First network meeting: 'New measures for new learning questions'
Dates
November 22-24 2017
Place
Hotel de Medici, Bruges – www.hoteldemedici.com
Background
As part of the activities of the Scientific Community on ‘Learning strategies in social and informal learning contexts’ a three day meeting will be organised in one of Belgian’s most famous historical cities (Next to Antwerp of course): Bruges.
Purpose of the meeting
The meeting aims at bringing together scholars from different methodological research perspectives and traditions involved in research that deals with learning strategies in social and (in)formal learning contexts. Three research perspectives are put forward in the network. In this first meeting of the network, there will be contributions on each of these perspectives, with special attention for the third perspective: new measures for new learning questions.
The first research perspective aims at a better understanding of the role of social contexts on student learning. Until now the social aspects of learning strategies have been underexamined due to the fact that most studies have taken an individual learner perspective into account (Vermunt & Endedijk, 2011). In the domain of social-cognitive theory and self-regulation theories, various models of social regulation have been proposed such as co-regulated and socially shared regulated learning and are still under development (Hadwin, Järvelä & Miller, 2011). These theoretical frameworks are an important impetus to further explore the social dimension of learning strategies in diverse contexts and can result in defining a more fine-grained model to understand learning strategies in contexts of social interaction.
The second research perspective concerns the need to expand our knowledge of learning strategies in formal contexts or in-school learning environments to informal or on-the-job learning contexts (Kyndt & Baert, 2013; Schulz & Roßnagel, 2010). Studies investigating students’ learning strategies, have been predominantly carried out in formal school contexts. However, a small sample of studies have been trespassing this boundary by investigating learning strategies in workplace learning contexts combining different theoretical lenses (Bernsen, Segers, & Tillema; 2009; Kirby, Delva, Knapper, & Birtwhistle, 2003; Vanthournout, Noyens, Gijbels Van den Bossche, 2014). Theoretical and empirical studies are needed to investigate the possibilities of integration of these different theoretical lenses, to further understand the nature of learning strategies in informal learning contexts.
The third research perspective concerns the added value of the use of other measurement techniques to investigate learning strategies in social and informal contexts. By means of triangulation of research methods and techniques, we aim to further explore the value of social network analysis and more on-line measurement tools such as eye-tracking, video and bodymetrics to further expand our knowledge of how learning strategies are present in social and informal learning contexts. The use of these measurement techniques has been successful in the domain of self-regulation (Azevedo & Aleven, 2013; Molenaar & Järvelä, 2014; Panadero & Alonso-Tapia, 2014) and offers opportunities to deepen our current understanding of learning strategies and to move away from predominantly self-report measurement techniques in the field (Donche, De Maeyer, Gijbels, Van den Bergh, 2015).
Type of contributions
- Traditional paper presentations of theoretical and empirical work with ample time for discussion
- Explorative workshops in which new theories and ideas are explored and discussed based on available empirical data
- Future-vision workshops in which new activities for the scientific research community are discussed and joint project proposals to European and other funding agencies are explored
Output
- Publication of papers in special issue or book
- Exploration of joint project proposals to (European) funding agencies