Learning Journal

What makes learning meaningful?

Technology Enhanced Learning Environments

James Cunningham - 181308

jc745@sussex.ac.uk

BSc (Hons) Games and Multimedia Environments

Department of Informatics
University of Sussex
2020
Describe your own meaningful learning experience

When I was 15, I had a terrible English teacher; at the time we did not know it and he was
generally well liked for being fun and relaxed - a "cool" teacher, some would say. At the end of
the year, he left to teach at a different school and we were introduced to his replacement, who
informed us that the work we did under him had all been marked incorrectly and was actually
1 or 2 grades lower than previously thought. Additionally, much of what we had studied for
our upcoming exam was misinformation.
The whole class was devastated - nobody's grades were left untouched. I was ready to concede
the lower grades - perhaps a B for language and a C for literature. My teacher did not give up
so easily. She sacrificed her time to put together extra sessions after class and fought to have
our "skills for life" session replaced with a further English lesson, all in the name of redoing our
previously mismarked assignments and getting the grades we deserved. There was no
favouritism; she knew how much help each individual student needed and she accommodated
everyone, regardless of the cost to herself.
Inspired by her determination, I worked hard to fix my broken assignments. I attended every
lesson and after school session and got feedback from her at every possible moment. She was
never annoyed to be asked for help, she was only too happy to provide assistance whenever it
was needed to any student that asked for it. Ultimately, she was an inspiration to the whole
class and every single student's grades improved solely because of her. Instead of a B and a C,
I came out of my exams with an A* and an A.
This experience is important because it was the first time I truly believed a teacher cared about
my learning. Moreover, it showed me that I had underestimated my abilities all along and that
I was capable of more than I initially thought. Not only did I learn the content for the course, I
learned self-discipline and the importance of doing the best you can without worrying that you
are unable to do it.
Other learning experiences in school and in online learning platforms such as MOOCs (e.g.
Udemy) or instructional videos (e.g. YouTube) have failed to provide me with the intrinsic
motivation to push myself to achieve my goals. In part, I think it is because I do not truly believe
that the instructors care about my personal progress, since the lessons are not tailored in any
way.
Assumptions about learning

The main takeaway from my learning experience is that people learn most effectively when
they genuinely believe themselves to be capable of understanding the content and completing
the required tasks. This is not something that can be directly controlled, but when you receive
encouragement and praise, you are more likely to feel confident in your abilities.
Secondly, a personalised experience gives a strong impression that you are learning in a way
that will work for you; in a world with so many different ways to learn and where many people
prefer certain methods over others, it is easy to worry that a certain learning experience might
be ineffective at teaching you. When you receive personal feedback, you get an actual answer
about whether the learning method is working for you, thus clearing feelings of doubt. This ties
in with my initial point, as if the encouragement you receive is tailored to your progress
specifically, it is a lot more meaningful.
A further assumption is that motivation can be effectively influenced and even controlled
under the right conditions. While learning from my first teacher was a painful experience
(despite his "fun" exterior) that left me feeling that I had no linguistic abilities, learning from
my second teacher was actually enjoyable, motivating and got me to believe in myself.
Theories of learning

As my experience took place in a secondary school, the learning experience was predominantly
focused on observable behaviour and thus was behaviourist; through results from frequent
quizzes, one may feel a sense of joy or dissatisfaction with their marks. This response is
reminiscent of Pavlov's classical conditioning, where doing well feels rewarding and doing
poorly feels like a punishment. This occurs in spite of the fact that no explicit conditioning takes
place; students are not given rewards for doing well or punished for doing poorly. However,
some may find that doing better than average or better than the majority of your classmates
is a kind of positive reinforcement and similarly, some may perceive the shame of telling friends
and family that you got a low mark to be a form of positive punishment. It is not uncommon
for parents in certain households to reward or punish their children based on the grades on
their report cards - for example, my Mum had promised me £5 for each B grade, £10 for each
A grade and £15 for each A* grade, so I worked towards a monetary reward.
However, what made this experience stand out from other school experiences was its
departure from the typical behaviourist model. While the underlying behaviourist motivations
were undoubtedly present throughout the entirety of my GCSEs, lessons with my second
English teacher introduced new motivations. Somehow, she made the usually tedious task of
language study interesting and even fun, causing us to want to learn out of genuine interest as
much as for good grades. This new intrinsic motivation was the foundation of her somewhat
constructivist approach and is, in my opinion, the main reason it was so effective.
The difficulty with constructivism in schools is that they always follow a rigid syllabus over a
tight schedule, meaning there is not usually time for students to have the luxury of free
exploration to reach certain conclusions - they must simply be told to memorise that
conclusion. My teacher taught us the required texts and materials from the syllabus, but
showed us how to interpret implications and ideas that authors may have had; this imbued us
with the ability to explore literature to draw our own original conclusions from the work, rather
than simply memorising certain conclusions. In essence, she gave us the tools to identify
important points and form a convincing argument around them in place of traditional
memorisation methods.
One could also argue that cognitive theory played a part - albeit incredibly minor. Where some
teachers prefer to have you read from PowerPoint slides or a textbook, my teacher chose to
use images and diagrams in PowerPoint presentations as much as possible alongside her
narration and spoken explanations of the issues. This is a clear example of Mayer's modality
principle - however, as many of her spoken points also appeared in text form on-screen, the
redundancy principle was not administered.
Ultimately, cognitivist aspects of the experience are negligible. What made the experience
memorable and profound was the inclusion of constructivist ideas alongside ideas of
behaviourism that are traditional in school environments.
Theories of motivation

As previously mentioned in my first entry, the main motivations came from a positive attitude
that helped me develop an intrinsic motivation for the subject area and from the personalised
feedback that gave me real, objectionable goals.
This closely follows the outline of Cognitive Evaluation Theory. The feedback was positive and
extremely useful information, facilitating a clear path to improvement and a desire to do so
and become better. This satisfies the aspect of "competence". "Autonomy" was satisfied by my
teacher's use of a somewhat constructivist approach - through opportunities for individual
interpretation of the authors' intent, we were able to direct ourselves in forming unique but
compelling arguments with competent rationale behind each. There was also an element of
"relatedness" in the class environment, as we would often share our work for peer review and
discuss our thoughts on the literature with our peers to broaden our individual understanding.
There is also an argument that certain elements of Lepper and Malone's model of intrinsic
motivation apply to this situation. This is primarily through the form of cognitive curiosity,
where feedback from the teacher would suggest the next area to study to improve your
understanding. As feedback was tailored, the suggestions given were the perfect level of
challenge for each individual student.
From real to digital

An ideal way to approach recreating the positive experience I had with my teacher might come
in the form of advanced AI that is capable of accurately identifying your skill level, along with
your weak and strong suits, to come up with suggestions of the most effective "next steps" to
help you improve. For example, if an AI is given the syllabus, mark scheme and guidelines for
what kind of interpretations might be acceptable in an English language context, they could
determine how convincing each of the user's arguments actually are and use that conclusion
in mapping out the student's learning path.
A less technologically advanced way might be to upload lesson content to an online service,
where each lesson has multiple different versions to suit different kind of users. From here,
the user could create a custom learning route (i.e. which lessons they want to learn and in what
order) or preferably, an expert linguist could perform a one-time review of the student's initial
work in order to create that learning route for them.
Regarding keeping the user motivated, it is not too difficult to implement the cognitive curiosity
factor of Lepper and Malone's model of intrinsic motivation in a technology-enhanced learning
environment. This could be done by giving the user feedback on what they did well during the
lesson and what could be improved.
The above is something I implemented in my own prototype - users are given statistics about
their performance in the quizzes at the end of lessons; these show the areas where the student
shows most strength and the areas which require the most work. I also aimed to keep all
feedback as positive as possible, as punishment may put off users from learning through the
app altogether.
Going back to my initial point, an ideal system would use an AI to generate customised praise
for the user each lesson and emulate the experience of a real teacher.