Complete thesis - Murdoch University

programmes within Engineering, albeit for the final two years of study only. Thisapproach addressed the issue of undermining the learning ‘philosophy’ being initiatedin the RE unit and ultimately in the SE programme.These elements were addressed by exploring Schön’s ideas on reflecting-in-action (Schön,1983). However, as discussed in Chapter 3, the design studio approach, which is seen toexemplify learning for practice, also has some problems in that it may focus on the creativityof the design process to the detriment of the practical application that should be its goal.In addition, while the studio model enables processes to be exploited to support the designactivity, reflection-facilitating strategies are seen as often missing, and require scaffoldingthrough concrete activities built into the environment (Nelson, 2003).What is needed, then, is a model of education that adds, to the positive aspects of studios, afocus on metacognition, so that learning integrates evaluation of the ‘practical’ outcomes ofthe problem with the creative process. Aspects of Laurillard’s learning model, with teachback(Pask, 1976) and self explanation (Chi and Bassock, 1989) are incorporated as key phenomenain the learning dialogue, thereby:• forcing a focus on key aspects of the domain• forcing deeper processing of the topic, allowing relationships to be forged• allowing failures and conflicts to emerge (Gobet and Wood, 1999).These ideas form the basis for the Studio Learning model for RE proposed and applied in thischapter. This model explores the ‘dialogic’ nature of learning (Laurillard, 1993) and supportsthe idea that learning is defined in terms of dynamic sets of relationships whose interactionsand interdependencies create and control conditions that are supportive of specified conceptswithin the discipline.This chapter describes how the issues identified in Cycle 2 were addressed: how the interventionwas planned, what actually occurred and possible interpretations for findings of thecycle. As in previous cycles two distinct evaluations are proposed: implementation of themodel and its success and the effect of the intervention on the student cohort. This cycleplaces greater emphasis on examining longer term impacts of the intervention, through datacollected in a follow-on unit.In summary, these evaluations suggested that there was close alignment between characteristicsof the discipline and the Studio Learning model developed, although some concern shouldbe expressed regarding the pragmatic decision to retain components of assessment that didnot align with the learning model – in Elton (2000)’s terms, doing the right thing wronger.332