Becoming an expert learner

Professor Caroline Keenan, Director of Education and Student Experience and Associate Professor of Law and Legal Education, led an interesting project on helping students become expert learners. Here’s an overview of the session and project goals.

University learning can feel fragmented and overwhelming to students. There are many support services, but students must seek them out individually. This puts a lot of pressure on students to identify and address their own learning gaps. It’s like entering a train station and being bombarded by neon signs flashing different messages all at once. Students (and staff) get buffeted about by various initiatives and programs without a sense of coherence.

Caroline felt the current approach was too individualised and pressurising and that the responsibility should not just be on the students to ask for help, but on the university to design inclusive learning experiences for all. She wanted to create something to help students make sense of their learning, so she drew inspiration from Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which emphasises designing for learner diversity rather than a fictional “average” learner.

The project translates UDL’s 9 benchmarks for expert learning into 9 statements of skills students need to develop. It outlines what’s required by the end of Year 1, Year 2, etc. to become an expert learner. The UDL 9 expert learning skills are:

• Access
  • Identify
  • Interest
  • Goal focused
• Engage
  • Practice
  • Gap recognition
  • Task appraisal
• Express
  • Monitor
  • Active
  • Tool selection

Caroline also designed a card game, kind of a trading card game for first year students, so that they can identify where it is in the subject modules that they can acquire or be working on a particular benchmark skill.

With the help of graphic designer Yoshi Pakalkaite, the project has been brought to life with badges that have been created that can put onto ELE2 pages to indicate which particular benchmark skills each module is working on. There are also award cards, prompt cards and trade cards for each skill, with a record sheet where students explain how and where they identified this skill.

The Project

• Images and badges that are displayed on each module page in ELE2 that represent level of mastery of each skill.
• A trading card game to help first year students identify and practice expert learning skills in their subjects.
• Materials for academic tutors so they understand how to guide students.
• Introduction during induction week through mixed group gameplay. Then further reinforcement through the year.

This project helps students name and consciously develop the skills needed for expert learning in their new environment. It also sets explicit expectations for what “good” looks like at each stage, rather than relying on implicit guesses.

More Details on the Trading Card Game

The trading card game includes:

• Game instructions so students understand how to play.
• Award cards representing each of the 9 expert learning skills
• Wildcard cards students can collect and trade to complete their deck.

The random distribution of cards encourages students to trade with peers to collect a full set. Gameplay during induction week in diverse groups provides an interactive introduction.

Students can then continue playing throughout the year to reinforce the expert learning skills in their subjects. Having concrete artifacts like cards helps build familiarity with the concepts.

Benefits of the Project

This project provides a much-needed sensemaking tool for students entering the university’s complex learning environment. It empowers them to consciously build expertise, instead of relying on ineffective strategies from their past.

The trading card game delivers the concepts in a playful, engaging way, and it facilitates important connections with peers. Overall, the project translates expert learning into an accessible framework for students.

The blog post was developed by Jo Sutherst following an interview with Professor Caroline Keenan.