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Mismatches Between Teachers and Students

The following is an extract from Askell-Williams, H. (2004). Teachers' and learners' knowledge about teaching and learning. Unpublished PhD thesis, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. Reproduced with permission.

Mismatches between students and their teachers in understandings about broad-scale goals, purposes, objectives and outcomes, or smaller-scale strategies and task requirements, might lead to unrealistic expectations, inappropriate strategies, or less than optimal learning outcomes (Winne & Marx, 1980). Alternatively, identifying conditions that facilitate parity between teachers' and learners' understandings has the potential to prescribe features that will maximise learning (Rohrkemper, 1985; Trigwell, Prosser, & Taylor, 1994).

For example, White and Gunstone (1989) described extensive interventions in classrooms and observed that learners' understandings of the purposes of the interventions were difficult to align with teachers' understandings.

The teachers were talking about long-term development of learning strategies that would enable the students to achieve broad understanding of information and experience both in formal lessons and outside the classroom for the rest of their lives; the students thought it meant a quick improvement in their score on the next classroom test. (White & Gunstone, 1989, p. 582)

Early analysis by Anderson (1981) suggested that students, especially younger students, do not possess enough life and learning experience to be able to match short-term tasks, such as phonic exercises, to long-term goals, such as becoming a better reader. Brown and Palinscar (1989) stressed the importance of the teacher having clear instructional goals. They argued that some practitioners' interpretations of cooperative learning have left students to construct learning goals for themselves, which change as the activity progresses, and are sometimes at odds with teachers' goals.

We need … instructional theories that place the learner's constructive mental activity at the heart of any instructional change, that treat instruction as an intervention in the ongoing knowledge construction process. This does not mean, however, that students can be left to discover everything for themselves. Instruction must provide information for learners' knowledge construction processes. It must constrain those processes so that they will result in knowledge that is both true and powerful - true in the sense of describing the world well or according well with the theories of a discipline, and powerful in the sense of being lasting and finding diverse occasions for use. (Resnick, 1989, p. 2)

If the setting of instructional objectives is left to the learners, then a situation can arise where 'the requirements of particular learning tasks may remain obscure or totally misunderstood by many students' (Westwood, 1997, p. 7).

Winne (1985; 1987; Winne & Butler, 1994) argued that learners must cognitively process information to acquire it. Whereas this may now be appreciated when teaching and learning factual information, it may be less readily apparent for other types of learning, such as procedural strategies, beliefs, values, attitudes and motor skills (see Winne, 1991). If learners are actively participating in, say, group work activities without cognitively addressing skills such as turn-taking, then the purposes of such learning experiences may well be overlooked by the learner. A similar assessment was made by Morgan-Fleming and Doyle (1997), who collected students' writing about their classroom experiences. The authors found that the students embedded daily events in the social fabric of their experiences, while their teacher thought (and hoped) that the curriculum was the major issue of influence. Morgan-Fleming wrote, 'I began to wonder if the students and I were occupying different worlds within our classroom space' (1997, p. 50).

Similarly, Winne and Marx (1982) cited an example from their research where a teacher raised his own hand to demonstrate the enjoyment he felt when participating in a lesson. One of the teacher's students thought the teacher was going to answer the question himself. Another student thought the teacher was cueing that the students should all put up their hands. Both students missed the teacher's intention: that participation was enjoyable. Winne and Marx (1982) stressed that teachers need to clearly explain the relationships between what is being taught, how it is being taught, and how students need to be thinking.

Rohrkemper (1985) reported a study where primary school children (and their teachers) were interviewed to determine the students' perceptions and interpretations of the behaviours of teachers and other students in hypothetical student-teacher interactions. Rohrkemper drew the conclusion that students were sometimes aware of the intentions behind teachers' behavioural interactions with students; however, at other times, they were not. Rohrkemper suggested that teachers need to both explain explicitly their rationale, and continuously model appropriate teacher-learner interactions. 'Such active attempts might increase the match between what teachers and students intend to communicate to each other and what is actually achieved' (Rohrkemper, 1985, p. 43).

An extensive study of 'Show and Tell' in kindergarten and junior primary classrooms in New South Wales led Cusworth (1995) to conclude that theoretical purposes from the research literature, teacher intentions, teaching strategies and learners' understandings of purpose were not well matched for the Show and Tell activity. For example, an analysis of students' drawings of the Show and Tell activity found that some students depicted it as a personal presentation, with the teacher and other students an essential audience, while other students depicted it as receiving or listening to another student's account of an experience or special possession.

Cusworth extended the study to include the perspectives of six parents, who also held the view that the purpose of Show and Tell is developing students' public-speaking skills. However, the students' own teacher's intentions for Show and Tell were not presenting or listening, but rather 'the process of building up a community within the classroom and the sharing of experiences through talking together' (Cusworth, 1995, p. 14). Cusworth suggested that the strategies that teachers used (such as directing and controlling the flow of conversation and having students sit in traditional arrangements in order to inhibit interaction), thwarted pedagogical intentions such as sharing experiences and encouraging student-to-student discourse. Further, whereas one main purpose of Show and Tell, as gleaned from the research literature, is to enable the construction of oral narrative, which in turn has the purpose of developing thinking skills, Cusworth found that students were generally not presented with the time or the conditions to construct narratives, but rather were engaged in restricted recounts of their experiences.

Tasker (1992) reported the comprehensive Learning in Science Project in New Zealand, which highlighted the influence of learners' existing conceptions and perceptions of the lesson in achieving conceptual change (see also Osborne & Freyberg, 1980; Tasker, 1981; Tasker & Freyberg, 1985; Tasker & Osborne, 1983). Tasker drew attention to a 'gap' that seemed to exist between teachers and students. 'Often what I observed was in effect two lessons, the teacher's and the learner's' (Tasker, 1992, p. 28), which suggested possible mismatches between teachers' and learners' views of what a lesson is all about, including its purpose, procedures and outcomes.

Tasker's 'gap' appears in other authors' work. For example, Hogan (1999) conducted a 12-week intervention study called 'Thinking Aloud Together'. The aim of the study was to develop the metacognitive, regulatory and strategic aspects of knowledge co-construction in a sample of eighth grade students. Hogan found that, although the students could talk about their new-found skills of negotiation and collaboration, when a new problem-solving situation was presented, the students did not invoke those skills. Hogan concluded that there was 'a gap between students' metacognitive knowledge about collaborative cognition and their use of collaborative reasoning skills and attainment of well-integrated conceptual understanding' (p. 1101). The students' learning outcomes (declarative knowledge about collaborative consultation) did not concur with the purposes of intervention (procedural collaborative consultation). Palinscar (1997) also addressed the ubiquitous influence of students' conceptions, positing that students' conceptions of what they are supposed to be doing mediates the quality of their learning interactions with potentially rich learning environments.

Anderson, Holland and Palinscar (1997), investigated the activity of a group of five children assigned to a scientific task. The teaching objectives of the task were that the students would develop conceptual understanding of a scientific concept in a collaborative enterprise. However, the authors reported that:

Carla, Shana, and Tara showed little interest in the scientific aspects of the work, choosing instead to focus on aspects of the task that were more salient and interesting for them - organising the group to get the work done and designing an attractive poster. This left the scientific activities of writing the explanations and demonstrating with the molecular models to Linda and Juan. Tara showed some interest in the molecule models, but it centered more on fantasy play involving the dog-shaped ethanol models than on using the models as a tool for understanding. Juan, with his references to oxygen and the minuscule size of actual models showed an interest in understanding the models as representations of actual models [sic], an interest that Tara did not share. (Anderson et al., 1997, p. 367)

The researchers felt that the scientific purposes of the teaching and learning activity had been subsumed by a) the interpersonal relationships in the group and b) the task and accountability structure, such as what artefacts were to be produced and by whom. This fits with Durkin's (1974), Anderson's (1981) and Bianchini's (1997) observations that students appeared to be more concerned with just getting the work done, rather than actually understanding the topic or subject. 'If students mis-perceive the goal that a teacher intends when assigning a task, they may engage inappropriate tactics for completing the task or they may adopt an inappropriate reference for monitoring the qualities of their work' (Butler & Winne, 1995, p. 257).

A focus upon tasks, rather than upon learning, was also addressed comprehensively by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1989), who investigated Grades 1, 3 and 6 students' intentions during schoolwork. Bereiter and Scardamalia drew the conclusion that students appeared to liken schoolwork to a 'job' or a task to be done. Focusing upon the task subsumes, or simply replaces, a focus upon any learning purpose of the task, thus learning becomes incidental (to the task) and uncontrollable, rather than intentional. Bereiter and Scardamalia suggest that children see learning as an activity, whereas sophisticated adults see learning as a goal. Furthermore, Bereiter and Scardamalia cautioned that teachers might themselves hold the view that the activity is the goal.

This is particularly true of so-called higher order skills of comprehension, planning, composing, and problem solving. School-work goals provide a handy and satisfying substitute for such elusive learning goals. (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1989, pp. 378-379)

In their work with a number of high school classes, White and Baird (1991) asked students what they were doing and why they were doing it. The most common response to both questions was, 'I don't know' (p. 160). In a class of, say, 30 students, it would not be surprising if all of the intentions of all of the students did not match those of their teacher. However, a substantial match between a teacher's and his or her students' intentions would be essential if the lesson goals are to be achieved.

In a study of small group collaborative learning, Webb, Troper and Fall (1995) observed that students who were working diligently were not necessarily those who benefited most from the learning activity. Earlier, Peterson and Swing (1982) and Ames (1990) had drawn attention to the need for teachers and researchers to look deeper than surface observations of learners' time on task. Rather, the quality of learners' task engagement, including how information is processed, how learners monitor their progress, and how they react to feedback, are some of the more complex issues that might point to potential learning outcomes (Wittrock, 1986). Webb et al. (1995) suggested that one possible reason for their observations of students' differential learning outcomes was that different students may have possessed different goals. The instructions to students in the Webb et al. study stressed learning and understanding. Webb et al. reported that although some students appeared to want to understand how to solve the problem, others just wanted to get the correct answer written on their paper.

One possible reason for such mismatches has been proposed by Edwards and Mercer (1993). They hypothesise that some teachers have interpreted the Piagetian perspective as referring to teaching practices in which teachers are reluctant to make explicit either the purposes of learning the subject matter, or the purposes of their teaching actions in relation to the subject matter. Thus, students may not have access to the essential pedagogical knowledge necessary to inform their learning intentions, plans and actions. This is a clear example of confounding constructivism as a theory of learning with constructivism as a referent for pedagogical practices (Tobin, Tippins, & Gallard, 1994).

According to Edwards and Mercer (1993), a pedagogical, as opposed to learning, interpretation of Piagetian theory:

encourages a pedagogy which overemphasises the individual at the expense of the social, which undervalues talk as a tool for discovery, and which discourages teachers from making explicit to children the purposes of educational activity and the criteria for their success. (p. 170)

To take one pedagogical example, Edwards and Mercer (1993) observed that experiential (or discovery) learning is of little use if teachers do not help students to make sense of those experiences. Rogoff, Matusov and White (1996) took Edwards and Mercer's argument further, proposing that in some cases:

the lesson's motive is often unavailable to the teacher as well, because the teacher is only a part of the institutional chain of transmission of knowledge from the 'higher experts' to the students. (Rogoff et al., 1996, p. 394)

Driver et al. (1994) explained that such 'discovery' approaches also confuse individual construction of knowledge as something reliant upon exposure to physical experiences, with scientific knowledge that requires being enculturated into a symbolic world through talk and shared activities with more experienced members of the relevant community.

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