Complete thesis - Murdoch University

within the formal (tertiary) education sector, they found that while expectations existed ofstudent progression towards a more competent state and the achievement of generic graduateoutcomes, there was no consistent university-wide approach. Rather an implicit (though not acommon) understanding of what differences between the levels of undergraduate units acrossa university should be existed. Within a discipline the progression was often managed by theuse of pre-requisites (skills and knowledge). Where educational reasoning existed capabilityframeworks (eg Australian Qualifications Framework (2002)) and learning taxonomies (egBloom et al (1956)) featured.It is accepted that learning does not stop with the end of formal education. However, learningafter formal education is not constrained by the cultures and methodologies of formaldisciplinary learning (although many of the cognitive strategies for learning are the same).Professional learning requires learner capacity and understanding for working with many differentsorts of knowledge in order to work with complex emergent problems for which theremay be a range of possible solutions. From the learner perspective, what is necessary is to :• have developed the executive function (metacognition) to engage in self-directed learningthat is effective• be able to visualise learning problems and engage individual conceptions of these problemsin order to ask questions like: what do we need to know? and how are we goingto come to know?• to have the knowledge to know how to go about developing new factual knowledge, todevelop new conceptual frameworks to make sense this knowledge and to be able toconsolidate, organise, connect and make future use of this knowledge.As noted by Laurillard (1993), the implications for the design of learning environments toachieve these graduate aims are two-fold:• academic learning must be situated in the domain of the objective, the activities mustmatch that domain• academic teaching must address both the direct experience of the world, and the reflectionon that experience that will produce the intended way of representing it.Savery and Duffy (1995) distilled the following instructional principles as a guide to thedesign of learning environments that address these issues:• anchor all learning to a larger task or problem159