W E N Dy B E E K E S

The 'Millionaire' method for encouraging participation

A B S T R AC T Encouraging students to participate during class time is important to facilitate the learning process and encourage deep learning to take place. However, students with certain cultural and education backgrounds are often reluctant to participate in class discussion. This article provides some initial insight into the use of the Personal Response System (PRS) to encourage class participation at the postgraduate level. I

Introduction and background

Innovative methods to provide effective learning and teaching are under investigation in most universities in the UK. Some have focused upon the potential benefits of virtual learning environments (for example, Crawford et al., 2001;Morris and Rippin, 2003;Ramsey, 2003;Broad et al., 2004) and new 'technology-led' computer-assisted learning packages (for example, Lane and Porch, 2002). This article examines the use of the Personal Response System (PRS) to improve the level of classroom participation. The necessity for involving and encouraging participation of students from the Far East is an important issue for many universities in Anglo-Saxon countries that have been taking an increasing number of students from the Far East in recent years (Ottewill and Macfarlane, 2003). Cultural differences between students from the Far East and the West, and the impact on student interaction and participation have been documented (for example, Cortazzi and Jin, 1997;Cortazzi, 2002;Turner, 2003). In an attempt to stimulate discussion and encourage greater class participation, I wanted to test the use of the PRS. Specifically, I wanted to find out whether using the PRS technology in my classes would overcome their inhibition towards making a contribution to class discussions. I also hoped that using the PRS would enhance the learning process for all of the students on my course.

The PRS technology offers the lecturer the opportunity to ask a group of students a series of Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs). Students reply individually to each question posed by selecting a button on a hand-held wireless transmitter. This is similar to 'Ask the Audience' on the television game show 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire? ' (Seenan, 2000). At present, only a few companies manufacture the PRS, and to my knowledge, there is not widespread use of this technology in UK universities. However, some studies have found clear benefits of using the PRS in large undergraduate classes in the UK (see for example, Elliott, 2002Elliott, , 2003;;Williams, 2002;Madill, 2003).

On an accounting postgraduate level course at Lancaster University, I tested out the use of the PRS and examined students' reactions to the technology. In particular, I was interested in the reaction of students from the Far East to the PRS as compared to other teaching methods.

This article describes the rationale for using such technology before a discussion of how the PRS works. There will then be consideration of both my own and the students' reactions to using the PRS. The article concludes with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of using the PRS and suggestions for future wider use of PRS technology.

Background and rationale for using the PRS

The idea of using MCQs in lectures is not new: before the PRS was developed, lecturers used MCQs in lectures, asking students to respond by raising different coloured cards to vote (see for example, Harden et al., 1968;Dunn, 1969) or raising their hands. Harden et al. (1968) suggests that although lecture preparation time is increased if MCQs are used, more effective teaching and learning during class time takes place. Draper et al. (2002) detail the many pedagogic uses of the PRS, which include formal assessment and the provision of formative feedback to students and lecturers on a real-time basis. Prior evidence suggests that the PRS is useful in many subject areas at the undergraduate level. For example, Hake (1998) concluded that the PRS improved students' problem-solving skills and as a consequence students performed better in subsequent testing. Cue (1998) found that the PRS stimulated student interest for the subject and increased the depth of student learning. Elliott (2002learning. Elliott ( , 2003) ) found that the PRS is useful for generating and maintaining student interest and checking students' understanding. Therefore a body of literature exists that suggests there are many potential benefits of the PRS at the undergraduate level.

However, to the author's knowledge, there is little evidence of postgraduate students' reaction to the PRS.

I experimented with the PRS on a course which is a compulsory component for students registered on the MSc in Accounting and Financial Management. In recent years students from the Far East have dominated the student cohort. For example in academic year 2002/03, just over half of the class cohort had Chinese nationality, with the remainder of students originating from the UK and mainland Europe, Brazil, India, Malaysia and Taiwan. There can be up to 60 students in this class, although I have also used the PRS successfully in much larger undergraduate classes.

The act of 'making sense' of course material and reconstructing knowledge is an important part of the learning process for students (Jonassen, 1992). There are two extreme learning approaches highlighted by the literature: surface and deep learning strategies. The surface approach involves the student skimming over the material and tending to learn things by 'rote' without understanding, rather than considering the linkages between concepts. The deep approach is where the student engages fully with the subject matter. A deep learning approach enables the student to make various linkages between topics and see the course as a whole, rather than a series of independent topics (Lucas, 2001). Biggs (1999) suggests that students taking a deep approach will be less likely to have 'knowledge boxes' and fragmented understanding. Such students will therefore be more likely to integrate knowledge and understanding. I particularly wanted to encourage students to make a more active contribution to discussion during class time, to promote linkage between various topics and encourage deep learning to take place.

The PRS encourages students to engage in active learning, maintaining their concentration and attention span in lectures. The course does not have any formal tutorials or seminars for discussion of problems/issues, although I used a number of formats in the sessions including traditional lectures, debate of controversial issues and problem classes. The course sessions were one-and-a-half hours long, thus creating the need for small tasks and short breaks during the lecture to maintain concentration. Maintaining interest and attention is important and MacManaway (1970) and Gibbs et al. (1987) suggest that the average student has an attention span of only around 20 minutes. The PRS was very effective for breaking up the sessions and maintaining student interest. Following the use of the PRS, some time was allocated for discussion. This provided an opportunity for questions of clarification, which is another important component in the learning process (Bligh, 1998). Where a majority of students provided the incorrect answer to a question, there was a period of class discussion/ debate used for clarification purposes.

Interaction is an important element because it encourages students to express an opinion on the issues for discussion. These sessions give the opportunity for students to practise their communication skills in a group setting. The PRS is a stimulus for discussion and interaction. It does not per se encourage this unless the lecturer stimulates discussion of material after the votes have been cast. I found that the PRS's graphical representation of student responses was a 'talking-point' and I used this to engage students with course material to promote deep learning approaches.

Students of Far Eastern origin, like all others, have perceptions of what makes good teaching. Xiao and Dyson (1999) suggest that, for Chinese students, these include an in-depth knowledge of the subject, the use of effective and interesting teaching methods, an organized and clear presentation of material and an aptitude for encouraging further self-study. Thus it emerges from Chinese students' perspective that good teachers should be able to encourage and motivate self-study rather than participation in the classroom per se. However, there is some change emergent in Chinese universities. There has been an attempt to incorporate wider skills development and encouragement of greater participation in class discussion in Chinese universities, although there is inertia and traditional approaches still dominate (Lin and Deng, 1992;Cooper et al., 1994).

The learning preferences of students from the Far East contrast with the typical learning and teaching style used in UK universities. For example, Cortazzi (2002) suggests students from Chinese universities are used to 'learner-trained' teaching. Students typically recite, memorize and learn material and much of students' learning takes place during self-study. This approach to study is often misconstrued as 'rote memorizing' and taking a surface approach to the material (Watkins and Biggs, 1996;Prosser and Trigwell, 1999). However, this is clearly not the case as such students can be deeply engaged in the subject and they often complete vast amounts of self-study (Cooper, 2004). These students are simply not used to responding instantaneously and are often therefore reluctant to contribute to class discussions for fear of giving the wrong answer and 'losing face'. It is probably true to say that such students believe they can learn more from the teacher than from their peers (Cortazzi, 2002). This may lead them to believe there is little that can be achieved and gained through class discussion, despite our emphasis on the importance of debating key issues. The PRS enables students to answer questions anonymously. The lecturer reveals how many students have voted for each option and then there can be a debate about which is the correct answer. Students from the Far East are not used to this type of class discussion. Hence, the students' lack of responsiveness to the prompts for class discussion that I, and doubtless others who teach such students, have experienced in the past is not entirely surprising. It is also important to acknowledge that not all students 'learn in the same way'; each student has their own preference and this may change over time (Marriott, 2002;Marriott and Marriot, 2003).

What is the Personal Response System and how does it work?

The PRS is used to test students' understanding through a series of Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs). Each student is provided with a handset with buttons for use with MCQs to register their vote. The format of MCQs is flexible and it is possible to use MCQs with up to 10 possible answers. When I used the system, I limited MCQs to five possible answers to ensure questions did not take too long to read and attempt, allowing sufficient time for discussion and debate of student responses.

Following voting there is a wireless transmission of responses to portable receivers placed at the front of the lecture theatre. The receivers are connected to a computer with specific software that collates responses and displays results in the form of a bar chart. I displayed the MCQs on an overhead projector and projected the PRS visual display on to another screen at the same time. Prior to voting a screen of empty cells is shown on the visual display. As each student votes for a particular alternative, a cell is highlighted on the PRS display. It is possible to allow students to vote with 'high' or 'low' confidence, which provides the lecturer some idea of a student's certainty of their answer being correct. When the student inputs a confidence rating before voting this will be indicated by a different colour in the cell on the visual display. This confidence rating is also reflected in the graphical display of results.

There is a time limit for voting during which students have the opportunity to change their vote. (It is possible for the lecturer to vary the amount of time given per question and the number of changes students can make to their vote, depending on the difficulty of the question.) The lecturer asks the question and starts the clock on the programme. The time remaining to answer the question is shown on the visual display. A record of the number of handsets used to vote and the number of attempts made by each handset for each question is kept by the system. The lecturer may retrieve this at a later date. When the voting time is over, a bar chart summarizing the voting for that particular question is shown on the screen. This provides feedback to students and enables the lecturer to see what is well understood and the certainty of students' responses.

It is possible to use the system in either a named or an anonymous mode. In the anonymous mode, as students vote the cell is highlighted and the number of their handset is displayed within this cell. (Each handset has a unique number on the back and the students can see this number come up on the visual display screen as they vote.) Therefore students are able to identify their vote from the number in the cell, but this is not revealed to their colleagues. This anonymity may be particularly important to students not wanting to 'lose face' in front of their colleagues. Indeed, Cortazzi (2002) suggests that this anonymity is an important factor influencing Chinese students' participation in class discussion.

There is facility for the PRS to be set up for classroom testing where the students are allocated to a particular handset. This involves using the PRS in named mode. When in named mode, students have to be allocated to a particular handset. In named mode when the vote is registered, the screen cells change colour and indicate the name of the student answering. All the responses for the session are then saved in a file on the computer that may be accessed at a later date. The saved information also includes details of the time taken by each handset to answer every question, the number of attempts made for each question, and the confidence levels of the answers selected. It is clear that the system is very versatile and has the potential for significant benefits for class testing.

My experience

I used the PRS to ask checkpoint questions in one particular topic that students found challenging. This provided a basis to motivate students to engage with the material and check on the concepts and accounting method that had been discussed. I did not reveal the exact format of the class in advance and the use of this technology was a surprise. It was different from the usual format of lectures in this course, which is usually that of a traditional lecture interspersed with student tasks and the discussion of pre-set material or general class discussion. The use of the PRS does constrain the choice of MCQs to some short calculations or interpretative questions, although the format is adaptable to most, if not all, subject areas. I found it was possible to stimulate further debate by incorporating questions based upon the accounting research relating to the pension funding decision and factors influencing this.

The use of the PRS encouraged students to contribute more to the discussion. In addition, there were more questions of clarification asked following the MCQs. As a result of using the PRS, the level of student participation increased and there was more engagement with the subject matter and discussion than had been the case in previous years. I believe that the PRS has key advantages over conducting MCQs 'by hand'. Firstly it provides an accurate representation of the voting by students and enables a more complete view of students' perceptions and understanding to be reflected.

Secondly, the use of the PRS stimulated students' interest, but the greatest change in behaviour was evidenced with the students from the Far East. They were keen to contribute to discussions and ask questions after voting; the PRS appeared to enable them to overcome their inhibition and lack of confidence to contribute to class discussion, resulting in a more engaged approach to learning. Thirdly, I found it easy to learn how to use the PRS and it has very effective results for motivating students and generating a productive learning environment. It did not take students long to get familiar with the PRS technology; I used a couple of practice questions and demonstrated how to vote with 'high' and 'low' confidence, and all were successfully voting using the PRS. A distinct advantage of the PRS is that it allows students the opportunity to check their own understanding, and compare their performance against that of their peers. I found that the PRS has stimulated students' interest and concentration levels in lectures and created a fun and engaging learning environment.

The students' reaction: PRS questionnaire

At the end of the course, I asked the students (anonymously) to complete a questionnaire about the PRS. The PRS questionnaire contained five questions to which students could respond by selecting answers 1 to 5, where 1 indicates strong disagreement and 5 denotes strong agreement. In addition, students were given the opportunity to add any further comments on the PRS at the end of the questionnaire. The questionnaire was based upon Elliott (2003) and the results are shown in Table 1.

In response to the statement 'The PRS is easy to use', students voted with a mean of 4.45 and median of 5. This was expected as when I introduced the technology I gave students a couple of practice questions to enable them to become familiar with the technology. This is similar evidence to that obtained at the undergraduate level by Elliott (2003). Students voted with a mean of 4.25 and median 4.5 in response to the statement 'Using a PRS has increased my enjoyment of lectures'. This suggests that students found using the PRS was fun and contributed positively to the lecture environment. Finding a learning and teaching method which is fun to use is important for motivating all students to contribute to class discussion, particularly when the course material is challenging or complex. I have found that if students enjoy the session, they appear to be more receptive to technical issues and material that otherwise would have been difficult to teach. I firmly believe that the PRS played a vital role in helping students to understand the pension accounting topic on the course.

The student responses for 'Using a PRS has helped my concentration levels in lectures' had a mean 3.75 and median 4.0. This is lower than expected and contrasts with Elliott ( 2003) who received a mean (median) response of 4.3 (4.0) for this statement. This is perhaps due to the nature of the students on the course, who are typically highly motivated, although during long sessions it is still important to have a variety of formats to maintain student interest. 'Using a PRS has encouraged me to attend lectures' produced a mean (median) response of 3.65 (3.5). Again, this is not a surprising result and many students on the course commented that they were keen to attend all classes and the PRS would not influence this decision.

I found that for certain groups of students, particularly those from the Far East, participation levels were significantly increased by the use of the PRS. However, the final statement 'Using a PRS has increased my confidence on this course' led to a mean (median) response of 3.35 (3.0), which is lower than expected. This suggests that the students did not perceive this as a device for increasing their confidence. However, from the narrative comments, it may be surmised that the students found the PRS useful for clarifying their understanding of certain issues and they felt that they learnt more from participating.

Conclusions

Prior literature has focused on the use of the PRS to encourage participation and engagement with the lecture material at the undergraduate level. The

A C T I V E L E A R N I N G I N H I G H E R E D U C A T I O N 7(1)
32 Students were asked to respond to the statements on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is 'strongly disagree' and 5 is 'strongly agree'.

Statement

Responses PRS has also been used to streamline the assessment process. This article provides some preliminary evidence of the merit of using the PRS with postgraduate students, and in particular for overcoming problems of nonparticipation from certain students from the Far East. Further evidence needs to be collected based upon the use of the PRS at the postgraduate level. For example, the potential benefits of using the PRS for class tests are currently unknown. It would also be useful to investigate student preparation for classes in more depth by introducing more regular quizzes for material covered in preparatory reading. Liebler (2003) suggests that this helps ensure that students are adequately prepared for the class and highlights areas of potential weakness. It will also be useful to explore whether similar results would be obtained on other courses, whether related to this discipline or otherwise. Also, more in-depth analysis of the student reaction to this technology could be done through focus groups and a more detailed questionnaire.

The use of this system is pedagogically diverse: it may be used to assess prior knowledge, introduce new concepts, check student understanding of concepts discussed or re-emphasize certain concepts. It may also be used to check whether students have completed and understood the preparatory reading completed for the class. Questions may be phrased positively or negatively and material from most subject areas could be adapted to use the PRS. The clear advantage of the PRS is that it requires students to actively engage with the subject matter during lecture time, preventing a passive learning approach, often typical of the lecture setting (Synder, 2003). It also allows the lecturer to respond to students' needs by focusing questions on areas of difficulty and provides immediate feedback to the individual, and the student group as a whole based on both their own and relative peer group performance and understanding. Above all the system is fun to use and may, as a consequence, result in better student retention of key concepts and more success in achieving learning objectives (Marston, 2003). The disadvantage of the PRS is that it is not costless, although the cost depends upon the number of handsets and receivers required. It does involve additional time to set up and test the system, although I have found that it only takes about five minutes to set up the system and it appears to be quite reliable. Inevitably since this is computer-based technology, it could on occasion break down or fail, leaving the lecturer to be distracted from the main focus of the lecture (Marston, 2003).

Although the PRS will not suit all lecturers and learning environments, this study demonstrates that the PRS has benefits in terms of increasing and maintaining student participation and attention levels. If the PRS is used in anonymous mode it has the added benefit of giving students the opportunity to contribute to discussions anonymously, increasing their confidence to participate more widely in class discussions.

Table 1 PRS questionnaire results

 1

  from students

		Mean	Standard	Median
			deviation
	1. The PRS is easy to use	4.45	0.76	5.0
	2. Using a PRS has increased	4.25	0.97	4.5
	my enjoyment of lectures
	3. Using a PRS has encouraged	3.65	1.23	3.5
	me to attend lectures
	4. Using a PRS has helped my	3.75	1.21	4.0
	concentration levels in
	lectures
	5. Using a PRS has increased	3.35	1.31	3.0
	my confidence on this
	course
	Questionnaire is based upon Elliott (2003)

B E E K E S : T H E ' M I L L I O N A I R E ' M E T H O D

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dr Caroline Elliott for her assistance in reading the draft of this article. The author would also like to thank the Editor and two anonymous referees for their useful comments. Any errors or omissions from the text are my own.


Keywords: containing, developmental, problems, psychodynamic, relationship, responsiveness active learning

This article considers university staff's place in students' worlds from a psychodynamic perspective. It looks at 'studenthood' as a psychological stage, in which relationship to university and university staff is seen as being recruited into a personal developmental context. It sketches some psychodynamic background for understanding the role students unconsciously assign to staff, in terms of concepts such as transference, projection and containment. It makes connections between mechanisms for early infancy social learning about self/identity and the identity-establishing responses which students need at their stage too. It uses this understanding to explain some of the difficulties which can be experienced in responding to troubled students. We can extrapolate from the more difficult end of the spectrum to inform our general understanding about the dynamics of students' need for responsiveness and 'help', and the article finally briefly considers 'help' and 'problems' as usually being developmental rather than pathological agents of students' learning process.

Introduction

This article originated as a discussion paper for a Counselling Service-led workshop on the theme of 'responding to students' designed for a group of mostly academic staff at the University of Portsmouth. The aim of that paper was to facilitate, using a psychodynamic perspective, an understanding of some of the experiences staff might be having of students' impact, needs and demands. The staff group wanted help with their effectiveness in their own jobs, rather than to learn how to provide counselling, and a question they brought was how academic staff who are sensitive listeners and empathetic people can respond constructively to needy students without becoming enmeshed in escalating cycles of dependency which exceed the boundaries of, and sometimes undermine the function of, the academic-to-student relationship.

What follows is a description of 'studenthood' as a developmental stage, explained with reference to the psychological mechanisms of development of self in infancy, since it is suggested that these same mechanisms -underpinned by crucial dynamic relationships with caregivers -extend onward into later developmental processes especially at times of transition. It is suggested here, in line with O'Carroll (1997), Percy (2001) and others, that a student's relationship with the university can play a dynamic part in their present personal development. The article looks at studenthood from the stance of staff as participant observers: viewing the de facto existence of students' relationship with the university and with staff as both a useful litmus for what is happening in students' internal worlds and a vehicle for some sort of delivery of help. (It is worth remembering that most students, in spite of major challenges, weather and negotiate this stage without needing too much help.) Using psychodynamic concepts, the article goes on to consider the ways in which the personal 'baggage' carried by those students who do encounter major difficulties can obstruct the very relationships they turn to for help, posing questions about how, in spite of this, we can resolve such distortions enough to access the potential of the relationship to be helpful. This leads to the suggestion that this process of encountering and dealing with snags is in itself frequently a developmental rather than pathological one, lying at the very heart of the mechanism for healthy learning, whether psychological or academic. For this reason it is argued that a holistic and integrated approach to supporting students can have benefits which may be lost with an over-compartmentalizing 'specialist' approach.

This article does not seek to answer the question about what to do, but reflects on what is happening when staff feel their involvement in student difficulties to be uncomfortable. The students whom staff find the most challenging are likely to be those who themselves are feeling anxious, challenged and unable to manage their own difficult feelings unaided. The aim here is to introduce a psychodynamic understanding of the experience of becoming a student, and to suggest how this could be useful to staff in their interactions with emotionally needy students. In contrast to the more secure students, the focus is on those whose impact on us feels more difficult, needy, or anxiety-provoking. While the more secure will confidently absorb and manage their difficulties, tending to be good at dialogue, able to negotiate, able to accept compromise, able to see different perspectives, and able to solicit, receive and consider advice appropriately, the latter group will be on the lookout for help with managing or resolving their own inability to manage and resolve things. The request for help with a crisis of the moment serves as the carrier for a more unconscious plea for a deeper sort of help.

In responding, it is helpful to be aware of how someone's personal backdrop profoundly influences their present responses, so newlyencountered difficulties such as course problems, relationship issues, crises in their student houses, losses, illnesses or bereavement are all experienced partly in terms of a background history. The 'local' problem can often be a facet of a backdrop problem, and longstanding difficulties will often be re-expressed in unconsciously generated local crises, via a well-worn, circular, compounding response-style. It is important to understand how background and foreground may be connected, and to be aware that background can become articulated in the neediness which appears in some students' relationships with staff at university. A psychodynamic perspective offers some explanation of this process.

To clarify, 'psychodynamic' is a term applied to a model of counselling and psychotherapy whose theory and clinical practice broadly derive from psychoanalysis. In common with psychoanalysis, psychodynamic work understands someone's present in the context of their past and its influence on their development. It focuses particularly on relationship, including the way a client forms relationship with the counsellor, and places importance on an awareness of the significant part played by the unconscious and the involuntary in our sense of ourselves and our sense of other people. Like psychoanalysis, psychodynamic counselling maintains that some of our difficulty in onward growth and learning is due to our defensive intolerance of states of confusion, disintegration, and not knowing. If we can bear the difficult feelings it engenders in us (both as clients and as helpers), a process of unlearning and unravelling can precede fresh discovering of our capacity for change and growth. In psychodynamic counselling, students often find it helpful to have the opportunity to pause and learn to be less frightened by their sense of uncertainty and inexperience in an environment which tends to foster a goal-directed trajectory towards knowing, achieving and succeeding.

With its focus on the mechanisms of change, a psychodynamic framework is found by many counsellors to be useful in understanding and supporting students as they negotiate this major point of transition and change in their lives. This framework has found a natural place within many university counselling services in Britain, tapping into processes common to both academic and personal learning. Aspects of counselling theory and practice (psychodynamic along with other models) can also be applied in a wider context than counselling itself, via the other 'scaffolding' relationships in students' lives. Hence the workshops for academic staff which counselling services sometimes offer, and the genesis of this article.

Studenthood

Three ubiquitous underlying contributors to student stress are:

• Their role at university and their relationship with university in terms of autonomy/dependency. • Their developmental stage of life.

• Circumstantial transition and change.

By looking at these in turn, we may identify elements of the transition to studenthood which are easily overlooked, but which are yet central to an effective staff-student relationship.

Role at university -autonomy/dependency

University students are in an odd position, on the cusp between dependence and independence. A growing child increasingly takes on the task of regulating things for him-or herself, shifting into the driver's seat as she or he becomes better able to predict what goes on both inside and outside, what influence she or he has over things, how to 'work the controls', and also how to manage the discomfort of not having control over some major aspects of his or her experience. By the time we see students, they are moving into a new phase in which they need to establish adult autonomy and self-determination, and need to be let go of by parents and adults around them. Yet by enrolling at university students subject themselves to what the less secure can perceive as the paradoxical indignity of a rather infantilizing compliance with an institutional -or 'adult' -demand that they be independent thinkers. We expect them to depend on us to help them become less dependent. They engage the university to teach, guide, assess and support them, and yet they are at a stage where their dignity and self-esteem depend on feeling that they have authorship of their own lives. Students have both childlike needs and very adult needs in an odd and often uneasy combination.

Developmental stage of life

Compounding this situation is the stressful effect of late adolescence as a developmental stage. (It is worth also noting that, while most students' age places them in late adolescence, many adults returning to study also find themselves revisiting an adolescent-type experience, in which they feel incapacitated in some ways, defined as being in deficit and needing to be taught and assessed by more fully endowed 'experts'. Mature students can also be seen as returning to late-adolescent tasks, such as redefining identity, dealing with separation, or establishing autonomy which they feel still unresolved in themselves. This thought originated from comments of Jim Pye, Mature Student Advisor at Oxford Brookes University in discussion in 2002-3.) 'Infantile' experiences are revisited and reworked, but this time with the psychological and physical strength and size of an adolescent. Late adolescence and the transition to adulthood are a time when our psychic configurations seem to loosen again, enabling very rapid changes and adjustments to be made (which some suggest can be an almost psychotic experience -an idea discussed by Stokoe, 2004). Volatility, unpredictability, uncertainty, and shifting and intensely held beliefs and ideas, are all part of the flavour of this experience. There is confusion about what to think, who one is, whether one likes or dislikes aspects of oneself. There is confusion about reading other people's responses too. And there is an Alice-in-Wonderlandish instability in the size of one's self-esteem: one feels big one moment and very small the next. The individual is making a bid to assert a distinctive identity, to be special in her or his own right, and to have more control, more autonomy or a different balance in her or his connections and ways of relating with people. And most of the students coming to university are still at an age and stage where this process is very alive.

During this stage, people are understandably self-conscious, sometimes rather narcissistically self-absorbed, and touchy about, as well as in need of, feedback from others about who they are, what they are like, what their impact is and what their value is. Adolescents need mirroring reflective feedback about themselves, in order to consolidate a viable identity. This process echoes and continues the work of building of self which, some would argue (Fonagy, 2001) is the principal preoccupation of infancy. It is now understood that the human baby is genetically primed to exist, survive, develop and unfold within a powerful environmental attachment bond with principal caregivers -usually one or two parents (Gerhardt, 2004;Holmes, 1996). This bond enables a baby to develop her or his sense of a self, including styles of behaviour, by discovering reflections of himor herself in the responsiveness of caregivers. If such responsiveness is experienced as being contingently elicited by the baby and therefore readable as a sort of analogue of him or her, and if this is comprehensibly congruent with internal senses and sensations, the baby can use it to catalyse a secure, acceptable, continuous and viable self which integrates inside and outside.

Since outside and inside are never identical, a developmental task is also to differentiate him-or herself from her surroundings. The child has to hold him-or herself intact and accommodate the separateness and difference between self and other by managing an interface between the child's own sense of things and the messages he or she receives from outside. There is a defining friction between self and outside, and this is manifest again in the differentiating behaviour we know as 'adolescent rebellion'. The paradoxical 'I need you to know that I don't need you' reveals the still very asymmetrical dependency relation in which adolescents stand to 'grownups'.

Circumstantial transition

Understanding the importance of mirroring responsiveness, and an awareness that people's need for this continues in evolving form through childhood into adulthood, can help us to think about the impact on students of being plunged into an unfamiliar environment. Many students arrive at university in a strange town or city and for the first few weeks feel that they exist in a vacuum -they send out signals about themselves, and feel that these vanish into a void, leaving them devoid of the mirroring feedback they need. They are often amongst peers who also are very insecure and not in any state to be giving meaningful attention to others, so they can feel very alone in the crowd. Their geographical surroundings are new so they do not have the comfort of familiar worn paths and their own familiar reactions to these. They often feel that they are, in relation to their courses, completely anonymous until they have begun to get feedback and assessments. In large classes they are often not known by anyone, and sometimes no-one even knows their name. If anyone is left in a void for too long, it starts to have a paralysing and devastating effect on their functioning.

Students need to discover a sense of contingent influence on their new world. They learn about themselves, in this learning environment, by emitting signals in order to trigger these essential resonances which they need to take back in. They need to know how their world responds to them in order to know how to manage and respond to it -to know what their world wants them to be.

Baggage

Freud noticed how patients often experienced him, the analyst, as though he were someone else, often the patient's parent (see, for example, Freud, 1920: 291-292). Similarly, a student's experience of you sometimes has little to do with how you are, and they may be impervious to your responses to them if their relationship with you is affected by this phenomenon which Freud termed 'transference', whereby the person unconsciously distorts your reactions and perceives you as if you were someone else.

In this way students frequently come with baggage about authority figures -experiencing them as if they were teachers, parents or others from the student's past. This transference may be idealizing, demonizing, or anything in between. They may expect us to be pressurizing or critical, or at the other end of the scale, inattentive, indifferent, and with no expectations of them at all. Or they may try to make us into an idealized perfectly attentive and comforting parent whom they felt they never had.

Students expect to be judged by academic staff, by virtue of the teacherstudent relationship, and this resonates with pressures and expectations from the past. While students do have to submit themselves to academic scrutiny, they can be helped to disentangle this from the personal judgement, anxiety or criticism they so often fear. It is helpful for them to discover that we can be aware of them and think about them without worrying about them or needing things of them in the same way that their parents do or did. (This gets slightly complicated by the reality that staff do worry about whether we can get them through our courses!) As teachers and support staff, we can often be more effective if we can help them to differentiate us from the ghosts and spectres of their pasts.

Contagious anxiety

A common example of baggage which many people carry is the worry that their problem will be 'too much' for those around them, which is very often a factor in turning to a counsellor. Often parents' protective anxiety has diverted the focus of parental attention away from the reality of a child's difficulty and what can or cannot be done about it, and parents have been preoccupied instead by their own worries about their child. Some children come to believe that it's best to hide their problems, because they think parents will just 'fuss' if they try to turn to them for support, i.e. the child thinks the parent will be hurt by or dismissive of the child's problem, and unable to attend to it. Adolescents often feel this way. So their assumptions about available adult responses to them in turn flavour the way they communicate their needs, and at times become self-fulfilling.

If they have abandoned any attempt to address their pain through dialogue, people sometimes 'act out' their internal distress in behaviour such as self-harm, excessive substance use, eating difficulties, or by isolating themselves and cutting off everyone and everything. Students often tell us that they do this because they feel it would be useless or unsafe to express their feelings directly to anyone. The extreme behaviour has become the only way they know of expressing how they feel either to themselves or others: by showing rather than telling. Their distress often contains anger and despair -the behaviour often aims to give others the hurt they are feeling inside themselves, making others feel it too. 'Acting out' behaviour very effectively transmits (in psychoanalytic terminology this is 'projection') acute feelings into other people -who are then put in the position of having to deal with their own intense reactions, which may feel anxious, angry and panicky. But what people need when in these intense states, as much as possible, is a calm response which is not reactive or retaliatory.

Discovering that someone can know about their difficulty without being overwhelmed is in itself very helpful. Simply being known and known about may often be much more important than the advice or help which the knowledge may prompt us to give. This is because a student's discovery that you are not panicked or overwhelmed by his or her problems enables her or him to learn that maybe he or she can be less overwhelmed by them, and this frees her or him to get to know it better, and to mobilize his or her own coping responses and find his or her own solutions. So -paradoxically -wheeling out the supportive heavy artillery can actually be more alarming than helpful to someone who is already anxious about the scale of their disaster.

Again this is a continuation of a fundamental infancy developmental process, whereby intense sensations and impulses lead a baby to behave in emotive ways (a cry or a smile) which very effectively project intense (e.g. pleasurable or anxious) feelings into caregivers, who then have the job of not being overwhelmed or distracted by the feelings set off in them, but 'containing', making sense of, or in a Kleinian-Bionian framework, metabolizing the signals (see, for example, Mitchell and Black, 1995: 102-108) and responding appropriately. The baby thus enlists and engages the caregiver in a dyadic processing and regulating of the baby's states, which gradually become integrated into patterns that can be tolerated, recognized, thought about, coherently responded to, and represented in the minds and language of caregivers. As caregivers also reflect these thoughts, recognitions and responses back to a baby, the baby gradually takes them back in and builds them into a constellations of internal 'working models' (Bowlby, 1969). Through experiencing -in good circumstances -this process of securely and even pleasurably existing and having an impact in another's world, the baby develops internal tools for regulating his or her own states. Thus as well as getting things happening by her or his behaviour, what the baby gets back is both the happening things, and also some recognition and feedback about how she or he gets things happening, thrown in with the package like compound interest. When this mechanism is functioning well, there is a developmental trend towards self-regulation.

In asymmetric dependency relationships like parenting, teaching and counselling ones there is a perennial question about how to give help which can be used by someone to reduce their need for further help. We have to monitor whether help is being helpful or not, and it is sometimes difficult to balance the helpfulness of help against help's disabling spinoff. Students who can regulate and manage things well already will be better at digesting help and sorting out the wheat from the chaff for themselves. These will be people whom it feels easy and comfortable to help. People with more fragile self-regulatory resources will present as needier but also be more vulnerable, they will swallow without being able to chew, and so ingest things in less nourishing more toxic form -with easily upset psychic stomachs. They may seem to need more, but they may also react to their own neediness as a sign of inadequacy, and to any offer of help as a confirmation that we too see them as inadequate, thus compounding their passivity and stuckness. These needy students are often resistant to responsiveness, distorting their perception of its meaning, and so also need help to smooth out their experience of being offered help enough to take it in. For such people, our response has to enable a change and an acceptance of an unfamiliar view of themselves in interaction with others. We have to have the courage to challenge their status quo. Even so, sometimes people's capacity to use help is so disturbed that it becomes almost impossible to offer anything useful.

The bottomless pit

The discovery that someone will actually listen does sometimes open floodgates, and a student will become very demanding, almost as though any amount of attention and help is not going to be enough. They have not had a chance to get the thermostat on their self-regulation mechanism set up effectively. This may happen when the student still internally experiences the present as though it were inevitably repeating the past, perhaps in terms of a deficit of acceptance, safety or responsiveness which meant that their states never were very coherently regulated. Their dark-tinted spectacles make it impossible for them to perceive undistorted -or trust in the reality of -what you are giving. They remain highly alarmed by their own state, no matter what you do.

Sometimes you can come to feel that you are the only person that a student can be helped by, and that it is vital that you somehow get it right. The student's singling out of one rescuer whom they latch onto in this way is a sign that the student really is needy, but also unable to take in successfully what is being given, hence the escalating demand for more. Seeking out one willing individual may be a way of warding off anticipated wider rejection or criticism, making it hard for you to say 'no'. But this student is not effectively using the help, and the help is not reducing or resolving their sense of need.

When a student has invited you into this role, it is likely to be a signal of major difficulties which cannot be solved simply, and certainly not by any one person. What they most need to do is develop their capacity to take in, digest and use support more effectively. This might be a major aim of a therapeutic relationship with a counsellor, but people who have a very fragile capacity to take in help are often the ones who are most ambivalent about seeking or persisting with counselling or therapy, so the most chaotically troubled students are often in more contact with academic or hall staff with whom they already have a relationship. They may be extremely resistant to counselling, and occasionally need psychiatric intervention. But for the majority of students who need help, the outlook is much more positive.

Student 'problems': pathological or developmental?

'Past trauma' or 'developmental deficit' models for understanding problems have been criticised for being reductionist and pathologizing (Mitchell, 1988a). An alternative view is that problems, wherever we locate them in the spectra of dysfunctionality we choose to apply to them, are common or even ubiquitous, and except for very severe misfortunes or very selfdestructive personality disorders, problems frequently carry the seeds for onward change and growth. The developmental processes we are in the habit of assuming to have been stopped in their tracks by childhood environmental deficits or traumas are often very much alive in new incarnations in the present, so that, for example, a person's self-building mechanism is always, throughout life, sending out feelers for newly helpful reflective feedback.

The interpersonal environment plays a continuous, crucial role in the creation of experience. The earliest experiences are meaningful not because they lay down structural residues which remain fixed, but because they are the earliest representation of patterns of family structure and interactions which will be repeated over and over in different forms at different developmental stages. Understanding the past is crucial, not because the past lies concealed within or beneath the present, but because understanding the past provides clues to deciphering how and why the present is being approached and shaped the way it is. (Mitchell, 1988b: 149) While the constructing process may be particularly elastic and rapid in infancy, most of it does not stop there, and as the complexity of the mechanism develops, so does the array of uses it is put to. Adolescents are on the lookout for responses which they can use to expand their selfknowing and self-managing repertoire, at a time of life when horizons rapidly expand. It is usual for adolescents to be hungry for access to new sorts of responses from new adults in their world which are different from the patterns they have grown up with. Students take themselves to university, and they are looking for things not provided by the family world they have inhabited up to now. Since staff are the 'grownups' on their newly erected stage, staff will be players in their developmental drama, and we can expect that at times this will include dynamics which have the flavour of friction, grit, struggle, or the appearance of 'problems'.

Who should respond?

Academic staff want guidance about student support issues. Where does the limit of their responsibility lie? At what stage does student neediness become a 'welfare' issue which passes beyond their personal capacity or competence? Who does pick up where they leave off? How does institutional 'duty of care' really work (Harris, 2003)? In the context of widening participation as well as higher education fees, the climate of student needs and demands is shifting radically. Academic staff want recognition of the fact that their teaching role seems to be becoming simultaneously a welfare role, as students with complex needs increase in numbers while at the same time the onus to recognize and respond to student needs is increasingly taken on by institutions.

A proliferation of specialist support services is one response to this situation. But fragmented and parcelled off responses leave some needs, especially those around issues of self-integration, at risk of being unmet. Perhaps this is why we find ourselves puzzling at the fuzzy overlap between counselling, academic support, disabilities support, chaplaincy support or mental health intervention. Students' needs do not really divide vertically -those who have serious difficulties often turn to multiple sources of support.

Support at the 'point of delivery ' (Layer et al., 2002) via existing relationships with academic staff has many advantages. Students' use of mainstream academic guidance, teaching and support can have major therapeutic or developmental effects beyond the academic focus from which it may originate. The majority of students will get much more from their three or more years of relationship with academics than they do from specialist 'problem-oriented' support services (see, for example, O'Carroll's discussion of students' dynamic relationship to the institution, 1997).

A cybernetic systems analogy can be applied to the question of when a problem requires specialist help, rather than being resolvable from within the context in which it arises. There is a threshold between states in which input is used by the system to keep it within a stable range, and states in which input plus processing result in an unsustainable feedback cycle which takes the system on a trajectory towards self-destruction. Also unsustainable can be situations where a foreign toxic input is too damaging for the system to be able to recover unaided (a mosquito bite can be dealt with where a snake bite might be fatal). There comes a point where specific 'therapy' is called for -something corrective from outside the system, and sometimes even that is not enough. A rule of thumb question might be: can a student use one's offerings to keep their developmental momentum on track, or are one's interventions ineffective or even impeding?

Concluding comments

Teaching and support can be jointly understood as fuel for students' learning development in an 'emotionally literate' sense (Park, 2004), where academic learning is part and parcel of personal learning about how one works and how to work oneself, a process in which the capacity to make mistakes, get stuck, and be curious about one's problems -personal or academic -is a prerequisite for growth, and is intrinsic to the capacity for success.

It has been the suggestion of this article that a psychodynamic perspective can make a useful contribution to forming an integrated understanding of students' problems and need for help. It has described how a fundamental part of studenthood is the process of negotiating the interface between the self a student brings with him or her, and the novel signals, demands and meanings of this very new environment and stage of life. The academic process of being helped to learn takes place within the broad personal developmental process sketched out above, so academic staff, as well as support staff, become recruits into students' wider developmental task. Just as infants do at the earliest formative stages of life, students use responsiveness and feedback from the environment around them to manage, understand and grow from the challenges they engage in.

According to a psychodynamic view, 'problems' and 'help' within relationships function as the catalytic agents of needed change. Teachers, peers, and support staff all exist in relationship to students, and it is these relationships which -especially for the less secure -can powerfully and crucially contribute to someone's capacity to manage and metabolize the disorientation and discomfort which their learning and growth often entails. Simply to hold up a mirror to the as yet undiscovered parts of someone's self is not enough, unless we can at the same time help them to manage their puzzlement at what they see. If they can hold their nerve and bear to go on looking, they will begin to construct meaning from the disjunction between the self they thought they knew and the image they begin to recognize in the reflection they see in front of them.

  They need feedback about what they are doing, how they are doing, what they are like, and what others expect of them. But there are difficulties about feedback.

B A K E R : W H A T E L S E D O S T U D E N T S N E E D ?

Biographical note

 [email: amanda.baker@port.ac.uk]


The relation between self-regulated strategies and individual study time, prepared participation and achievement in a problem-based curriculum

Marianne van den

The relation between self-regulated strategies and individual study time, prepared participation and achievement in a problem-based curriculum M A R I A N N E VA N D E N H U R K Radboud University Nijmegen,The Netherlands

A B S T R AC T In problem-based learning (PBL) students are encouraged to take responsibility for their own self-regulated learning process. The present study focuses on two self-regulated learning strategies, namely time planning and self-monitoring. Time planning involves time management, scheduling and planning one's study time. Selfmonitoring involves setting goals, focusing attention and monitoring study activities. The aim of this study was first, to assess students' time planning and self-monitoring skills and second, to investigate how time planning and self-monitoring skills are related to actual individual study time, (un)prepared participation in the tutorial group and cognitive achievement. 165 first-year psychology students, enrolled in a problem-based curriculum, filled in a questionnaire (response 77 %) and their scores on two tests of cognitive achievement were used. Results showed that students who are better time-planners and who have better self-monitoring skills were more efficient in allocating their individual study time (spent less time on individual study), prepared more appropriately for the tutorial group meeting (although not significant [n. s.]) and achieved higher scores on cognitive tests.

K E Y WO R D S : achievement, individual study, problem-based lear ning, self-regulated strategies active learning in higher education

Introduction

A recent article on self-regulation (Boekaerts and Corno, 2005) concludes that there is no simple and straightforward definition of the construct of self-regulation. In general, self-regulation can be seen as a process in which an individual plans, organizes, self-instructs, self-monitors, and evaluates at various stages of the learning process (Boekaerts, Pintrich and Zeidner, 2000;Schunk and Zimmerman, 2003;Zimmerman, 2002). Comparing the major self-regulation models in education, each model emphasizes slightly different aspects of self-regulation (Pintrich, 2000). Winne (1995), for example, emphasizes the cognitive aspects whereas Corno (2001) emphasizes the volitional, and McCaslin and Hickey (2001) describe the sociocultural aspects of self-regulation. Nevertheless, all models of selfregulated learning in education share certain basic assumptions (Pintrich, 2000). One of these shared assumptions is that students construct their own meanings, goals and strategies based on the availability of internal or external information (for an extensive overview see Pintrich, 2000). In other words, students are active, constructive participants in their learning process. A second assumption is that students are capable of monitoring and managing aspects of their own cognition, motivation, behaviour and learning environment (Pintrich, 2000). Monitoring can be seen as the assessment of feedback information, managing has to do with taking control of learning tasks and activities. PBL is an example of a learning environment in which these assumptions are emphasized.

PBL and self-regulation

In PBL students are encouraged to take responsibility for their own selfregulated learning process. Independent and active learning is stimulated by discussing problems in small groups (Barrows and Tamblyn, 1980;Schmidt, 1983). A problem describes a set of phenomena requiring an explanation. The discussion provides unanswered questions, formulated as learning issues, which subsequently serve as a guide for independent learning. Students take an active role in selecting appropriate learning resources, planning their study time and monitoring and managing their cognitive study activities. This process is helpful in the development of students' self-regulated, lifelong learning skills (Barrows, 1985;Walton & Matthews, 1989). However, evidence that supports the effectiveness of PBL seems limited. Studies, including large meta-studies which examine the effectiveness of PBL consistently demonstrate that students following a PBL approach generally do not differ from their peers in conventional curricula on measures of knowledge, although they are more satisfied with their learning environment than conventional students (see, for example, Albanese and Mitchell, 1993;Colliver, 2000). Some evidence is found that students develop self-regulated learning strategies in PBL. Rankin (1992) investigated whether students in a problem-based curriculum become selfregulated learners, comparing four medical schools of which three were problem-based and one was conventional. The results showed that students in a problem-based curriculum made greater use of the library and of selfselected (as opposed to faculty-selected) reading materials, and felt more competent in independent information seeking skills. These findings are supported by other studies (Albanese and Mitchell, 1993;Blumberg, 2000;Blumberg and Michael, 1992;Evensen and Hmelo, 2000). Thus, it seems that when students are responsible for their own learning, they acquire autonomous learning skills essential for life-long learning.

However, it is not clear to what extent students demonstrate selfregulated learning strategies when they are relatively new to PBL and less experienced with the concept of PBL. When students are introduced to PBL they are faced with a new learning environment and whilst PBL has the capability to be an environment in which students can meet their own learning goals and interests, some students may be at risk of failure in such environment through the lack of self-regulated strategies. Van den Hurk et al. (1999a) showed that first year students are uncertain about what literature should be studied and confine themselves more strictly to the content of the learning issues but that in later years students study more according to their own learning needs and interests. When students are able to regulate their own learning process and when the instruction programme is not heavily externally regulated, there is no friction in the learning process of students (Vermunt, 1995). However, in the case of low self-regulation, and given that PBL is by definition a loose study environment, there is a real danger that students low in self-regulation encounter loose teacher regulation. Symptoms of friction are, for example, negative effects on the learning process or learning outcomes (Vermunt and Verloop, 1999). Therefore it is important to know how students with different levels of self-regulated strategies participate and perform in PBL. Do they differ in using the available individual study time? Do they differ in their preparation to participate actively in the tutorial group and finally how do they differ in performing on the final test of cognitive achievement?

PBL and learning outcomes

In a problem-based curriculum 40 per cent of the total scheduled learning time is allocated for instruction and 60 per cent for individual study (Van der Vleuten et al., 1996). Instruction in PBL includes tutorial meetings, lectures and practicals. Individual study includes searching, studying and preparing literature for the tutorial meetings. Students are expected to spend time on preparing for the next tutorial meeting (reporting and elaborating on the literature) in order to test hypotheses and share knowledge to synthesize the information acquired from their individual studies. Dolmans et al. (1998) andDas Carlo et al. (2003) found that, according to the views of students, interaction contributed substantially to the success of the tutorial group. Interaction was strongly related to elaboration which means that students were able to answer each other's questions or explain the material to other group members. Lack of interaction and lack of elaboration can occur for several reasons. A situation in which lack of interaction in the reporting phase may occur is, according to De Grave et al. (2001), when students have all read the same materials from the same book during individual study. Another reason can be a lack of preparation. Van den Hurk and colleagues (1999b) showed that if students prepare extensively, for example by making summaries to explain the text in the next tutorial meeting, the depth of the reporting in the group will increase. However, practical experience shows that students often participate in tutorials without any preparation. As a result there will be less interaction and elaboration and this will affect the learning process and the learning outcome. Less research however has been done on what causes the lack of preparation. This could be related to the students (lack of) self-regulated learning skills.

Academic achievement related to self-regulated learning has been the focus of research by Pintrich and Schrauben (1992) and Ablard and Lipschultz (1998). Studies show that students who are high achievers use self-regulated learning strategies to a greater degree than low achievers (Risemberg and Zimmerman, 1992). Pintrich and Garcia (1991) found that students who set goals, plan effectively and monitor goal progress are more likely to achieve higher on knowledge tests than students who fail to engage in these activities. Zimmerman (1994) found that time planning and management training helped students to better self-regulate their use of study time and in turn improved their results.

The study described here focuses on two self-regulated learning strategies important in PBL, namely time planning and self-monitoring. Time planning involves time management, scheduling, planning, and managing one's study time. Self-monitoring involves setting goals, focusing attention and monitoring study activities. The aim of this study is first, to assess students' time planning and self-monitoring skills and second, to investigate how time planning and self-monitoring skills are related to actual individual study time, (un)prepared participation in the tutorial group and cognitive achievement.

Method

The study was conducted in the first year of the Bachelor programme at the Faculty of Psychology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. The Faculty of Psychology uses PBL as its educational approach. Students work in small group tutorials, in which they are presented with problems in cognitive and biological psychology. The first year of the Bachelor programme starts with training in PBL, allowing students to practise skills needed for this student-centred teaching method. This first week is followed by two course periods of 7 weeks each. In each course period students take two courses at the same time (an 'A' and 'B' course). These two periods are followed by a 4-week period in which only one course (for example a statistical course) is offered. After this third course period, again two 7-week course periods follow, each with two different courses (again an 'A' and 'B' course), concluded with another 4-week course period with one course.

During the course periods in which two courses are followed at the same time, students have three tutorial group meetings per week: two meetings for course 'A' and one meeting for course 'B'. The other week they will have one meeting for course 'A' and two meetings for course 'B'. In the seventh week of the course period, course 'A' will have the last meeting on Mondays and the exam (block test) on Wednesdays. Course 'B' will have its last meeting on Tuesdays and the exam (block test) on Fridays.

Material

Prior to the construction of a questionnaire, 4 first-year students were interviewed to gain more insight into which factors students consider most important in regulating their individual study. Based on their responses a questionnaire was developed. Students were asked to give their opinion on each item using a 5-point Likert scale ranging from (1) 'totally disagree' to (5) 'totally agree'. In this questionnaire four items assessed the extent to which students feel capable of managing their individual study time. This factor is called 'time planning'. An example of an item is 'I feel I have sufficient individual study time to study the literature for both courses'. Three items measured the extent to which students feel capable of monitoring their cognitive learning strategies shifting from one PBL course to the other. An example of an item is 'During my individual study I feel capable of monitoring the content of the learning issues'.

The questionnaire contained two additional questions. In the first question students had to estimate the mean time they spent on individual study per week. Several studies (Ericcson et al., 1993;van Til et al., 1997) have shown that this method provides a reasonably valid indicator of the actual time spent. Comparisons of time estimates in retrospective reports and diaries have revealed that respondents generally overestimate the time spent in retrospective reports such as questionnaires. For the present study this means that the actual time spent by students was probably less than they reported. In the second question students had to mention exactly how often they participated in a tutorial meeting during the two courses without any literature preparation. Cognitive achievement was measured by using the scores of two block tests. The major goal of the block test is to assess students' knowledge about the block contents and to provide the students with information on their achievement in relation to the course objectives. The test consists of 40 multiple choice questions, the final score being expressed on a scale of 1-10. An example of a multiple choice question within the domain of learning and development is:

The ability to successfully cope with one's own emotions and those of others is known as: a) theory of mind b) internal working model c) emotional competence d) strange situation.

Procedure

The questionnaire was administered to all first-year Psychology students (N = 213). Students were all about 18 to 20 years old, and their prior education was broadly at the same level. All had been exposed to a mainly teacher-centred approach prior to enrolling in the university. Students filled in the questionnaire after they had finished two courses: (A) 'Learning and development' and (B) 'Visual perception'. Both courses started in the eighth week of the academic year of 2002-03. In total 165 students filled in the questionnaire (response 77 %).

For each student a mean score of the items measuring both factors (time planning and self-monitoring) was calculated. To facilitate data interpretation, the mean scores of these factors were categorized into four groups: very low (score lower than 2), low (score between 2 and 3), high (score between 3 and 4) and very high (score higher than 5). The number of students in each group was comparable. For each group the following were calculated: mean time spent on individual study (average of the two courses A and B), prepared participation in the tutorial group (average of two courses A and B) and mean score on the block test (average of two courses A and B).

Analyses

To assess the construct validity of the two factors measured with 7 items factor analyses was carried out. The constructs in the model yielded the two predicted factors. To assess the reliability of the clusters, Cronbach's Alphas were computed. Differences between students' scores in each factor on individual study time, prepared participation and test-score were analysed using ANOVA.

Results

Results in Table 1 show that the mean scores of time planning and selfmonitoring were rather low, which means that students experience difficulties with time planning and monitoring their study activities.

Figure 1 gives the mean time spent on individual study for four groups; students scoring as very low, low, high and very high ranges on each factor. Results in Figure 1 show that the higher the students score on the factor time planning the lower their individual study time (varying from 13.2 hours per week to 7.2 hours per week). The scores between these groups are significant [F(3, 162) = 4.05, p < .009]. For the factor selfmonitoring this pattern is about the same [F(3, 163) = 3.00, p < .018].

The higher the students score on the factor self-monitoring the lower their individual study time (varying from 11.9 hours per week to 9 hours per week).

Figure 2 shows that students who have a low score on time planning, as well as on self-monitoring, most often participate in tutorial meetings without preparation. Neither the factor time planning [F(3, 162) = 2.01, p > .23] nor the factor monitoring [F(3, 162) = 0.797, p > .52] showed any significant differences between groups for being unprepared.

In Figure 3 a trend is shown that the more appropriately students planned their time the higher their score on the block test. However, these

VA N D E N H U R K : S E L F -R E G U L A T E D S T R A T E G I E S 161

Conclusion and discussion

The aim of this study was first to assess time planning skills and selfmonitoring skills of first-year students with little experience in PBL. Results from this study suggest that students experience difficulties in time planning and monitoring their individual study activities in a problembased curriculum. Most of these students have experience of a teachercentred way of learning. In contrast, PBL requires students to take more ownership over how and when learning takes place. The learners are the focus and the teacher plays an important but peripheral role as a tutor so there is less direct explanation from teachers, and less guidance. Students must learn to study independently (for example, they must define which learning goals are important and which literature will be relevant to study the learning goals). That the results of the present study show that a majority of the students experience difficulties in managing their learning activities does not provide any evidence that the students who did badly on the PBL course would have done better in another teaching context, for example, in a classroom where a more teacher-centred approach is adopted.

An expansion of the study to investigate this question would be very interesting.

Although this study makes clear that students experience difficulties in time planning and monitoring, it is in general not clear how students can develop self-regulation skills. Some conceptualize self-regulation as a general disposition that students bring into their studies, whereas others conceive of self-regulation as a property of the person-in-situation and attend to domain-specific self-regulated strategies that develop through experience within and across situations. According to Pintrich (2000) students can learn to be self-regulated and that self-regulation is a way of approaching academic tasks which they learn through experience and selfreflection. Weinstein and Mayer (1986) believe that 'good teaching teaches students how to learn, how to remember, how to think, and how to motivate themselves ' (1986: 315). However, Biggs (1999) argues that there are certain limits to what certain students can achieve, and these are beyond the teacher's control. However, good teaching practice can narrow this gap as 'good teaching is getting most students to use higher order cognitive level processes which the more academic students use spontaneously ' (1999: 4). These studies indicate that regulation is not a general disposition but can be learnt. Further research should focus on how intervention programmes can be designed to help students regulate their time and focus in the service of goals. Another explanation for the differences between students in applying self-regulating skills, for example planning time and self-monitoring, is that students start their academic career with different backgrounds. For example age and prior educational experience can be crucial factors.

VA N D E N H U R K : S E L F -R E G U L A T E D S T R A T E G I E S
The second aim of this study was to investigate how time planning and self-monitoring skills were related to actual individual study time, (un)prepared participation in the tutorial group and cognitive achievement. This study suggests that students who are better time-planners and who have better self-monitoring skills seem to be more efficient in allocating their individual study time (require less individual study time), prepare more appropriately for tutorial group meetings (although n.s.) and score higher on cognitive tests. Planning time and monitoring study activities seem to be important regulation skills; they are also difficult skills to use according to most students.

Students who are highly skilled in monitoring their study activities seem to benefit more than less skilled students in terms of efficiency and cognitive achievement. This finding is in agreement with the results of the study by Pintrich and Garcia (1994) who found that students who set goals, plan effectively and monitor goal progress are more likely to achieve higher on cognitive tests than students who fail to engage in these activities. Therefore it is important in all learning environments in which active learning is required to offer study programs in which students learn how they can be skilled self-regulated learners. To assist students in being effective in their learning strategies students must also become aware of alternative ways of approaching different learning situations (McKeachie, 1988). According to Collins et al. (1989), this awareness comes about naturally when students learn from their tutors (apprentice) how to think about academic work, to reason through problems, to question assertions and present arguments, and to use activities such as time planning and monitoring. In other words, as teachers model and explain their thinking in the variety of tasks and activities they expect students to perform, students can eventually take over.

Limitations and future research

There are several widely validated assessment instruments for measuring self-regulation strategies. Examples include the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ;Pintrich et al., 1993) and the Self-Regulated Learning Interview Schedule (SRLIS; Zimmerman and Martinez-Pons, 1988). The advantage of these instruments over the use of the non-validated questionnaire developed for use in this study is that these include not only time planning and monitoring but also motivation and volitional components, such as effort management, organizational strategies and persistence at difficult or boring tasks. The questionnaire used in this study was developed in the context of PBL, and although it appeared to be reliable, it was not validated. Further research, using these instruments, is recommended. Furthermore, a combination of instruments would be preferable over a single instrument for assessing self-regulation as a process (Boekaerts and Cono, 2005). A further limitation of this study was that all the findings derived from student opinions. Although students are in an optimal position to witness and comment upon many of the investigated factors, their primary role is to learn, not to be observers of the processes in which they are engaged. They are not necessarily critical observers of these processes at this stage of their development. Therefore, additional studies of the issues investigated here are clearly needed. A desirable strategy in a future study, for example, would involve direct observations, by skilled observers, of the way in which students participate in the tutorial group. Differences between students in applying selfregulating skills, for example planning time and self-monitoring, may in part be attributable to the fact that students start their academic career with different backgrounds. For example, age and prior educational experience can be crucial factors. Although the students varied little in age and educational background, one of the limitations of this study is that specific baseline data about the various levels of prior learning experience, motivation or intelligence across the cohort of students involved was not gathered. Our future research will investigate these and other factors which may impact on self-regulated strategies.

Some suggestions for future research can be drawn from this study. First, the study focused on self-regulated strategies of first-year students. Future research should look at the further development of self-regulated strategies over the years of study. In addition, how process of the development of such strategies in the new, more (social) constructivist learning environment in HE today takes place. In other words learning environments should be investigated in terms of the affordances and constraints they provide for the development of self-regulation skills. For example, it should be investigated in what way social interactions in the tutorial group (for example, in PBL or other collaborative learning environments) may be helpful in the development of self-regulation strategies and how these interactions can improve prepared participation given that in such groups peers have the opportunity to model and discuss their own learning strategies. Second, more intervention studies must be conducted to determine how students progress in their capacity to apply effective learning strategies. It should be investigated what interventions might be effective in changing ability in self-regulation, efficiency and cognitive achievement. Third, further investigation is needed into the dynamic process of development of selfregulation strategies.

Figure 1 Figure 2

 12 Figure 1 Mean hours spent on individual study for both factors, split up for students scoring very low, low, high and very high on each factor

Figure 3

 3 Figure 3 Mean scores on block test factors, split up for students scoring very low, low, high and very high on each factor

Table 1 Mean scores (Mean), standard deviation (SD), number of students (N) and Cronbach's Alpha (Alpha) of the variables

 1

	Variable	Mean	SD	N	Alpha
	Time planning	2.5	0.8	165	0.79
	Self-monitoring	2.8	0.8	165	0.77
	Individual study time	11.1	6.3	163
	Unprepared participation tutorial (tot. 20)	2.7	2.6	164
	Block test (score 1-10)	6.0	1.4

p < .008]. The more appropriately students monitor their study activities and the more they apply themselves, the higher the block test score.

  They developed a general study and learning skills programme for students and a Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI) to provide students with feedback before and after the course. Students with learning difficulties and insufficient study skills especially benefit from these interventions in terms of improved cognitive achievement. Hofer and Yu (2003) designed an undergraduate course in order to teach college students to be self-regulated learners. They investigated training effects and concluded that a course on self-regulation (including cognitive and motivational components) can be helpful for students.

Biographical note

Her research interest is in the area of learning processes that take place in instructional environments that promote active learning in higher education. Address: Radboud University Nijmegen, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Pedagogical Sciences and Education, P. O. Box 9104,6500 HE Nijmegen,The Netherlands. [email: M.vandenhurk@pwo.ru.nl]