8. Overall Conclusions

8.4 Learning Strategies

On all three packages involved in this evaluation, we have seen examples of student approaches to the learning task which have challenged the view that students have existing study mechanisms which can be utilised and are appropriate. Students often appear to see the CAL experience as a highly individualised activity (unless guided to work in groups, students were rarely observed to do this spontaneously) and to see the CAL as a prescribed "auto tutor" rather than a tool which they can control. Unless the guidance given to students was very specific (for example a structured exercise), then most students adopted a linear approach to the material. The flexibility within each activity has been understood and utilised, as many quotations included in this report have shown, but within a package as a whole students have, in the main, failed to adopt a flexible approach or to assess for themselves the areas that they require to study. The high degree of suggestibility shown by students, mentioned earlier in the study on Nomenclature, implies that we cannot assume students will know how to approach these materials and that teachers need to talk about the different possible strategies students could adopt or tutors would like them to adopt in studying them.

Strategies for improving student study methods need not rest with the tutor. Some modifications to the packages themselves could be considered. The PCCAL packages studied in this report have not contained any overviews of the material beyond the main menu structure. An overview might be an appropriate way of assisting students to select suitable areas for study and rejecting those that they are already familiar with. Another approach built-in to the packages, might be to begin packages (this may not be suitable for all, but perhaps for revision purposes) with a pre-test, to act as a diagnostic tool to enable students to be more targeted. Whilst it is accepted that in some cases, tutors may wish students to go through all the material, by encouraging more adventurous study habits, students will be more likely to explore other packages and gain some benefit from this increasingly large bank of CAL resources that students have access to.