Utilising Diversity for Project Work and Learning: A Study of the Learning Agreement Intervention

Abstract

The learning agreement has great potential as a learning intervention that supports learners to take ownership of their learning and to develop in ways that are meaningful to them. It is useful to educate a diverse student cohort. In a project course as the one investigated in this study, the learning agreement intervention can be beneficial to make use of the different experiences and competencies that a diverse student group brings to the table. In practice however, the learning agreement invention is uncommon in education and not well understood. As it is used in the present study, it is essentially a document in which the students describe competencies that they want to develop, as well as how they will develop and assess those competencies. This study has investigated the learning agreement intervention as it was conducted in an open-ended group project, in particular a workshop to improve the quality and usefulness of the students’ learning agreements. Two versions of learning agreements, the one before the workshop and the one after, from 19 students were analysed, as well as semi-structured interview data with the students. We find that many learning agreements are of little use, even after the workshop. A qualitative thematic analysis suggests that the students experience the learning agreement and workshop as useful but that they still struggle with the learning agreement, particularly with describing activities to develop and assess their learning. We derive ideas for how to improve the learning agreement intervention, e.g. by integrating it more with the project work.