Contrasting forms of understanding for degree examinations: the student experience and its implications

TLDR: In this article, a detailed examination of the interview transcripts of 13 students, who had just completed their final degree, was supplemented by analyses of written responses from an additional 11 students in their final undergraduate year.

Abstract: Previous research on student learning has established the importance of the constrasting conceptions of learning held by students, and of the distinction between deep and surface approaches to learning. It has also shown that the outcome of learning may be described in terms of qualitatively different levels and that different forms of examination encourage different levels of answer. Within all these studies the nature of the understanding which is developed has been rather taken for granted. In this essentially exploratory study, a detailed examination of the interview transcripts of 13 students, who had just completed their final degree, was supplemented by analyses of written responses from an additional 11 students in their final undergraduate year. In the interviews, the students were asked about the revision strategies they had adopted and their attempts to develop understanding, and aspects of these were explored further through the written responses. Analyses of both interviews and written responses indicated the existence of differing forms of understanding which parallel, to some extent, the conceptions of learning identified previously. Links were also explored between the revision strategies adopted and the forms of understanding reached. Implications of the findings suggest that traditional degree examinations do not consistently test deep, conceptual understanding. It appears that some students gear their revision to question types which can be answered within frameworks provided by the lecturer or a textbook and that the type of questions set has a strong influence on the forms of understanding students seek during their studying and their revision. Some types of question encourage, and test, a restricted form of conceptual understanding. It also seems that the particular types of structure used in a lecture course to provide a framework also has an important influence on the ease with which students can relate it to other courses and also develop their own understanding.