Learning in autonomous student groups: Learning skills as a predictor of satisfaction

Abstract

Staff time in higher education is an expensive resource. As staff-student ratios become less favourable the problem of staffing seminar or tutorial work with students intensifies. Is it inevitable that group sizes must be increased? A seminar with more than ten or twelve students, however, probably ceases to function in an effective sense for many of the students: larger numbers intimidate the more introverted student from participating, and the role of the lecturer as a kind of chairperson tends to become more prominent, taking responsibility away from the individual student. Alternative learning methods are beng devised to cope with this problem, including a range of teaching strategies for introducing new material and obtaining the active participation of students in discussion (e.g. Boud, 1981; Habeshaw, Habeshaw, and Gibbs, 1984; Miall, in press). One radical solution would be to dispose of staff input entirely for seminar work, requiring students to manage their own seminar groups. It is this alternative that I describe in the present paper. I offer an assessment of a unit in which most of the student's work took place in student-managed groups. I led a year's unit in English literature, Romanticism: 1789-1824, which recruited 35 students, and for which a staffing of two lecturers was allowed. The unit is offered to Year II students taking English on a Combined Studies degree. The unit was organized mainly to operate in small, autonomous student groups. Formal lectures to the whole class occupied thirteen hours of the unit; the remaining 33 hours of class time were given over to work in student groups. The learning skills of the students were assessed on entering the unit and a detailed student evaluation of the unit was made near its end; together with the grades achieved by the students and less formal evidence, these two instruments were the principal measurements of the group system. The majority of students coped satisfactorily with this new learning environment, but a minority expressed considerable discontent throughout the year. The present study, however, enabled particular skills relevant to autonomous study to be identified, so that it is possible to offer some conclusions on how to make autonomous study of this kind more effective for all the students. The group system was organized as follows. The curriculum for the unit was divided up into ten topics. All students were required to take one of these (a Theory topic), and to choose one of two prose topics. They then had a free