CONTRASTING VARIATION IN LEARNING: SOME ASPECTS OF THE CHINESE PARADOX

This was the title of a Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA) seminar delivered recently at Curtin University by Professor Erik Meyer, Director of the Student Learning Research Group and Teaching Methods Unit at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

Professor Meyer described the results of some recent research involving engineering students at Imperial College in London, focusing on identifying and measuring individual differences in the way the students approached their learning. His research indicated that some first-year overseas students, particularly those from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore, performed extremely well using learning strategies that might be termed 'surface approaches' to learning, i.e. they were successful by using rote learning techniques. This is the 'Chinese paradox', which Ference Marton (who will visit UWA in October) noted when studying the approaches to learning of successful Chinese students.

The research indicated that students from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore at Imperial College memorised for understanding, or memorised what they had come to understand, and combined this with using logical steps for problem solving and focusing fairly narrowly on the course material. Many of these students were what Professor Meyer called 'strategic serialists' - extremely motivated by 'collecting' marks.

Professor Meyer's research adds further to the existing literature on student learning, and his detailed analysis of the approaches to learning reminds us of the complexity of the learning process.