•internalisation of knowledge, skills and dispositions

Vermunt and Verloop’s categorisation of learning activities

Description and intended use

In his doctoral research project, Vermunt developed a theoretical framework for categorising approaches to learning, especially in higher education (Vermunt, 1992). He built the framework around cognitive, affective and metacognitive (regulative) dimensions. He drew on several lines of research dating back to the 1970s, including Flavell’s ideas about metacognition (e.g. Flavell, 1979). In 1999 Vermunt and Verloop use the same dimensions to present what they call a taxonomy or categorisation of learning activities. Their treatment of the affective and regulative dimensions is rather more developed than in Vermunt’s earlier work (1996, 1998), while cognition is treated in very much the same way. Vermunt and Verloop hope that their formulation will be used to guide theory and research into learning and instruction and will not prove too simple or too complex for that purpose. The ‘taxonomy’ is not presented as an ‘ultimate solution’ and its authors do not claim that the categories are either exhaustive or mutually exclusive. The various categories of learning activities are summarised in table 6.6.

It should be noted that Vermunt and Verloop use the terms ‘metacognitive’ and ‘regulative’ interchangeably when referring to a type of learning activity (the other types being cognitive and affective). They define the metacognitive regulation of learning processes as ‘exerting control over one’s own cognitive and affective processing of subject matter’ (1999, p. 262).

(Vermunt and Verloop, 1999, p. 259)

Vermunt and Verloop expand on the meaning of each category, but mostly at an abstract or general level. Some paraphrased examples are given below:

Relating/structuring means looking for connections, including partwhole relationships and those between new information and prior knowledge.

Analysing means breaking down a whole into its parts and studying those parts or aspects in a step-by-step fashion.

Concretising/applying includes thinking of examples and using subject matter to interpret experiences and solve problems.

Critical processing means forming a personal judgment of the correctness of information presented.

Selecting means finding and studying the most important parts. Attributing means ascribing learning outcomes to causal factors. Appraising means deciding whether a learning task is worth the time

and effort.

Dealing with emotions means being positive and coping with negative feelings.

Monitoring/testing/diagnosing means observing, during task performance, whether the learning process proceeds according to plan, and if not, finding a reason.

280 Frameworks for Thinking

Evaluating means judging how far the learning proceeded as planned and was successful.

Reflecting means thinking over what has happened as well as about learning experiences in general.

Although they clearly favour a high degree of student selfregulation, the authors develop further pedagogical implications of their framework by taking each learning function and giving examples of things teachers can do to activate learning where there is either shared regulation of learning or strong teacher regulation. Thus, for example, with shared regulation, a teacher might promote critical processing by ‘having students present arguments, presenting conflicting views, organising a group discussion’ (1999, p. 268), whereas with strong teacher regulation a teacher might proceed by ‘telling arguments in favour of and against a point of view, pointing out different possible conclusions’ (p. 267).

It is the hope of the authors that their framework will provide a common language for teachers and researchers to communicate about student learning processes, especially in upper-secondary and postsecondary education. They argue that using the framework to analyse learning tasks, questions, assignments and examination questions will help achieve a better balance of activities and will help avoid what they term as ‘destructive frictions’ (1999, p. 270) between teachers and learners.

Evaluation

This categorisation is better described as a framework than as a taxonomy, since it does not have a consistent classificatory principle within each domain.

The proposed set of categories is neither complete nor without overlap, and several of them are combinations of processes which for some purposes it would be helpful to distinguish. Vermunt and Verloop’s framework is similar in many ways to Pintrich’s more elaborate framework for self-regulated learning which appeared a year later (Pintrich, 2000). When compared with Pintrich’s framework, it becomes clear that it deals only with mental activities, not explicitly with behaviour.

The authors succeed only partially in their purpose of identifying core learning activities (most of which can equally be described as thinking activities), since they do not fully embrace the idea that students can extend as well as reconstruct knowledge, for example through dialogic or experimental enquiry.

Vermunt and Verloop designed their framework with older adolescents and adults in mind, but there is no reason to suppose that it is not applicable at the primary stage. It does, however, have the limitation that it was designed to apply primarily to academic rather than practical learning.

In its present form, this categorisation of learning activities is more appropriate for outlining a research agenda rather than for practical use in the classroom. It has the advantage of being closely related to two other dimensions of Vermunt’s research: conceptions of learning and orientation to learning. It may have more appeal in higher education than elsewhere, in view of its potential for informing research on congruence and friction between individual differences in the self-regulation of learning and teacher control.

Summary: Vermunt and Verloop