With the aim of building student agency as leaders of learning, a collaborative team at Griffith University has initiated the project, Empowering leaders of learning through the science of learning: Collective knowledge building and co-design with student leaders and educators. This project explores how students-as-learners and students-as-mentors interpret, translate, and communicate the science of learning with the purpose of supporting learning literacy for learners and educators.
The ‘science of learning’ refers to the body of research devoted to understanding learning. This often occurs in many disciplines (e.g., psychology, education, learning sciences, neuroscience), and across many levels of analysis and applications (labs; classrooms) (e.g. Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan, & Willingham, 2013; Weinstein, Madan, & Sumeracki, 2018).
Often, the science of learning is used by educators to support their learning and teaching practice. In this project, we aim to empower students with the science of learning, thereby strengthening students’ metacognition about learning, an important aspect of students’ educational wellbeing (Morehead, Rhodes, & DeLozier, 2015; Tavakolizadeh, Yadollahi, & Poorshafei, 2012). This will enable them to transform this knowledge into practical learning strategies as contextualised by their experiences as learners and as student mentors.
It is anticipated that this collective knowledge building will shift students from passive consumers to active producers and facilitators of knowledge translation. This will be evidenced through co-creation of research-informed resources to support learning (as active producers), and through research-informed peer mentoring (as active facilitators).
Dr Sakinah Alhadad, Dr Jude Williams, Rhys Cooper, Nathan Seng, Chris Dell