Differences in Learning as a Function of Differences Between Hierarchical and Sequential Organisation of the Content Taught

This dissertation, "Differences in Learning as a Function of Differences Between Hierarchical and Sequential Organisation of the Content Taught" by Pui-man, Pakey, Chik, 植佩敏, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of thesis entitled Differences in learning as a function of differences between hierarchical and sequential organisation of the content taught Submitted by Chik Pui Man, Pakey for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong in May 2006 Since the turn of the century, there has been a growing concern in scholarly discussions with the interplay between the teacher, students and content in the classroom, and its impact on improving teaching and learning. This study aimed to explore such interplay by describing the qualitative differences in the ways in which teachers handle the content of a specific topic and by relating these differences to the qualitative differences in students' ways of understanding the content taught. This study focused on six Chinese language lessons taken from a two-year research project. The six lessons were matched into three according to the topic being handled. Each pair of matched lessons thus formed a unit of data collection. For each unit, data were collected by video-recorded classroom observation, audio-recorded post-lesson individual interviews with the teachers and the students, and written tasks completed by the students immediately after each lesson. The teacher interviews were conducted to capture the objectives and strategies adopted by each teacher. The purpose of the written task and the student interview was to examine the students' perception of and capability in using what was learnt in the lesson. All of the recordings were transcribed verbatim for analysis. In analysis, this study employed the theoretical framework of variation iii and focused on the "object of learning" to describe the lessons from the teacher, student and theoretical perspectives. Comparisons were made between the objects of learning depicted from the three perspectives within and between the matched lessons. One important finding was that in each lesson, the "lived" object of learning described from the student perspective was found to be a function of the "enacted" object of learning from the theoretical perspective. The enacted object of learning, in turn, built on the "intended" object of learning from the teacher perspective and took shape with what was brought to students' focal awareness by the "patterns of variation and invariance" enacted during the classroom interactions on the content. The comparisons between the matched lessons further revealed that the differences observed in the lived object of learning were related to the differences between the hierarchical and sequential organisation of the content taught in the matched lessons. Specifically, it was found that the different organisations of the content taught afforded different levels of functioning of the enacted patterns of variation and invariance. This then contributed to two different senses of discernment, namely the discernment of part-whole-context relationships and the discernment of specific aspects/features. This study therefore provides an empirically grounded analysis of how teaching can be related to student learning, by focusing on what and how the content of a topic is organised during the teacher-student interactions in the classroom. The structural differences in teaching and their close relationship with the differences in student learning observed in