Keith Trigwell

A phenomenographic approach to research into learning can be appropriate for exploring the approaches geography students adopt in their learning. This resources article provides a brief description of phenomenography. The essence of the approach is that it takes a relational qualitative perspective that aims to describe key aspects of variation in the collective experience of phenomena, rather than focusing on the individual experience. Phenomenonographic research is a major undertaking but is valuable in providing insights into how students understand the content they are learning and can be used to evaluate students' variation in all forms of experience within a learning and teaching context.

Background. The Approaches to Teaching Inventory (ATI) was developed to explore the relationship between students' approaches to learning, and teachers' approaches to teaching, in the physical sciences in higher education. It is increasingly being used in other contexts. Aim. To analyse the factor structure of the ATI. Method. Confirmatory factor analysis. Sample. Inventory responses from over 1,000 university teachers, from 4 different countries and a wide range of disciplines, experience, and teaching level (year of students' study) were used as the sample. Results. Cronbach's alpha values of the 2‐scale inventory were acceptable for scale reliability, but not for the 4‐scale structure. A good fit to the intended 2‐factor structure was obtained by confirmatory factor analysis. Both Information transmission/teacher‐focused and conceptual change/student‐focused scales had well identified intention and strategy subscales. Conclusion. The ATI has been developed as a relational indicator of 2 dimensions of approaches to teaching. It is not intended for use in gathering a full, rich self‐report of teaching, or in non‐relational contexts. However, it has now been used in a number of different contexts, including different subject areas and cultures. There is evidence in this paper that in those contexts its factor structure is, in the main, consistent with the original design. This analysis also suggests ways that the ATI could be improved.

The Approaches to teaching inventory (ATI) is now being widely used as an instrument for formally monitoring approaches to teaching. A lesser‐known use is as a stimulant for discussion among groups of teachers to raise awareness of the variation in qualitatively different ways of approaching teaching. The phenomenographic origins of the ATI are consistent with these uses in academic development, both formative and summative. Following this increase in use, the validity and utility of the ATI were reviewed in 2003 using data from over 1600 teachers. We now summarize the outcomes of this review and report new results of the tests conducted on an expanded ATI with a further 318 academics. While the revised ATI maintains a focus on the qualitative variation in two key dimensions of teaching (a conceptual change/student‐focused approach and an information transfer/teacher‐focused approach), the number of items in those scales has now been increased. This version enhances those features of the original instrument that helped make it a useful trigger tool in ‘phenomenographic pedagogic’ discussion. Both phenomenographic pedagogy and the development of the ATI are discussed in this paper.

This paper reports an analysis of qualitatively different ways in which teachers experience change in their understanding of subject matter they have recently taught. In this exploratory study, interviews with 31 ‘typical’ teachers from a range of first and second-year university subjects revealed that 20 reported no experience of change in their understanding. The reports of the 11 teachers who did experience change were used in a phenomenographic study from which five qualitatively different categories of description of change were constituted. These range from the experience of change as the adding of unproblematic knowledge to what is already known, to questioning the theoretical framework of the subject matter. The relation between the experience of change in understanding and the experience of teaching and learning for the 31 teachers was also explored. It was found that the teachers who did not experience change in their understanding were more likely to experience teaching as the transmission of knowledge, and the teachers who experienced change in their understanding, and who experienced that change as the re-interpretation or questioning of knowledge, were more likely to experience teaching as changing or developing students’ conceptions.

Although the term ‘blended learning’ is widely used, this article argues against it. Two arguments are advanced. The first is primarily philosophical, although it has several pragmatic implications. It proposes that ‘blending’ either relies on the idea of dichotomies which are suspect within the context of learning with technology or else becomes ineffective as a discriminating concept and is thus without purpose. The implication of this is that the term ‘blended’ should either be abandoned or, at the least, radically reconceived. The second argument proposes that learning, from the perspective of the learner, is rarely, if ever, the subject of blended learning. What is actually being addressed are forms of instruction, teaching, or at best, pedagogies. The implication of this is that the term ‘learning’ should be abandoned. The second half of the article attempts to redeem the concept of blended learning by arguing that learning gains attributed to blended learning may have their explanation in variation theory. It offers a new way to conceptualise what is being ‘blended’ that is theoretically coherent, philosophically defensible and pragmatically informative. The article concludes by setting an agenda for further work in this area.

A variety of models of the scholarship of university teaching have been advocated since Boyer first proposed that the scholarship of teaching be considered as one of four forms of scholarship associated with university practices. These models have evolved from theoretical and empirically based analyses, and have as their core value concepts as diverse as reflection, communication, pedagogic content knowledge, scholarly activity and pedagogic research. They tend to take aspects of scholarship rather than of teaching as their starting points, and to give priority to the construction and critical review of the knowledge base for teaching. This article focuses on a model of the scholarship of teaching that specifically includes students and it is argued that representing the scholarship of teaching as a reflective and informed act engaging students and teachers in learning is supportive of the aims central to the project of developing a scholarship of teaching.