Podcast Episode 2 (transcript)

2: ‘Predicting undergraduate students’ learning from a lecture: The role of self-control, motivation, and mental effort’ with Dr Robin Owen

Professor Tom Crick talks to Dr Robin Owen about ‘Predicting undergraduate students’ learning from a lecture: The role of self-control, motivation, and mental effort’. https://doi.org/10.16922/wje.24.1.4 

TC: Hello and welcome to the Wales Journal of Education podcast. I’m Professor Tom Crick from Swansea University, and I’m one of the editors of the journal. Today, I’m joined by Dr Robin Owen from Liverpool Hope University. We’ll be discussing his article, entitled ‘Predicting undergraduate students’ learning from a lecture: The role of self-control, motivation, and mental effort’. Robin, thank you very much for talking to us on the podcast today.

RO: Hi, Tom, and thanks for having me.

TC: Pleasure, thank you. Can you just tell us a little bit about yourself, your academic career and your role at Liverpool Hope University?

RO: I’m originally from Austria and I lived there until the age of ten. My father is Welsh, and I’ve been living in Wales now for about 17 years, which means that I’ve learnt Welsh, being immersed in North Wales and having also studied at Bangor University through the medium of Welsh. When the coincidence and opportunity happened of doing educational research, and getting that published in a Welsh journal, especially one that’s Open Access, I thought, bingo! This is everything coming together quite nicely, which was really cool. My academic career was that I initially wanted to become a secondary school physical education teacher. I was absolutely determined to do this. Nothing, absolutely nothing was going to stop me. So, 12 hour shifts in the library to make sure I get a first class degree to ensure my place on a PGCE were pretty normal. But I made a mistake and worked a little bit too hard, which then opened the avenue for a PhD. I thought, I might as well do a PhD. It’ll be funny being a doctor and a PE teacher. That was my thought. But then I got stuck in academia, and now I’m a lecturer at Liverpool Hope University. I was also a lecturer for two years at Bangor University in North Wales, and I specialise in skill acquisition. The trend of teaching, pedagogy and just learning in general, has been very prevalent throughout my career. It’s something I love, and it’s been great to be involved with this journal.

TC: Thank you, Robin. There were some interesting themes which I’m sure we’ll pick up today in part of our discussion. That point around the prominence and importance of bilingualism or multilingualism and particularly that theme around physical education, physical literacy, health and well-being, which we know are key issues both educationally but certainly societally. I’m sure we’ll explore that a bit more as we go through the work. I’m keen to hear the underlying rationale for this work. How did this come together? What was the motivation for doing this study?

RO: I would like for the exact motivation for the very beginning of this journal article to be a little bit more attractive, almost, but it started a little bit mundane. As part of my career in academia and wanting to have the door open to become a lecturer, I did a PGCert in Higher Education as part of becoming a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, which, in the United Kingdom, as you probably know, is quite a desirable tick box to have when wanting to become a lecturer, or keeping that door open, as it was for me at that point. In the end, I wanted to do a research study which didn’t just fulfil the criteria of this PGCert. I also wanted to do something I was genuinely interested in and I thought would genuinely create some sort of useful knowledge I was really interested to find out myself. Having been a very nerdy student as an undergraduate has made me a little bit curious about what makes some people learn a lot from lectures and some people learn much less and how might individual differences, state differences, trait differences and psychological aspects, all part of that umbrella, affect our ability to learn from lectures. That was the topic I came to in the end with the PGCert and also then, this research study.

TC: I think that’s really interesting. I know some of the requirements we have as academics. There are things we have to do, the sort of things you do at the start of your career. That motivation is interesting for the foundation of some of your research, particularly the big issues around learning and pedagogy and, certainly in the higher education context, around motivation and how does that impact and affect the learning process. I suppose it would be really useful to get… I think that’s a really interesting rationale and motivation for the work. If you can give us the classic elevator pitch, the short focus of the article? This is for everyone who’s going to read this article, as this is obviously a full-length journal article. I’m keen to hear that snappy introduction of the main focus of the article.

RO: Most of the people who are listening to this have probably attended a lecture or lectures. In some lectures, they learnt a lot and in some lectures, they probably didn’t learn much at all, even though they might have wanted to. For me, I’ve always been quite curious... OK, I’m often personally quite motivated to do things, to achieve certain things, but then I fall at the final hurdle or maybe at much earlier hurdles, so to speak. The starting point or factor is, how does our motivation to achieve in a course, and consequently to learn from a lecture, how does that motivation affect our actual learning from a lecture? Those are the two key variables which probably form the foundation of this research study. Motivation to learn from a lecture, and then the actual learning. The two main moderators, mediators, the affecting psychological factors associated which might control this relationship between motivation and actual learning that we looked at in this study, are mental effort and state self-control. Firstly, in terms of mental effort, OK, if I’m in a lecture and I’m motivated to work hard, I’m probably going to invest more effort into the lecture. If I invest more effort, I pay closer attention to the lecturer, try harder to make better notes, I try harder to really understand and think deeply about the knowledge being presented to me, then I should, in theory, learn more. Then I thought to myself, and also looking at some of the literature, sometimes we’re quite motivated, sometimes we want to invest the effort, especially if we feel this motivation before the actual action or lecture. But then, once we start the lecture, once we start whichever event it is, we might run out of steam pretty quick. We might run out of effort pretty quick. This might be, and our study suggests this is the case, that we need self-control to actually turn our motivation into mental effort to learn from a lecture. This self-control, as a concept, is our ability to overwrite and control intuitive, automatic habits, almost. Our habit as a person is to conserve energy, to have a happy, easy life and just enjoy things. Sometimes, us lecturers don’t make that particularly easy in lectures, especially if we’re teaching statistics, for example. So, if we have high self-control available, it seems to be, based on this study, that we are more likely to be able to keep on investing effort in line with our motivation to learn from the lecture.

TC: Thanks, Robin. That’s really interesting, both in a societal sense, about people’s ability to do the things that they like to do, and that self-control, avoiding procrastination. That’s particularly pertinent, having worked in higher education for a long time as well. What that looks like for different types of students and how you support and facilitate that. Just to drill into the details a bit more around the type of data you collected for this article, I see this is primarily focusing on final year undergraduate students. Can you talk a bit more about the type of data you collected for this article and how that provided the foundation for your wider analysis and conclusions?

RO: One thing I’m particularly proud of with the study is, in my opinion, its reasonably high generalisability. This was not a separate experimental lecture that was optional or not related to the programme. Instead, we were quite lucky. It was also quite a job, going through the ethical process and approval and so on, to run this sort of study with a real cohort who will be assessed on this sort of content to increase the generalisability of the study. In the end, it was a correlational study because it probably wouldn’t have been ethical to manipulate the learning environment too much from what is normal within students. We gave questionnaires on motivation, mastery approach and a couple of other dimensions, mental effort during and after the lecture. We assessed state self-control, and also at the end, we gave participants a test on the lecture content to assess immediate learning from the lecture. How much they actually take away come the very end of the lecture. So, I’m quite proud that it was all in a cohort for whom the content was truly relevant and representative of the importance they would normally have with lectures, which I’d like to think is a real strength of this study.

TC: I agree. It’s an interesting point you note about the ethical approaches for this. Obviously, that’s important for educational and social science research in general, but particularly stuff in this wider space around how do you construct an appropriate experiment but also ensure that it’s ethically appropriate and not only passes university processes but actually provides a firm foundation for the work you’re doing. Again, there are a few things I’d like to pick up as we head through this discussion. What do you think are the most important findings of this research? You mentioned the generalisability, which I think is really important, not just in a higher education context but its transferability to other educational contexts. It’s not disciplinary-specific, because I know this is with final year undergraduate sports coaching students. So this is invariant to the types of disciplines and also perhaps the level of study of the students?

RO: I would like or hope to think so. One potential confound is that these were final year students, which of course increases the relative importance of any lectures they attend, potentially, because in the UK, normally the third year is the most valuable one towards the final degree classification. So, the exact effect in earlier years, in the university first year for example, might be slightly different, but in terms of, just like you’ve pointed out, topics and also in terms of the general level of study at university, hopefully those results are quite generalisable.

TC: I think it is interesting and, unsurprisingly, there is a wider context to this work. This is the Wales Journal of Education. We care about what’s happening in Wales, but actually there’s that wider international lens. It isn’t just about research in Wales. But I guess there is that point around the applicability to the broad educational context in Wales, both from early years all the way through to post-compulsory. I suppose, clearly, the Covid context is there. It’s interesting looking at that thing around motivation and what does that mean because we’ve had these disrupted two and a half years. Where do you see this work? Does it have a Covid lens? Is it interesting what this looks like as we start to slowly emerge into a new post-Covid abnormal? Do you think this has an impact on the way in which we should be constructing learning, teaching and assessments?

RO: Yes, absolutely. Quite unsurprisingly, and that’s why it’s a fantastic point you bring up, Covid really complicates things. Although I am conjecturing and guessing a little bit, the exact effect of Covid, in terms of either learning remotely and over the computer, for example, for students, or learning in person, how exactly these effects manifest might be quite individualised. For example, the self-control resources of an individual. They seem to be quite heavily affected by the autonomy they perceive of their environment, so it’s possible that individuals who get the choice between attending a lecture remotely and streaming it or attending in person, that might give them the autonomy that no matter in which setting they attend the lecture, be it in person or remotely, having had that autonomy actually increases their self-control. It might be that a next step for this line of research might be looking at individual factors and preferences. Similarly, motivation seems to be influenced and affected by the relevance of content that’s perceived and also by perceiving interactiveness, for example. Gamification has also been linked to motivation. How exactly those different aspects might manifest can be different between online environments, which have become pretty normal in Covid times, and in-person environments. But I think, overall, actually – and again I’m just conjecturing – but my own personal experience from having taught online and actually starting my lecturer career online, is that it has forced me to look for more unique ways to interact with students. Inherently, my initial opinion was that online lectures can be very dry and even less engaging, potentially, than in person. I’m sure many lecturers might share this opinion. So, it has forced me to try and look for new methods to engage students, new technologies in particular – such as Mentimeter, for example. There are loads of other technologies available to increase the interactivity, the gamification almost of my lectures, to increase that motivation and hopefully, overall, increase learning.

TC: I think that’s a great general point. We’ve seen the massive disruptive impact that Covid-19 has had on education across all settings and contexts, and both the challenge and disruption of what that’s meant for routine business in the sense of the mode of delivery and the rapid emergency remote teaching and the rapid shift to online. But actually, what that means is that Covid-19 is a catalyst for positive change. Actually, what are the things we can stop doing? Does it afford us the ability and empower us to be able to fundamentally redesign the way that we might approach learning, teaching and assessment? I think some of this work is really interesting around the academic and pastoral side. How do students learn, particularly in an HE context, and what kind of support do we need to think about engagement, to think about developing grit and resilience and to provide the kind of structures and frameworks in place? Where do you see this work developing going forward? What are the next steps for this work?

RO: The cool thing is, it adds to an already big body of literature on both motivation’s effect on learning and educational contexts, and also self-control’s influence on learning and educational performance. So, it fits in quite nicely, and hopefully, it will show that, actually, when looking at relations between different states or traits of psychological aspects on actual learning, we need to look at interactions, perhaps, a bit more. Quite often, to some extent, in some research, I see relations or different effects and differences between certain isolated variables, which in one sense is good research for establishing cause and effect. But quite often, just as we talked earlier, the individual perceptions, individualisation, and the wider effect of many different variables – you mentioned resilience, for example – that can also fit into this line of work. It can all get very complicated very quickly. I hope, or my dream – quite blue-sky – but I hope that in 30 years’ time, we’ll have understood the basic relationships between psychological variables and educational performance and learning well enough that we can move towards a more holistic, maybe more multi-model understanding and approach to evaluating learning and the factors affecting it.

TC: Thank you very much, Robin. I think that’s a great point to end on, particularly as we’ve seen the start of the Curriculum for Wales from this September in a compulsory education setting, and actually what that looked like in the context of having health and well-being as one of the six Areas of Learning and Experience and that much more holistic approach, not only to learning and teaching, and education and learning more generally, but actually what do we want to achieve from national curricula, compulsory education, what the expectations are from that learning experience and that life course from 5 to 16, and post-compulsory. Diolch yn fawr iawn. Thank you very much, Robin, that’s great. Hopefully, you’ll be tempted to find the article online. All you need to do is visit the Wales Journal of Education website. As Robin alluded to earlier, the journal is a platinum Open Access journal, it’s bilingual, available in English and in Welsh. It’s available to read at no cost and can be downloaded as many times as you want. Thank you very much for listening and thanks very much to my guest, Dr Robin Owen. This is the second episode in a series of new podcasts for the journal, where myself and the other editors will be discussing research that’s been published in the Wales Journal of Education. You can subscribe in your favourite podcast app or listen on our website. Thank you very much.