The Problem
How often do teachers lament apparently basic failings in the independent learning work of students that seem to recur year after year, irrespective of the topic? Still, when taking a long-term perspective, unless a conscious attempt is made to probe the problems in some detail, the danger emerges that teachers rely too much simply on impressions they have gained over time, rather than on systematically gathered data. In 2016, keen to adopt a more rigorous approach to the exploration of student shortcomings, I set about analysing the work of Sixth Form candidates pursuing the Extended Project Qualification (EPQ). The inquiry led me to collect evidence over three years so, in total, I scrutinised the efforts of candidates from 2016, 2017 and 2018. I had worked closely with all these students as their EPQ teacher, supervisor and co-assessor.
Youngsters undertaking the EPQ are required to conduct, over a period of many months, an independent learning study on a subject of their own choice. They document their research processes in a diary (or logbook), write a 5,000-word essay and deliver an oral presentation. The evidence I used in my investigation consisted of:
- my own reflective evaluations of my taught sessions with the students
- notes that I had compiled during one-to-one tutorials with them
- observations I had made while watching them work
- my analyses of the completed essays
- my appraisals of the final presentations and the answers students gave to questions that were asked by the audience
This article sets down the key deficiencies I identified in EPQ work across different disciplines and by students in different cohorts. In keeping with the central focus of Digital Learning Magazine, I will restrict my discussion here to issues that arose in the electronic environment.
Quality of Information
The most frequently occurring weakness in the candidates’ essays lay in their use of poor calibre source material. Ideally a balance of computer-based and traditional materials should be struck, but there was, overall, an excessive reliance on electronic resources, some of which were websites whose quality could not be assured. Many students spurned academic journal papers, considering them too demanding and overwhelming, and my efforts to encourage the youngsters to exploit a paper’s abstract in order to direct them to suitable content within the main body of the article met with limited success. Still, at least the students avoided using posts on social media.
As part of an extensive EPQ teaching programme that has drawn praise from the Board’s moderators, all the candidates were trained in evaluating information and had been presented with a choice of frameworks that would help them do so. Moreover, each learner had been made aware that 20 per cent of EPQ marks are awarded for the effective use of information resources. Yet, in several cases, the web pages consulted were anonymous and undated. This raised problems when the source came to be referenced. I afford EPQ candidates the option of citing according to the Harvard system or a numeric approach, but when such fundamental details as the author and date of creation/updating are missing, in practice there is little alternative than to apply the latter convention.
Use of Surrogates
I have become concerned in recent years at how many students resort to taking information from monographs entirely on the basis of the material they have been able to access via Google Books. One girl referred to a treatise that I had read myself and gave a misleading impression of the author’s position by dealing with only one aspect of it. When I drew her attention to the fact that her summary needed to refer to the totality of the author’s argument, she acknowledged that it was possible that she had omitted key elements because only certain passages of the work had been available to her via Google Books and she had just relied on those. Later, I explored the prevalence of this practice with other students and became aware that several more EPQ candidates had employed the same approach, in effect using the material made available through Google Books as a surrogate for the complete work. In extreme instances, the student misrepresented what the author was saying, although usually it was simply the case that the context in which the writer set their ideas was missing.
