessment and task-selection advice, and if it helps learners in learner-controlled education to determine an appropriate learning pathway. The self-assessment advice provides a scoring rubric for assessing performance. The task-selection advice provides a rule for an appropriate task-selection which is based on the learner’s self-assessment, learner’s mental effort, and the task aspects of the prior task. These learners might be better able to determine their own learning pathway, in turn enhancing learning performance. It will be explored if the model benefits the learners’ development of self-assessment and task-selection skills, and, in addition, positively affect the acquisition of the learners’ domain-specific skills. This experiment will be followed by a second one, which will not be discussed in this paper, testing another advisory model. This second advisory model extends the procedural advisory model with more advice on self-assessment and task-selection. In order to test the effects of providing more advice on the development of self-assessment and task-selection skills, and, in addition, on the acquisition of domain-specific skills

Designing on-demand education for simultaneous development of domain-specific and self-directed learning skills

On-demand education enables individual learners to choose their learning pathways according to their own learning needs. They must use self-directed learning (SDL) skills involving self-assessment and task selection to determine appropriate pathways for learning. Learners who lack these skills must develop them because SDL skills are prerequisite to developing domain-specific skills. This article describes the design of an on-demand learning environment developed to enable novices to simultaneously develop their SDL and domain-specific skills. Learners received advice on their self-assessments and their selections of subsequent learning tasks. In the domain of system dynamics – a way to model a dynamic system and draw graphs depicting the system’s behaviour over time – advice on self-assessment is provided in a scoring rubric containing relevant performance standards. Advice on task selection indicates all relevant task aspects to be taken into account, including recommendations for suitable learning tasks which meet the individual learner’s needs. This article discusses the design of the environment and the learners’ perceptions of its usefulness. Most of the times, the learners found the advice appropriate and they followed it in 78% of their task selections

Why Advice on Task Selection May Hamper Learning in On-Demand Education

Taminiau, E. M. C., Kester, L., Corbalan, G., Alessi, S. M., Moxnes, E., Gijselaers, W. H., Kirschner, P. A., & Van Merriënboer, J. J. G. (2013). Why advice on task selection may hamper learning in on-demand education. Computers in Human Behavior, 29, 145-154. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2012.07.028In on-demand education, learners are required to plan their own learning trajectory by selecting suitable learning tasks. A positive effect on learning is expected when learners select tasks that help them fulfil their individual learning needs. However, the selection of suitable tasks is a difficult process for learners with little domain knowledge and suboptimal task-selection skills. A common solution for helping learners deal with on-demand education and develop domain-specific skills is to give them advice on task selection. In a randomized experiment, learners (N = 30) worked on learning tasks in the domain of system dynamics and received either advice or no advice on the selection of new learning tasks. Surprisingly, the no-advice group outperformed the advice group on a post-test measuring domain-specific skills. It is concluded that giving advice on task selection prevents learners from thinking about how the process of task selection works. The advice seems to supplant rather than support their considerations why they should perform the advised task, which results in negative effects on learning. Implications for future research on giving advice in on-demand education are discussed