Complete thesis - Murdoch University

discipline, at this point based primarily on personal experience in industry, suggested alternateapproaches should be investigated. The prime issue that acted as trigger for this cyclewas to provide a more ‘authentic’ environment for learning, in order to facilitate transfer.Consideration of issues facing students articulating into the unit was also a motivator forexamination and reflection.Figure 6.1 provides a visual representation of Cycle 1 of this study, in the context of thethesis as a whole.The first task (Cycle 1a) was to examine the perceptions identifies in the initial reflection.This was based on the examination of several bodies of literature, focussing on: what practitionersof RE say about graduate learning; how RE and early design tasks are said to becarried out, and what the literatures of learning say about modelling practitioners. Thisliterature has been discussed in Chapters 2 and 3.Cycle 1 was planned and developed after consideration of this literature. In this cycle theintervention is based on the Cognitive Apprenticeship model, described in the work of Collinset al (1989) and Brown et al (1989). As was discussed in Chapter 3, they suggest such anenvironment models proficiency and enculturates studentsinto authentic practices through activity and social interaction in a way similarto that evident - and evidently successful - in craft apprenticeships.(Brown et al, 1989, p 37)As noted in Chapter 5, the value of this model is its alignment with practitioners perceptionof learning in the discipline: they indicated an apprenticeship model of on-the-job learningfor novice Requirements Engineers. This literature has been discussed in Chapter 2.The Requirements Engineering unit (ENG260) was taught applying this model, during semester1 2002. This chapter describes the intervention in its context, the data that was collectedand discusses possible interpretations of these.Two distinct evaluations of this cycle are presented: implementation of the model and itssuccess; and the effect of the intervention on the student cohort, both short term and longerterm impact.In summary, the interpretation of the intervention suggested a model based on CognitiveApprenticeship could be applied reasonably successfully. However, while some students werecomfortable with a ‘master’ who, towards the end of semester ‘faded’, most acknowledgedthat this placed the onus on them to do the learning, and preferred to be ‘taught’. Thisexpectation was still observed in the following unit, where the first task was to apply what248