Task 4:

Describe an example of teaching and learning in your context where you believe that access to learning may be compromised or inequitable.

         Many of our students in the School of Veterinary Nursing have limited literary and numeracy skills.  These students are not utilizing a large proportion of the course materials provided because they either cannot read them at all, or the materials are too difficult for the student’s level of literary proficiency, or they are not receptive to this format of information delivery.  Quite a few of the students with known literacy limitations either never access these resources at all, or only briefly glance through them.  In fact, some students have expressed frustration after examining one set of course notes, finding them too difficult or unappealing, and subsequently never use the course notes as a resource for learning again.  A recent review of the full time CVN students’ activities revealed that over on third of the students had never opened their course notes on Moodle for 5200 Fluid Therapy, and an additional one third has only looked at the notes briefly. A majority of students did access the demonstration videos on Moodle, however.  This implies that a significant percentage of our students are relying mainly on attendance at lectures and practical demonstration, in real life or on videos.  An evaluation of course assessments also revealed that the vast majority of students are capable of performing the practical tasks associated with Fluid Therapy, but about two thirds did not fully understand the underlying deeper principals of fluid therapy.  This was exemplified by a Not Yet Competent scoring of nearly two thirds of the students on an assessment which required the students to perform full fluid monitoring of a hospitalized patient over a period of at least two consecutive days.  The students were successful at recording the factual data well, such as physical parameters of the patient, but were unable to interpret their results adequately to recognize dangerous warning signs of fluid overload, or severe dehydration.  These results exemplify the difficulty of trying to ensure deeper understanding of complex advanced scientific material to incoming students with limited background preparation, limited reading comprehension, and a variety of learning styles.

Reflect on factors of diversity associated with your students that impact on equitable access to the environment and their success. This may relate to the subject, resources, technologies, learning culture, socio-economics, ethnicity, assessments, learner motivation, engagement and abilities etc.

          Students with limited literacy skills may come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Although cultural differences may be one factor in the incidence of illiteracy rates, there may be many other factors such as socio-economic, regional educational opportunity variances, immediate family values, or even gender issues which contribute to the student’s previous education and learning, or its limitations. In addition to the actually level of literacy, students may have impediments to learning by reading the written word, due to their inherent learning styles.  For some students, reading the material in a text or the course notes has a very limited effect on their grasp or retention of that material.

          Veterinary Nursing has a tendency to attract young students, often with limited scientific or mathematical background, because the image of a veterinary nurse is often unrealistically that of a person who loves to work with and care for soft furry small creatures rather that someone who needs to possess a significant amount of medical knowledge and training. The students often enter the program naively believing that the veterinarian will be responsible for all the medical decisions, and the nurse will only need to perform simple tasks to care for the animal such as give an injection, or dress a wound. The sudden realization about the amount and level of scientific and medical knowledge required and used daily by a veterinary nurse comes as a shock especially to those students with a limited prior education.

          Learning styles described by Honey and Mumford (2000) may have an important degree of influence on the overall development of a learner by affecting or interfering with their individual progress on the learning cycle, and therefore may be an important factor in the lower starting performance levels in reading comprehension of some students.  Are the students with poorer literary skills simply students with learning styles which did not promote their use of written material from an early age? Perhaps students with poor reading comprehension are displaying the result of an inherent natural tendency to avoid unpleasant or inappropriate learning experiences that did not match their learning style. Students displaying limited reading comprehension may be, in reality, students whose learning style is more of an Activist or Pragmatist described by Honey and Mumford (2000), who learn by doing, or by interaction or role playing with others.

          Even the different personality types described by Carl Jung, as cited by Donald Clark (2004) might be influential in forming a student’s preference for certain types of learning experiences, which therefore would affect their relative performance, based on how well their personality fit with the teaching formats offered to them. 

Discuss what your learners might need to access the learning environment more fully, and what you can provide.

          We have clearly identified that some type of barrier or resistance exists between a large portion of our students and utilization of the resources, especially those in written form.  Therefore, by extension, we need to ask, how can we reduce that barrier to our students, or provide an alternate route around the written material that will encourage our students to learn the theory behind the tasks which they will be performing in practice.

What are the barriers?

          Some current barriers to accessing the course materials include illiteracy, poor reading comprehension, lack of previous scientific education, limited computer skills, and limited computer access, or that the presentation format of the written material is not attractive, or interesting to the student because it does not match well with their learning style.

What support is needed?

          To improve the student’s opportunity to learn, several approaches might be taken simultaneously.  To address the barrier of limited computer access, student computers might be made available in the classroom, or in a separate open access study room.  It might even be possible to rent or loan an I-pad or laptop to a student for the duration of their program with a refundable deposit.  Computer skills might be improved by offering optional computer skills training sessions, and Moodle utilization training sessions might be offered in person or via Adobe Connect or similar on-line interactive community access programs.

          To improve student literacy, especially with regard to reading comprehension of scientific material, we might offer optional terminology classes. Additionally, we might challenge the students with a medical reading comprehension assessment early in the program to identify which students might require more assistance to understand this terminology.  It might be advantageous to offer a pre-requisite reading comprehension course(s) for students with significant limitations. Identifying students with specific needs or difficulties would offer an opportunity to address those needs at an earlier time, but controversially, it might have some negative effect by labeling students as less likely to succeed. These course improvements are directed primarily at addressing the areas in which the student has shown previous difficulty, but are approaching it from the same perspective as traditional teaching methods.

          We might also improve delivery of the course material by offering a wider variety of formats of the material, such as listening texts (read aloud), or a podcast of lecture sessions, or interactive game formats, which could be used by students with alternative learning styles.  Alternative learning formats might be designed such as interactive oral sessions of some kind or cooperative problem solving sessions. These options may offer new approaches which may be better suited to the diversity of learning styles of our students, and potentially may open new pathways to learning which the student may not have been afforded access previously.

References:

Honey, P. & Mumford, A. (2000). The learning styles helper's guide. Maidenhead: Peter Honey Publications Ltd

Clark, D. (2004). Concepts of leadership. Retrieved from    http://nwlink.com/~donclark/leader/leadcon.html