Abstracts - Earli

P 1201 September 2007 11:00 - 12:20Room: 4.95Paper SessionStudent learning in higher educationChair:Carmen Vizcarro, Universidad de Castilla la Mancha, SpainParallel transcripts to capture parallel perspectives on a shared experience: what they tell usabout student learningLynn McAlpine, Mcgill University, CanadaCynthia Weston, McGill University, CanadaJulie Timmermans, McGill University, CanadaIn this study, we undertook to examine the assumed but undocumented relation between teacherreflection and student learning. The challenge was to find a way to capture student thinking inorder to see if any such relationship existed. Since many factors other than reflection-on-teachingmay affect student outcomes in a course, we focussed on student thinking in class as we had usedsuch an approach as one means of capturing reflection. The line of thinking was the following. Weknew that when professors reflected in class, they were attending to classroom actions and howstudents responded. If we could capture how classroom actions were interpreted by students,actions could become the connecting point for examining any possible relation between reflectionand student learning. Having a conception of what we wanted to achieve, the challenges ofimplementation were successively - how to collect, how to prepare, and how to display the data ina way that would facilitate analysis. While many in the social sciences are interested in capturingco-occurring views on a shared experience (e.g., doctor-patient consultations), we found little andsomewhat variable guidance from the literature. So we developed and piloted the method as weproceeded. The result of our efforts are a) new insights into student thinking in class which haveimplications for teaching and b) design principles we believe useful to other researchers wanting toexamine co-occurring perspectives on a shared experience. These will be elaborated in the session.Self-beliefs and prior knowledge as predictors of student achievement in mathematics: A structuralmodelTelle Hailikari, University of Helsinki, FinlandAnne Nevgi, University of Helsinki, FinlandThe aim of the study was to explore the interplay between prior knowledge, self-beliefs andprevious study success in predicting student achievement of 140 students in a universitymathematics course. The significance of these two construct, prior knowledge and self-beliefs, asnecessary prerequisites for successful learning have been well established but research resultsregarding the predictive value of each construct have been somewhat contradictory. Structuralequation modelling was used to explore the interplay of these variables in predicting studentachievement. Results revealed that prior knowledge was the strongest predictor of studentachievement over and above other variables included in the model and it explained 55 % of thevariance together with previous study success. Self-beliefs as a leaner were strongly correlatedwith previous study success and had a strong direct influence on prior knowledge testperformance. However, self-beliefs predicted student achievement only indirectly via priorknowledge. The results imply that both prior knowledge and self-beliefs should be taken into– 846 –