This paper advocates the use of repeated applications of inventories of approaches to learning as an appropriate technique for the evaluation of educational innovations. The method is particularly appropriate for innovations aiming to introduce more meaningful forms of learning as this is a dimension measured by these instruments. The paper gives case studies showing how the measure can be used for innovations introduced in naturalistic settings. There is a voluminous literature on educational innovations. Different teaching methods, models of teaching, the latest educational media, new curricula, alternative assessment methods and many other forms of innovation have been proposed as leading to better teaching and improvements in student learning outcomes. For such claims to be believed they need some form of evaluation. The traditional approach to seeking evidence is to use the science-based experiment and control method. This approach, though, has been subject to criticism and suffers from limitations where the aim is to introduce an innovation into a genuine educational setting, rather than to conduct a laboratory-type trial. The first difficulty lies in ensuring that the experiment and control are genuinely comparable. Educational media comparison studies, for example, have been criticized on this basis by a

In this paper we explore issues surrounding university students ’ experiences of statistics drawing on data related to learning statistics as a compulsory component of psychology. Over 250 students completed a written survey which included questions on their attitudes to learning statistics and their conceptions of statistics. Results indicated that most students were studying statistics unwillingly. A minority of students acknowledged that statistics was necessary for psychology, but statistics was seen by many as boring or difficult. Students ’ conceptions of statistics were analysed from a perspective developed from phenomenography (Marton & Booth, 1997). The aim of phenomenographic research is to describe the qualitative variation in the ways people experience or conceptualise a phenomenon — in this case students ’ interpretations of the topic statistics. The conceptions fell into five categories of description including: statistics as decontextualised processes and algorithms, statistics as a tool for professional life and statistics as a way to self-development and enhanced perspectives on our world. Excerpts from interviews with selected students indicate the diversity of experiences in learning statistics. The perceptions of two teachers flesh out the learning and teaching environment. The findings raise challenges for supporting the learning of “occasional users ” (Nicholls, 2001) of statistics in higher education.

Teaching accounting and learning accounting- the different worlds of introductory accounting: the value of phenomenographic research in accounting education

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