University teachers designing for active learning: intentions, interpretations and the semantic turn in design

Abstract

Over the last two or three decades, there has been a perceptible shift of emphasis in higher education, from teaching by telling to learning by doing. This increases the importance of well-­‐designed tasks. Teachers design tasks for students, as a way of structuring and scaffolding their learning activities. Task specifications rarely determine what students then do. Rather, task specifications can be understood as resources on which students draw in the process of shaping their own learning activities. How students make sense of the tasks they are set also becomes an important influence of what and how they learn.

This study set out to improve our understanding of how university teachers design tasks and how students then interpret the tasks set for them. The research focused on three main objectives – to provide a better, empirically informed, understanding of: (1) university teachers’ design decisions ‐ with particular attention to their design rationales, (2) students’ interpretations of their teachers’ design intentions, and (3) teachers’ reflections on their students’ interpretations of the designed tasks, with particular attention to potential areas of match and mismatch between intentions and interpretations.

A case study methodology was employed, involving close examination of nine individual cases – each being a course taught by a university teacher. Data were collected in three phases from teachers and students using semi-­‐structured interviews with teachers, written responses from individual students and student focus groups. The three phases of data collection addressed each of the three research objectives in turn. Analysis was conducted using verbal data and thematic analysis techniques. The results show that when teachers explain how they designed the tasks they draw upon a range of beliefs about what constitutes good teaching and learning, on contextual factors, and on particular needs and characteristics of the student cohort. Results also show that students interpret teachers’ design intentions less accurately when (a) the intended learning outcomes are complex and/or (b) when the teacher is not explicit about the intended learning outcomes or the rationale for the task. In this admittedly small sample, teachers’ designs including explanations of the how of a task, rather than the why. Students expressed a need to get an explanation of this missing or implicit task rationale, so that they could better understand the task from a whole of course perspective.

This study has practical implications for helping university teachers improve how they design tasks for students, particularly by paying more careful attention to explanation of the rationale for each designed task. When the communicative function of a task design is given proper emphasis – acknowledging the need for students to make designed tasks meaningful – then better outcomes become more likely