The Road Less Travelled? Pathways from Passivity to Agency in Student Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This qualitative study examined fourth-year undergraduate students’ responses to reflective writing prompts and journal entries related to their practical experiences in two capstone courses, both based in SBL/PBL pedagogies. We examined their ‘strategic’ approaches to learning that make engagement with subject matter and learning processes more instrumental than meaningfully grasped and applied. Three levels of analysis were used in a recursive process of description, reduction, and interpretation, and the results were added to our previous work examining student responses to reflective activities that foster deep learning. Our provisional conclusions are that strategic learners are invested in a mastery relationship with subject matter that makes grade procurement the evidence of this mastery and this shifts their focus to product over process as an obvious consequence. This disconnect from process leads students to an unhelpful relationship with formative assessment and feedback. They tend to wrestle with the formative elements and see them as mini summative assessments or quasi final products, rather than the necessarily perplexing engagement that leads to the imaginative generation of possibilities and recursive building and refining of ideas and processes. Our future research will focus on environments that encourage more comfort with mistakes and contingencies as learning opportunities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".