The Churchie Research Centre, located at Anglican Church Grammar School (Churchie), has developed an Australian-first science learning program called A Learner’s Toolkit. It aims to equip secondary schools with tools and strategies to assist students to become lifelong learners.
A Learner’s Toolkit was developed at Churchie in response to the school navigating significant changes under the new Queensland Certificate of Education. This new curriculum incorporates external, standardised assessments based on six months to two years of content, whereas the previous school- based examination and assessment system relied on
a combination of internally designed and moderated assignments, projects and term-based exams (often based on only eight to 10 weeks of content). The short- term nature of the old assessment system supported students using low-utility strategies and cramming for exams.
Many students rely on low-utility strategies when preparing for exams, such as highlighting, re-reading, summarising materials and cramming. To become better lifelong learners, students require a more informed understanding of the nuances of different learning and study behaviours and strategies. They need to understand how different behaviours and strategies aid or hinder the construction of deep understanding, as well as which behaviour or strategy to apply and when to apply it.
A Learner’s Toolkit aims to provide students with six high-utility strategies that are more efficient and effective—they deliver more significant learning gain:
- Read It uses the cognitive process of active reading, which is the purposeful construction of meaning from text.
- Retrieve It involves recalling content from your long- term memory over time to build understanding.
- Space It is the purposeful distribution of study over a defined period.
- Jumble It, also known as interleaving, involves changing the order of what is studied, which requires multiple processing strategies to see the links, similarities and differences between concepts.
- Visualise It, or dual coding, involves arranging and organising text and accompanying images to create a meaning that is easier to comprehend than pictures or text alone.
- Connect It, also known as elaborative interrogation, involves explaining and describing ideas with many details and making connections among the ideas you are trying to learn.
In 2018 A Learner’s Toolkit was designed in partnership with The University of Queensland (UQ) Science of Learning Research Centre (SLRC) and Professor Mark McDaniel from the Washington University in St Louis. Churchie partnered with the UQ SLRC research translation Partner Schools Program (PSP). With the support of the UQ SLRC team, A Learner’s Toolkit was implemented with the Churchie pedagogical framework and practices. The partnership with Professor McDaniel responded to initial evaluations of the toolkit’s impact on students. The program employed a more nuanced training approach for students, informed by the Knowledge Belief Commitment and Planning (KBCP) framework devised by Professor McDaniel and his colleague Dr Gil Einstein (Furman University). The KBCP framework is built on the assumption that the sustained self-regulated use of any strategy requires four components: acquiring knowledge about strategies, belief that the strategy works, commitment to using the strategy, and planning of strategy implementation.
The KBCP framework provides a new perspective on building student capacity to select and then employ the correct strategy appropriate to the context or subject. It extends beyond common interventions that focus on knowledge about specific study strategies and instead primes students to believe that the chosen strategy is effective, works for them and is worth the effort in use. This direct experience of success overcomes the illusions of competence that low-utility strategies engender.
After four years, the A Learner’s Toolkit program has successfully produced impactful results for Churchie students. Students in Years 7 to 10 complete a journey through the Academic Skills and Mentoring (ASM) curriculum where they learn a variety of study skills from A Learner’s Toolkit and develop themselves as independent learners. A longitudinal project followed the progress of students who entered Churchie’s Senior School in 2018, the first cohort to benefit from A Learner’s Toolkit. At key points, students were measured on their beliefs about study and preferred study methods. The results showed that students successfully adapted to secondary schooling, completing the middle years with accurate understandings of their study skills and equipped with more effective study strategies. As the cohort undertook explicit training in A Learner’s Toolkit strategies, their confidence increased, and they were able to study more effectively and consistently than previous cohorts at Churchie.
Following its successful implementation at Churchie, A Learner’s Toolkit is now available for other students and schools to benefit from this exciting innovation. The Churchie Research Centre will launch its open access A Learner’s Toolkit study behaviours and strategies training program to all interested schools in 2022. It will be freely available to any school, anywhere, to support teachers to embed high utility study strategies into their teaching practice to positively impact student study behaviours.
To find out more about A Learner’s Toolkit, visit www.alearnerstoolkit.com.au. To learn more about a Churchie education for your son, visit www.churchie.com.au