1.1: Before we begin...

The Student As Independent Learner

The issue of taking responsibility for your own learning is one that educationists discuss a lot, and the general consensus in the British educational context is that it is a good thing, not least because it is likely to achieve better outcomes, such as higher marks and a better overall degree.

Taking Responsibility For Your Own Learning

My viewpoint on your learning journey is that you should be responsible for the route it takes in terms of what you have achieved by the end of your studies. This means thinking for yourself and being responsible for what you learn. Ultimately, you will create your own mental maps of your understanding in the topics that you study. You can think of these as mind maps (see Chapter 2) which will change as your understanding and breadth of knowledge on a topic increases.

Taking responsibility for your learning is supported in the following quotes from two established academics:

• A seminar leader is not supposed to program her students to share her views but to lead discussion. The quality of the discussion depends not on the leader but on the students. It is not the seminar leader's job to fire students with enthusiasm: if they do not have that already, they shouldn't be there.
• He wanted to show us that thinking for oneself was what mattered, not showing the ‘correct’ things.
• He told us about a candidate's essay: ‘I disagreed with every word of it, so I gave it 100 percent.’

These quotes take the spotlight off the tutors in the study process and put it on the individual student. Basically, they suggest that it is the attitudes you bring with you to university that determine how much you get out of it. If you want to find things out, have a questioning attitude, are prepared to think for yourself, you should do well.

• A - Ask questons
• E - Explore possible answers
• R - Reflect 

ACTION! If you don't already have it, cultivate an attitude of intellectual curiosity!

Approaches To Learning

Taking responsibility for your learning does not just apply to conceptual knowledge. It applies also to how you manage the study process. Learning does not happen simply by dint of natural academic ability, which you either have or have not, learning at university is also a social process. It takes place in an institutional context which has its own norms and ways of going about things. For example, you will probably have to write essays, which is not something you have to do in everyday life (see Chapter 5). You may feel relatively new to academic culture and it might take you some time to get used to its ways of working, but you can do so. You need to find and develop strategies for working and learning within it.

In this section, I shall look at different approaches to and different aspects of the learning process so that you can become aware of different attitudes towards learning and different ways of going about things, which you might then try out for yourself.

There are no magic tips, and no one way that guarantees success in your studies, but you may find there are changes you can make to your way of working or to your attitude towards your studies that help you to become a more effective learner.

Deep-holistic and Surface-atomistic Learners

Some researchers in Britain and Sweden have identified what they call 'deep-holistic' and 'surface-atomistic' learners (Marton et al., 1984). The researchers arrived at those rather unwieldy descriptions after recorded discussions with students, where they talked about how they approached different aspects of their studies. Some of the research was based on the analysis of essays and what students said about how they went about writing them.