Ruth Deakin Crick

Developing an Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory: the ELLI Project

This paper reports the initial results of a study that was designed to develop and test an instrument that could identify the elements of an individuals capacity for lifelong learning. We anticipated that the components of this capacity would include a complex mix of dispositions, lived experiences, social relations, values, attitudes and beliefs and that these various factors would coalesce to shape the nature of an individuals engagement with any particular learning opportunity. The instrument that was developed—the Evaluating Lifelong Learning Inventory—was trialled with pupils across a range of ages and subject to factor analytic study. The data have proved robust over successive factor analytic studies, allowing the identification of seven dimensions of learning power and reliable scales to assess these. These dimensions appear to be capable of differentiating between efficacious, engaged and energized learners and passive, dependent and fragile learners. Whilst further, larger scale field trials will be necessary to confirm these early results, the findings would appear to have significant implications for conventional models of curriculum design and classroom practice.

Learning how to learn : the dynamic assessment of learning power

This article introduces the notion of the assessment of ‘learning power’ as an important station in a mentored learning journey, which begins with the motivation and identity of the person who is learning, and moves through the awareness and development of the power to learn, to the publicly valued competencies and funds of knowledge of the formal curriculum. The seven dimensions of learning power are described, and the article reports on the findings of a qualitative study in which sixteen teachers were provided with learning power assessment data for their students as individuals and as whole groups. There were ten pedagogical themes which underpinned the teaching and learning encounters in those classrooms; these are briefly described. Learning power profiles have been used with nearly nine thousand students since 2003 and data from school-based development projects are referred to. The article concludes that the dynamic assessment of learning power serves three pedagogical purposes. First, it reflects...This article introduces the notion of the assessment of ‘learning power’ as an important station in a mentored learning journey, which begins with the motivation and identity of the person who is learning, and moves through the awareness and development of the power to learn, to the publicly valued competencies and funds of knowledge of the formal curriculum. The seven dimensions of learning power are described, and the article reports on the findings of a qualitative study in which sixteen teachers were provided with learning power assessment data for their students as individuals and as whole groups. There were ten pedagogical themes which underpinned the teaching and learning encounters in those classrooms; these are briefly described. Learning power profiles have been used with nearly nine thousand students since 2003 and data from school-based development projects are referred to. The article concludes that the dynamic assessment of learning power serves three pedagogical purposes. First, it reflects back to the learner what they say about themselves in relation to their personal power to learn. Second, it reflects back to the teacher data about individuals, and groups, which can be used for diagnosing what is needed to move forward in the development of self-awareness, ownership and responsibility for learning. Third, it provides scaffolding for ways in which the students encountered the formal content of the curriculum. All of these operate together through the shared, and sometimes locally created, language stimulated by the learning dimensions, and through metaphors, icons and heroes which carry meaning in the classroom.

Being a Learner: A Virtue for the 21st Century.

ABSTRACT:  Lifelong learning is something which one does for oneself that no one else can do for one: it is a public and personal human activity, rather than private or individualistic. One of the features of the education system is the paucity of a language for learning as process and participative experience. Personalised learning requires a sense of the worthwhileness of ‘being a learner’– a virtue in the 21st century. A sense of ones own worth as a person is essential to understanding ones identity as a learner. Research suggests the human capacity to learn can be understood as a form of consciousness which is characterised by particular values, attitudes and dispositions, with a lateral and a temporal connectivity. This ‘consciousness’ has several dimensions which are all related to becoming a person, with a learning identity. They also enable the learner to become aware of and appropriate what is of worth and map onto the sorts of core values that learning communities espouse. Awareness of self and of ones own worth as a person is a necessary condition for ‘becoming a learner’ and for identifying and engaging with ‘what is of worth’. Furthermore, a sense of self as a learner is formed in relationship, and understood as one learns to tell ones own story, as a participant in the conversation of the learning community. Character is the way in which we refer to that quality of personhood in which there is rooted the capacity to change and learn over time.

Inquiry-based learning: reconciling the personal with the public in a democratic and archaeological pedagogy

This article describes and explores the key elements of an approach to personalised learning which is rooted in student experience and choice. It is shaped by the learners interest, driven by her curiosity and purpose, yet is capable of supporting the delivery of the valued outcomes of a publicly accountable curriculum. It is an approach which enables a student to participate purposefully in the processes of learning, developing values, attitudes and dispositions for learning, while at the same time acquiring and managing specialist knowledge, skills and understanding in the service of a personally chosen outcome. The journey begins with a particular, concrete place or object, and moves through a developmental sequence of thinking and learning capabilities to a publicly evaluated outcome. It is a pedagogy which integrally supports citizenship education because it addresses questions of value and worth through the narratives uncovered in the world-as-it-is-experienced by the learner. It is an archaeological pedagogy in the sense that it begins with experience and observation, generates narratives and then reconstructs knowledge/s necessary to satisfy the original personally chosen quest, rather than beginning with pre-packaged conceptual expert knowledge. It creates a context for critical subjectivity and engagement with learning and with the world. It is a pedagogy which takes seriously the selfhood of the learner, and the formation of virtue in learning, while at the same time not abandoning the rigour of specialist knowledge in a particular field.

Assessing learning dispositions: is the Effective lifelong learning inventory valid and reliable as a measurement tool?

Background: The Effective lifelong learning inventory (ELLI) has been used as a diagnostic self assessment tool in schools and universities and other learning contexts as a means of raising an individuals awareness of their own learning dispositions and encouraging them to take responsibility for their own learning. The demand for the ELLI, in practice, has been significant, and since it is administered online, since 2004 a dataset of over 10,000 cases has accumulated. Purpose: This paper focuses on an exploration of the internal reliability, validity and stability of the seven scales of the ELLI. Some suggestions of its relevance to practice are made, though this is not the focus of the paper and is discussed elsewhere. Programme description: The inventory is available to formal learning organisations, and is administered by teachers who have been trained in its application, drawing on research and best practice through an evaluated programme. Sample: The total sample in this study is 10,496 individuals from 122 institutions and 413 classrooms. Design and methods: An exploratory factor analysis and scale reliability computations were undertaken and a ‘sensitivity’ study based on a subgroup of the original sample, collected in 2002 is reported. An Analysis of Variance study is repeated, comparing means between age ranges. Results: The study demonstrates again that the scales remain stable and continue to reach acceptable reliability levels in the new sample, in five age ranges and that the mean score on all positive learning dispositions reduces significantly until the 16–19 age range. Conclusions: The scales demonstrate a significant degree of stability, reliability and internal consistency over time. The constructs measured are thus useful for research, and institutional self-evaluation, and can be used, in practice, with some confidence. There remains a significant ongoing research agenda relating to the plasticity of the construct of learning dispositions and the ‘positioning’ of dispositions within an ecology of learning.

Learner Dispositions, Self-Theories and Student Engagement.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the concept of learner dispositions empirically and theoretically based on two related studies: one undertaken in the United Kingdom exploring students learning power, identity and their engagement in learning; and one undertaken in Australia, which explored the relationship between learning power and Dweckian self-theories. Three different measures of dispositions are used. Two of these – learning power and self-theories – approach dispositions as malleable but relatively slow to change attributes, while the third considers dispositions as potentially more contextually responsive. The two studies had the measure of learning power in common, enabling a statistical as well as a theoretical comparison between the two studies’ models of learning dispositions and their contribution to the notion of engagement. The implications of these related studies are that, in order to foster deep engagement in learning, pedagogical attention needs to be paid to the formation of learning identity and the development of learning dispositions in the process of knowledge construction. While the different approaches to conceptualising dispositions were broadly compatible, each provided a different insight into this complex concept and suggests different but related pedagogical strategies for building engagement. The paper concludes with an exploration of the implications for dispositional research of autopoetic theory as an integrating conceptual framework.

Pedagogical challenges for personalisation: integrating the personal with the public through context-driven enquiry

‘Learning outcomes’ are currently, and with good reason, the focus of international interest and debate. What are the necessary and desirable outcomes of a twenty-firstcentury education? The implication is clear that a wider range of learning outcomes is now under consideration than simply the attainment of a set of pre-ordained, subject-specific and measurable targets. What are the outcomes, it is being asked, which will enable young people to flourish economically, personally and socially in their time? Notions of ‘well-being’, ‘personalisation’ and ‘engagement’ have become common in educational discourse and, though not unproblematic, they do call for some investigation and improved understanding of how pedagogy, curriculum and assessment might actually relate to learning outcomes. The Thematic Group on Learning Outcomes (LOTG) of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) identified seven types of learning outcomes operating across a range of contexts (James and Brown 2005, 10–11):

Curriculum as narration: tales from the children of the colonised

This article will explore the centrality of narrative in both the process and the content of enquiry-based learning, as a formative process which does not predetermine either its starting point or its outcome. Rather, it takes as its starting point the agency and life narrative of the learner and builds from this to a formally assessed outcome. It will argue for the importance of what one of us has coined ‘narrative learning’ (Goodson 2006, 2009). The article will draw upon a research project in New South Wales in which this archaeological pedagogy and curriculum were studied and evaluated with, and by, a cohort of previously disengaged students. These students are from an Indigenous community devastated by dispossession and colonisation. Their stories and those of their mentors will be used to explain, expand and ground our argument. They demonstrate how the curriculum becomes a ‘narratable pathway’ towards the formation of identity and agency when ‘knowing as storying’ is valued, promoted and represented. Narratives provide and create space for ‘pedagogic moments’ in which people can connect with themselves, their own culture and tradition, their hopes and aspirations and ultimately with an intentional, mentored construction of knowledge which serves their personal and public trajectories. The article makes use of Batesons three levels of learning and builds on concepts of learning how to learn, by linking this with the ‘person’ who is learning, their selfhood and agency, and their need for meaning-making and purpose as a foundation for engagement.

Signs, symbols and metaphor: linking self with text in inquiry-based learning

The focus in this article is on the role of symbol and metaphor in the development of student self-awareness and engagement in the process of learning. It draws on a case-study which explored the process of an inquiry-based learning project in an Indigenous learning centre in a school in New South Wales, Australia. The data used for this article were taken from the first stage of the inquiry project – the construction of a shared language for learning. The article argues that developing a rich and local language for learning, that links to the collective consciousness of a community through metaphors and symbols, is a crucial prerequisite for inquiry-based learning. It reveals how the naming of native Australian animals as icons for learning power, the co-construction of a learning story and the creation of a self-portrait as a learner collage provide mechanisms through which the students can performatively re-represent and recall their identities as learners. The processes enable the students to make connections between self and the meanings carried in the pictorial texts to develop self-awareness and responsibility for their own learning. It also provides the learners and their mentors with the necessary symbols and metaphors to scaffold the process of the inquiry in ways that allowed them to use the metaphors associated with the symbols to talk about change and to begin to engage with the formal requirements of the curriculum.

Developing Resilient Agency in Learning: The Internal Structure of Learning Power

ABSTRACT Understanding students’ learning dispositions has been a focus for research in education for many years. A range of alternative approaches to conceptualising and measuring this broad construct have been developed. Traditional psychometric measures aim to produce scales that satisfy the requirements for research; however, such measures have an additional use – to provide formative feedback to the learner. In this article we reanalyse 15 years of data derived from the Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory. We explore patterns and relationships within its practical measures and generate a more robust, parsimonious measurement model, strengthening its research attributes and its practical value. We show how the constructs included in the model link to relevant research and how it serves to integrate a number of ideas that have hitherto been treated as separate. The new model suggests a view of learning that is an embodied and relational process through which we regulate the flow of energy and information over time in order to achieve a particular purpose. Learning dispositions reflect the ways in which we develop resilient agency in learning by regulating this flow of energy and information in order to engage with challenge, risk and uncertainty and to adapt and change positively.