Many writers have pointed out that pupil learning is not simply a matter of cognitive processing. All learning occurs in a complex social context, and is infl uenced by a variety of important affective variables (Elliot et al., 2005). In this context ‘affective’
issues refer to those emotional and social factors that impinge upon pupils’ learning.
They include, in particular, issues related to pupil motivation.
One of the most important affective issues related to pupil learning is the pupil’s self-concept. The notion of self-concept has two main aspects: ‘self-image’, which refers to those general attributes that describe how an individual views himself or herself (fat, clever, an Asian, male), and ‘self-esteem’, which refers to the sense of worth that an individual ascribes to himself or herself. For some pupils, doing well at school can help develop a positive academic self-concept, which in turn helps sustain further effort and success (creating a virtuous circle). For other pupils, doing badly at school can lead to the development of a negative academic self-concept, which in turn may lead to a withdrawal of effort and general alienation from school learning (creating a vicious circle).
One of the major problems facing teachers is how to give positive feedback to high-attaining pupils without thereby making other pupils who are doing less well feel they are failures. The experience of failure is often painful. Pupils who consistently feel they are doing less well academically than their peers will often make less effort to succeed. After all, poor marks in academic work when you have not being trying is far less painful than failing after you have tried very hard. Some pupils who are doing less well academically try to compensate for this, by establishing a image and self-esteem amongst their peers in terms of other goals, such as success in sports, music, or even misbehaviour.
An important aspect of school life is the ‘hidden curriculum’. The ‘formal curriculum’
refers to the subject knowledge that schools aim to foster. The hidden curriculum refers to all those messages conveyed to pupils by their experience of school regarding values, attitudes and expectations about themselves and their behaviour. Such messages may be intended or unintended by the teacher. Examples of the messages conveyed to pupils by the hidden curriculum typically involve the notion that ‘you have to put up with boring lessons’, ‘the level of work done by high-attaining pupils is more valued by teach-ers’ and ‘teachers are in authority and have sole control over what you do in lessons’.
For some pupils, poor motivation towards school learning can refl ect an attempt to preserve their own dignity and sense of worth by opting out of an involvement in aca-demic tasks that have previously resulted in painful consequences, such as low marks, teacher criticism, or appearing to be ‘dim’ in front of peers. In our society, doing well or not doing well, whatever the activity, matters very much to people, and success and failure makes learning an emotionally charged activity. Recognition of this emotional aspect of learning has done much to explain why pupils often misbehave in apparently senseless ways to avoid learning. When seen from the pupil’s perspective, such behav-iour appears to be both a natural and rational response to their circumstances. Effective teaching thus requires teachers to nurture and support pupils’ efforts, and to use forms of monitoring progress and giving feedback that reinforces pupil motivation and achieve-ment across the whole ability range and across a wide range of school activities.
The infl uence of teachers’ expectations on pupils’ attitudes towards learning has been the focus of much attention. One of the most infl uential studies reported was that of Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968). In their study, a group of primary teachers were told by researchers that certain of their pupils had been identifi ed on a test as likely to make marked gains in academic attainment in the forthcoming school year, when in reality, these pupils had been chosen by the researchers at random. Subsequently, these pupils did indeed make greater gains in IQ scores on average than their peers. Rosenthal and Jacobson interpreted this as evidence that the teachers’ expectations must have infl u-enced their behaviour towards these pupils in ways that promoted greater progress
HOWPUPILSLEARN 35 and produced a ‘self-fulfi lling prophecy’ effect. Subsequent studies by other researchers using this type of research design have produced a mixed picture, but the fi ndings of their original study and the notion of a teacher expectancy effect has had a great impact on thinking about pupil learning.
Whilst the relationship between teacher expectations and pupil learning may be more complex than a ‘self-fulfi lling prophecy’ suggests, the importance of teachers needing to convey high expectations to their pupils is widely advocated. Indeed, in numerous reports by the Offi ce for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted), the call for teachers to have high expectations is voiced as their most frequently expressed concern regarding effective teaching in schools (e.g. Ofsted, 2008a). Low expectations by teachers can easily come about because of the general inertia in the classroom, which acts to try and pull down the level of work expected for the class as a whole towards that produced by the lower-attaining pupils in the group. Indeed, hard-working, high-attaining pupils can often be ridiculed as ‘swots’ or ‘creeps’ by other class members because they provide ready evidence to the teacher of what can be achieved. It is important, however, to note that high expectations means expecta-tions that are challenging for pupils but that they can realistically be expected to achieve if they make suffi cient effort. High expectations that are too demanding will not foster greater progress, and are simply likely to produce the sort of attack on pupils’ self-concept mentioned earlier.
Another important affective issue concerning pupil learning is the psychological pro-cess of ‘identifi cation’. Identifi cation is the tendency to identify with and subsequently model oneself upon and adopt the values of another person (usually a person who is loved, admired, or seen as having power and status). Young children normally identify with their parents, often with one more than the other, and not always with the same-sex parent. Such identifi cation is a crucial process in the development of the child’s values, attitudes and aspirations, including those towards school learning. During the school years, teachers can often be the object of identifi cation, and where such iden-tifi cation has taken place it can have a marked infl uence on the pupil’s general behav-iour and motivation in that teacher’s class. In addition, the process of identifi cation can gradually become more generalised as pupils get older, so that instead of identify-ing with an individual, one can identify with a group, such as a group of friends who share common values, and where one can, as a result, experience strong peer-group pressure to conform to the group’s norms and expectations regarding values and behaviour.
Studies of pupils in schools illustrate how pupils’ attitudes and values regarding the nature of school and the importance of school learning is fostered and shaped by the expectations of their peers, parents and teachers (Cullingford, 2003; Pollard et al., 2000). Pupils need to strike a balance between the social side of school life (mixing in different friendship groups) and the importance of devoting time and effort to school learning. As they get older, pupils increasingly begin to appreciate the ‘seriousness’ of school learning through their encounters with teachers’ reactions to their work and behaviour, the setting of homework, taking tests in examination-like conditions, being grouped into classes on the basis of attainment, the issuing of school reports on their progress, and the schools’ operation of a system of incentives and rewards based on recognising effort and achievement.
Another affective issue worthy of attention concerns the effect of the pupil’s level of anxiety on their cognitive processes. Anxiety is an important source of motivation. It arises whenever academic demands are made and success in meeting those demands is important to the individual. Anxiety is thus a common occurrence during tests and examinations, and during class activities where, for example, the failure to answer a teacher’s question may cause embarrassment. Such anxiety can be elicited intentionally by the teacher in order to foster high levels of motivation. Two major dangers, how-ever, are involved here. The frequent occurrence of anxiety in learning activities may well lead some pupils to reject such activities as being of no importance to them, thereby defending themselves from experiencing such anxiety. Furthermore, high levels of anxiety actually places constraints on the breadth and quality of one’s cognitive processes, because the individual’s own awareness of being anxious takes up some of the ‘mental space’ available for information processing. Indeed, if anxiety becomes too great, an individual literally becomes paralysed. In establishing an effective envi-ronment for teaching, the anxiety levels of pupils need to be carefully monitored by teachers to ensure they do not inhibit learning.
Finally, a number of writers have highlighted the importance of pupils’ self-regulated learning (SRL) – the strategies pupils use to monitor, control and direct their learning (Hewitt, 2008; Schunk and Zimmerman, 2008). A useful distinction can be made between three types of SRL strategies:
Emotion control:
Ɂ strategies to maintain a positive emotional frame of mind.
Motivation control:
Ɂ strategies to maintain motivational effort.
Cognition control:
Ɂ procedures to direct cognitive processes (metacognition).
There has been an increasing recognition of the need to help pupils develop effective SRL strategies to control and guide their own learning, and that doing this successfully involves a range of affective issues, which is why SRL is so easily infl uenced by the prevailing classroom climate and, in particular, by the attitudes displayed by important others (such as parents, peers and teachers).
Summary
This chapter has outlined the basic nature of pupil learning together with a consid-eration of the most important developmental, cognitive and affective issues involved.
The main value of an understanding of pupil learning in the context of effective teaching is that it enables a teacher to refl ect upon an explicit agenda of the major processes and issues involved in such learning. In the framework developed here, the notions of ‘attentiveness’, ‘receptiveness’ and ‘appropriateness’ acted as the focus for thinking about pupil learning. Teachers’ thinking about their own teaching comprises much craft knowledge based on experience. The continued development of the quality of teaching stems from teachers thinking critically about their teach-ing. The processes and issues raised in this chapter lie at the heart of their consid-eration of pupil learning itself. In further chapters of this book, the major processes and issues identifi ed here will form the basis of the discussion of the key tasks involved in effective teaching.
HOWPUPILSLEARN 37
Discussion questions
What cognitive processes do teachers need to be aware of if they are to facilitate 1
pupil learning?
What aspects of child development have important implications for effective 2
classroom practice?
What part does pupil motivation play in effective teaching?
3
Which pupil needs must a teacher take account of in fostering learning?
4
How might a pupil’s personal and social context infl uence their learning?
5
How might teachers’ expectations infl uence pupils’ effort to learn?
6
Further reading
Child, D. (2007). Psychology and the Teacher, 8th edn. London: Continuum. A com-prehensive overview of the key psychological ideas involved in learning.
Fox, R. (2005). Teaching and Learning: Lessons from Psychology. Oxford: Blackwell.
Provides a good overview of the psychological processes involved in learning, particu-larly strong on personal and social issues.
Jarvis, M. (2005). The Psychology of Effective Learning and Teaching. Cheltenham:
Nelson Thornes. Deals with the ways in which cognitive, developmental and affective processes are involved in learning, and the implications these have for teaching.
Schunk, D. H. (2008). Learning Theories: An Educational Perspective, 5th edn. Lon-don: Pearson. A thorough overview of the key ideas, theories and issues involved in understanding how pupils learn.
Slavin, R. E. (2006). Educational Psychology: Theory and Practice, 8th edn. New York:
Allyn and Bacon. Presents an excellent synopsis of the key principles and processes involved in pupil learning.
Objective
This chapter is concerned with the types of learning tasks, activities and experiences that teachers can usefully set up to facilitate pupil learning. There is now an incredible diversity in the types of teaching methods used in schools (Muijs and Reynolds, 2005;
Wilen et al., 2008). There has been an increasing recognition by teachers of the impor-tance of ‘process’ compared with ‘product’, and an appreciation that the way pupils learn is just as important as the content of what is taught. This move towards an increasing emphasis on process is part of a trend towards making use of learning activi-ties that utilise more active pupil involvement (Watkins et al., 2007). Such ‘active learning’ approaches (such as small group work and problem-solving investigations) have increased in use, not only because they can foster greater understanding, better skills and increased transfer of learning, but also because of their benefi cial effects on motivation and attitudes towards learning.
As indicated in the previous chapter, the most important consideration involved in looking at pupil learning experiences is the degree to which they fulfi l three major conditions for pupil learning: attentiveness, receptiveness and appropriateness. The basic task of effective teaching is to set up a learning experience in which pupils effec-tively engage in the mental activity that brings about those changes in the pupil’s cognitive structure that constitute the desired learning. Teachers, therefore, need to be sensitive to the ways in which different teaching methods foster different types of mental activity, and the degree to which a particular mental activity brings about the desired learning.
Pupils’ learning in school can be fostered in two main ways:
Teacher exposition:
Ɂ listening to teacher exposition, which may include asking or being asked questions, watching a demonstration, and genuine teacher–pupil discussion.
Academic work:
Ɂ being instructed to undertake or engage in academic tasks and activities, either on one’s own or together with other pupils.
Teacher exposition tends to place emphasis on describing and explaining new informa-tion to pupils through direct teacher–pupil interacinforma-tion, and is usually based on teaching the class as a whole. Academic work is much more diverse, and includes the whole range of tasks and activities in which pupils engage whilst the teacher takes on a more supportive role, and in some cases the teacher need not be present at all. The vast majority of lessons given in classrooms involve a mixture of exposition and academic