KEYNOTE ABSTRACTS Peter Bouhuys University of Maastricth, The Netherlands Developing human potential to learn Self-directed learning, lifelong learning, student-centered education and learning to learn have become popular concepts in higher education and in society. How successful are we in promoting effective learning in Higher Education? The role of educational institutions and curricula has changed considerably, but the rate of change hasn?t been impressive in view of the increased role of science and technology in our society. In the presentation three main areas will be reviewed: The training of study skills and metacognitive skills, educational approaches which claim to foster better learning, such as problem-based learning, and finally the broader impact of the knowledge society on learning and the learner and on educational institutions and teachers. George Brown University of Nottingham, Great Britain Improving assessment and evaluation in higher education The terms of 'assessment' and 'evaluation' are used differently in Europe and North America. In this address the European usage will be adopted. 'Assessment' will be used to refer to the processes of estimating the worth of student learning for a variety of purposes including diagnosis and feedback. 'Evaluation' will be used to refer to the processes of judging the quality of assessment systems and degree programmes. This address will focus primarily upon ways of improving the assessment of student learning. It will consider some approaches to evaluating the quality of assessment systems but it will not consider in-depth the wider issued of quality assurance and programme evaluation. The address is divided into three parts. Part one will outline some guiding principles derived from empirical research and models of assessment. It will be demonstrated that the systematic application of these principles can improve the assessment of student learning. The second part of the address will consider the strength and potential weaknesses of methods of self assessment based upon learning diaries and portfolios. It will be argued that reflection per se does not necessarily improve learning or performance. The final section of the address will explore some approaches to improving the evaluation of assessment systems. Ronald Giere University of Minnesota, USA Critical thinking in higher education For twenty years there has been a movement in the United States to foster the teaching of critical thinking in higher education. The initial promise of the movement has not been realized. I will begin by exploring some reasons for this relative lack of success that may apply in the European context as well. My conclusion is that maybe the best we can do is to promote the discussion of general methodological aims and strategies within our own specific disciplines and, if possible, in more general areas of inquiry. I will illustrate this approach by drawing on my own field of the philosophy of science. This example has implications for critical thinking regarding all of the sciences, and not only in the context of higher education but also in the culture at large. Hannele Niemi University of Helsinki, Finland Moving horizons in higher education The moving horizon illustrates the complexity of our present life. The presentation focuses on drawing a picture of ongoing trends and tensions in universities. Changes on the societal, cultural and personal levels are explored. What high quality teaching and learning is in higher education during recent times and in the future, is a vital question. The learning concept is changing towards knowledge creation, collaboration and dialogue. New forms of learning and learning environments demand new skills and revisions in teaching and learning cultures and the development of evaluation methods. The important question is what quality means for different learners and stakeholders. Universities, and higher education, have an important role to play as institutions of civilization within a society. Facing a moving horizon, they must have a critical function as well as the capacity to create new knowledge and innovations with economic, social and cultural purposes. How these different aspects can be combined should be reassessed. In changing contexts, the students need learning environments which facilitate their growth towards empowerment, capacity building and self-directness and also enable them to grow as ethical intellectuals who have the readiness to think critically and work to enhance human life. Ference Marton University of Göteborg, Sweden The University of Learning Various attempts have made to enhance the quality of teaching, examination etc. at universities around the world. Introductory courses for new staff, student evaluations, staff development, systems for quality assurance are some of the means that have been used. Curiously for universities, the question has never been asked to what extent we have the necessary insights to seriously improve the pedagogical function of universities. The knowledge base we would need is actually missing. Such knowledge would help us to understand how people learn about and make sense of various fields of enquiry. Such knowledge has to be developed within the different fields of inquiry as specialisations into the human aspects of those domains. A focus on the human aspects of different disciplines would not only enhance shared understanding between teachers and students and between universities and the world around them, but also between the disciplines themselves. Alan H. Schoenfeld University of California, Berkeley, USA Understanding and Teaching "Thinking Mathematically" Knowing mathematical facts and procedures is only a small part of thinking mathematically. Other vitally important aspects of mathematical thinking and problem solving are: o problem solving strategies (rules of thumb for making progress when you are "stuck"); o "control" skills (having a degree of self-awareness during problem solving that makes you an effective and efficient problem solver); and o "having a sense of what mathematics is all about" – developing a mathematician's point of view, being able to engage in mathematics rather than merely knowing about it. For many years (in the U.S. at least!) mathematics instruction focused almost exclusively on subject matter mastery. That narrow focus had some disastrous consequences. This talk outlines the story, describes the spectrum of mathematical thinking, and provides some examples of what students can do when they are provided the opportunities to do some real mathematics in their classrooms. Henry Tirri University of Helsinki, Finland Intelligent systems for intelligent learners The accelerated progress of information technology touches every aspect of the modern society. It is rapidly changing the ways scientific research is performed, provides new tools for learning, and even challenges the traditional ways of scientific thinking. All these aspects will affect higher education. Unfortunately the effect of the developments in information technology are usually discussed at the quite superficial level, where its main importance is seen as an enabling technology for new tools providing mostly quantitative improvements in learning environments (e.g., information retrieval on the WEB vs. library). In this talk I argue that the effect of information technology, in particular the field of intelligent systems, will be much more profound. Human individuals and societies are decentralized and self-organizing learners acting in environments dominated by uncertainty, thus the research in "science of uncertainty" and decentralized computing will lead to a qualitatively new phenomenon: a convergence where the result can be characterized as an interplay between an intelligent computing system and an intelligent human learner. Johan von Wright University of Helsinki, Finland On the function of learning What is the function of learning? The answer suggested by the pragmatists was that learning is the most important coping mechanism of the human being, both from a biological and a social point of view. Some consequences of this view for education will be discussed, especially (a) the characterization of the learning process in terms of pragmatic (knowledge-based and action-oriented) constructivism, (b) the role of active transfer, and (c) prerequisites of self-regulation. INVITED ADDRESS ABSTRACTS Geoffrey Norman McMaster Universtiy, Canada The epistemology of clinical reasoning: Perspectives from philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. Research in clinical reasoning has been pursued from a variety of perspectives over the past twenty years, A number of views have been advanced ranging from the idea that the clinician is a sub-optimal Bayesian probability computer, to the perspective that routine clinical reasoning is a simple matter of pattern recognition, not unlike recognizing dog or cat. This paper places these perspectives in a larger context, drawing from historical writings in philosophy regarding the nature of a concept through to contemporary findings in neuroscience exploring how concepts are stored in the brain. Keith Trigwell¹ & Michael Prosser² ¹University of Technology, Sydney, ²La Trobe University, Australia Relations between learning environment and learning approach: a case study in an engineering course Engineering for Sustainability is a new subject in an undergraduate engineering course which has undergone significant restructuring and redesign. The subject was developed with a focus on some of the desirable academic, professional and personal attributes of engineering graduates rather than on specific technical engineering content. It aims to introduce students to concepts of sustainability, critical thinking, advocacy, academic reading and writing in engineering and an awareness of the diverse ways of thinking about engineering. Such subjects are still unusual in engineering courses. This paper describes the subject?s curriculum aims, learning experiences and assessment, and the contexts within which the subject was offered. It aims to report on the relations between this environment as perceived by the students and the approaches to learning adopted by those students. The study will be presented in the context of an extensive literature on relations between learning environment and learning approach, and between students prior experience and their learning outcome (summarised in Prosser and Trigwell, 1999). Jan Vermunt University of Maastricht, the Netherlands Expert learning This paper is about expertise in learning. First, expertise in learning is analysed in terms of the components that are essential for expert learning: what people do to learn, their conceptions of learning and related phenomena, their motives for leaning, and interrelations among these learning components. Secondly, the question is raised how expert learning develops from childhood to adulthood. Consonant and dissonant patterns of development are identified. Next, the issue of how the development from novice to expert learner can be fostered and impaired by the learning environment is discussed. Finally, implications are derived for the design of learning environments in higher education that aim to foster the development of expert learning. Simone Volet Murdoch University, Australia Researching and improving learning and instruction in higher education: Significance of diversity in research-practice dynamics The body of research related to learning and instruction in higher education is extensive but conceptually, ideologically and methodologically diverse. In this presentation, it will be argued that although diversity is potentially a richness, it is not perceived as such for a number of reasons. First, the overall research effort has remained fragmented with little cross-fertilisation across domains of research, research paradigms and research players. Second, a-priori value judgements placed on different types of knowledge and knowledge production have inhibited any effort to combine and integrate complementary types of research. Third, the pervasive lack of culture of research on learning and instruction in disciplines 'other than education' has prevented the development of theory-based experimental field research related to the teaching and learning of complex bodies of knowledge. A conceptual framework for researching and improving learning and instruction in higher education will be presented. The framework recognises that valid knowledge about learning can be produced by different key players and that different types of knowledge not only complement but reciprocally enrich each other. The framework identifies a bi-directional continuum of research-practice dynamics and highlights the conceptual value of diversity, dynamic interactivity, cross-fertilisation and reciprocity of research-practice influences.