Abstracts - Earli

Polish adaptation of the Jan Vermunt’s „Inventory of Learning Styles" are presented. At thebeginning the procedure consisting of three independent translations of the English version,authorized by J. Vermunt, which were the basis of the version subject to back-wards translation isdescribed. The final version was filled in by 243 students from three different faculties of theWarsaw University: Education, Law and Mathematics, half from the second, and half from thefourth year. The analyses showed that most scales had acceptable reliability. Higher coefficientswere found in the whole group than in sub-groups. The results were differentiated more by thefaculty than by the year of study. Relations between scores in „Inventory of Learning Styles" andGPA were also analyzed. The overall conclusion of the study was that the Polish version of theILS might be a useful tool in educational research. A second investigation was conducted with 62students from the second and fourth year of the Faculty of Electronics, Warsaw PolytechnicSchool in order to check whether learning styles are differentiated in younger and older students.The results showed that the application-directed style was dominating in older students, whereasmeaning-directed in younger. The undirected learning style was correlated with lowerachievements. The discussion is focused on the influence of educational and cultural settings in theformation of learning styles.Learning to Learn in schools: How do pupils think about their learning?Kate Wall, Newcastle University, United KingdomSteve Higgins, Durham University, United KingdomThis paper will explore data on pupil views of learning to learn collected across the three yearLearning to Learn Phase 3 Evaluation (Higgins, Wall et al. 2006). The data was collected byteachers as part of their action research projects using pupil views templates (Wall and Higgins2006). This paper will explore the method of pupil views templates (Wall and Higgins 2006),describing their use and the rationale and theoretical basis for their design. It will then go on todiscuss the analysis frame, which combines the work of Moseley et al. (2005) and Veenman andSpans (2005), used to produce investigate the way in which learning to learn pupils’ views ofcognitive skills are seen to overlap with their thinking about metacognition. (This will be a furtherdevelopment of the work presented at the EARLI metacognition SIG conference in July 2006,incorporating feedback from the conference participants.)Helping students extend their repertoire of learning strategies - The role of student’s expectationsof assessment tasksGerrit Hirschfeld, University of Münster, GermanyRuth E. von Brachel, University of Münster, GermanyThe study reported here investigates how students develop the wide range of learning strategiessenior students use to prepare for exams. One line of research suggests that student’s perceptionsof assessment influence students’ approaches to learning. As the assessment tasks vary betweenundergraduate and graduate exams, the question arises in how far these changes in assessmentpractices might influence the development of learning strategies. Accordingly we first expectedthat students’ learning strategies are determined by both, their previous experience with universityassessment and their expectations of particular assessment tasks. Secondly we anticipated that partof the influence of experience on learning strategies is mediated by a change in expectations. Intotal 209 university psychology students in their second to tenth semester participated in thisstudy. They responded to a newly developed Students’ Expectations of Assessment Tasks (SEAT)questionnaire which measures students’ expectations of five common assessment tasks (recallingfacts, reporting studies, explaining diagrams, contrasting different perspectives, developing an own– 833 –