Learning to Learn series of lectures conducted in OWeek 2000 attracting over 480 students. Shimmy New workshops targeting critical thinking skills for first year and postgraduate students. Shimmy Publications of new independent learning resources for students. A joint paper was presented in December 2000 at the AUTC forum on the assessment of the writing skills of first year Arts students. This project, ongoing since 1998, has involved 3 comparative studies investigating the influence of assessment method on student learning.
Results show differential learning approaches and perceptions according to assessment method.
Of particular importance are findings that students are more likely to employ surface learning approaches when preparing for their examinations and deep learning approaches when writing their assignment essays. In each study the open-ended responses reveal a clear preference for assessment by assignment essay rather than examination and provide interesting insights into students' attitudes to their assessment tasks. The findings and implications of these data were presented at the AARE conference in Sydney in December 2000. A published paper will appear in the conference proceedings in 2001. Shimmy Evaluation of Student Learning Facilitated by a Web-based Program on Writing a Lab Report Analysis of questionnaire data and literacy assessments of a small sample of student lab reports in biology showed that students who did the online program achieved slightly higher marks than those who did not.