| significant publications
I have written fourteen books, as sole or joint author; and have edited six. I regard the following as most significant: Information and Human Learning. Melbourne: Cassell, 1968; Glenview, I11.: Scott, Foresman, 1971; Stuttgart: Klett, 1974. Why behaviourism couldn't possibly model educational learning, although the conventional wisdom of the time was that it could. I put my money on cognitive psychology, suggesting how information processing in limited memory systems could model educational learning. (I later came to believe, and still do, that very little psychology was directly applicable to education—see below in journal articles). The Process of Learning. Sydney: Prentice Hall ( Australia ), 1981, 1987 with R. Telfer; 1993, with P. Moore. In its day, the most popular text in university teacher education in Australia . The thrust was not to tell students about which psychologists said what—which is what virtually all other texts did—but to give students a framework they could use reflectively when making classroom decisions. This was also the first ed psych text using examples and applications specifically for Australian classrooms. Evaluating the Quality of Learning: The SOLO Taxonomy (with K. Collis) New York : Academic Press, 1982. We started with what Piaget said about children's cognitive development but ended with how learning in school subjects grows in levels of complexity—which is something completely different. Hence SOLO: The Structure of the Observed Learning Ooutcome. These SOLO levels can be used to assess the quality of a student's learning in most subjects and to design curriculum objectives or intended outcomes—and to explain why marital disputes favour those who use low complexity arguments. Student Approaches to Learning and Studying; The Learning Process Questionnaire (LPQ): Manual; and The Study Process Questionnaire (SPQ): Manual. Hawthorn, Vic.: Australian Council for Educational Research, 1987. A monograph on the theory of approaches to learning, describing the evolution of the LPQ and SPQ; and the manuals for the LPQ (for school students), and the SPQ (for tertiary students). The Chinese Learner: Cultural, Psychological, and Contextual Influences . (Edited with D. Watkins) Hong Kong: Centre for Comparative Research in Education/Camberwell, Vic: Australian Council for Educational Research, 1996. Several researchers report their take on the so-called “Paradox of the Chinese Learner” and other things relating to students from the Confucian Heritage. A breakthrough publication. Teaching for Quality Learning at University. Buckingham: Open University Press/McGraw Hill Educational, 1999, 2003. Third edition in preparation with Catherine Tang. Introducing constructive alignment and how it can be used to improve tertiary teaching. My best and most influential to date—a pity it appeared five years after my retirement, but I always was a slow developer. The Subversion of Australian Universities (edited with Richard Davis). The book no publisher would accept, so we put it online. Starting with Labor Education Minister Dawkins, the pitiful story of how successive governments and particularly the Howard Government have subverted, corrupted and prostituted Australian universities into becoming knowledge shops that have to toe the managerial line. Subversion was written in a state of shock in 2000; we would never have believed that, six years on, things would become even worse. Book chapters, journal articles I have published some two hundred articles, many, most, being your typical academic potboilers. However, I think the following said something worth noting: Coding and cognitive behaviour. British Journal of Psychology, 60 , 287-305, 1969 Comprehensive but clunky, I argue how a model of coding information within a limited memory system could account for an awful lot of high level cognition that behaviourism couldn't. Here was the way forward for educational theory! Educology: The theory of educational practice. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 1 , 274-284, 1976 But it wasn't. Here I argue that directly applying psychology, cognitive or otherwise, is not the way forward after all. Applying psychological theory had changed educational practice very little, still hasn't, and even that is by analogy not deduction. The reason? Psychological theory is derived from experiments done in laboratories or with captive first year subjects, so why should it apply to education? Educ -ational psych- ology (get it?), however, is derived directly from educational contexts—the burgeoning ‘student learning research', now so influential in higher education, is a good example. Not that anyone mentioned educology except me, but that's what happened. Individual and group differences in study processes. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 48, 266-279, 1978. The first public airing of the basic version of the Study Process Questionnaire and the presage-process-product model. How ten original scales were reduced to three, reproducing, internalising and organising, which interestingly paralleled work done independently by Entwistle, and which I later renamed to surface, deep and achieving (see below). Individual differences in study processes and the quality of learning outcomes. Higher Education, 8 , 381-394, 1979. A nice demonstration of how the SPQ scales were associated, in appropriately designed contexts, with levels of outcome as defined by SOLO. Coincidentally, in this same issue Entwistle pointed out how his work and mine were converging, which led to my renaming of the scales to surface , deep and achieving to show we were talking about the same generic concepts. The role of metalearning in study processes. The British Journal of Educational Psychology, 55, 185-212, 1985. By now I'd done a lot of studies on various aspects of student learning. This article brings it all together, showing how students' metacognitive processes operate. Depending on their motives and other resources, students use surface, deep or achieving approaches to bring about the outcomes they want or are capable of achieving. Approaches to the enhancement of tertiary teaching. Higher Education Research and Development, 8, 7-25, 1989. So far, I and others had been preoccupied with how students tick, not so much with how what we knew about student learning might be used to improve teaching. We knew that surface approaches to learning led to poor learning, deep approaches to good learning. We also knew that some aspects of teaching led to high surface approaches, and others to deep approaches. The link was obvious. This paper elaborated on these implications for teaching and assessment. It was based on my Inaugural Lecture on my appointment to the Chair of Education in the University of Hong Kong. Internal politics were going badly at the time and I desperately wanted to impress. I think I might have but not those I had in mind. Modes of learning, forms of knowing, and ways of schooling. In A. Demetriou, M. Shayer, & A. Efklides (Eds.) Neo-Piagetian Theories of Cognitive Development (pp. 31-51). London : Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1992. An expanded model of SOLO, showing how developmental stages are defined by the levels of abstraction children and adults can handle at various ages, the SOLO learning cycles operating within and across these stages. I thought this had a lot to do with what schools should best be teaching at different levels. I thought it a neat way of looking at a complex issue, but few others seemed to—except Andreas Demetriou, bless him, who was happy to include it in his book. Approaches to learning of Asian students: A multiple paradox . In J. Pandy, D. Sinha, and P.S. Bhawuk (Eds.), Asian contributions to cross-cultural psychology (pp. 180-199) . New Delhi : Sage, 1996, based on paper given to Fourth Asian Regional Congress of Cross-Cultural psychology, Kathmandu , Jan, 1992. I made The Paradox of the Chinese Learner public in Jan 1992. Just for the record… What do inventories of students' learning processes really measure? A theoretical review and clarification. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 63 , 1-17, 1993 Inventories of students' learning processes were proliferating: the US ones in particular applied psychology directly, often talking about learning styles or otherwise ignoring what students were learning and in what context. Critics fired shots in all directions, hitting targets that didn't deserve these criticisms. This is my attempt to clear things up. Assessing for learning: Some dimensions underlying new approaches to educational assessment. Alberta Journal of Educational Research. 41 , 1-18, 1995. The devil in the teaching/learning environment is assessment. The problem, as some US writers were making clear, was that we'd borrowed a measurement model from individual differences psychology, measuring learning outcomes quantitatively as if they were stable traits—as if learning could possibly be! We should be assessing outcomes qualitatively, against criteria of good learning. This was just what I needed to back up SOLO and to clarify what educational assessment should be about, as I outline in this article. Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment. Higher Education, 32, 347-364, 1996. This paper is an account of one of the last classes I taught before retiring and how it led to the idea of constructive alignment. Students had to place items in an assessment portfolio that showed how they reflected on theory to improve their workplace decision-making: that was the intended outcome for the class and we negotiated teaching/learning activities to help them achieve that outcome. It worked so well, there had to be a book about it. In fact, it brought together everything I'd been working on since my PhD: a theory of student learning that helped the design of curriculum, teaching and assessment methods. So my retirement plans to write fiction fulltime were put on hold: Teaching for Quality Learning resulted (good), but Project Integrens, To Choose Again and whatever else was fermenting in my right hemisphere didn't (bad). Biggs, J.B. (2001). The reflective institution: Assuring and enhancing the quality of teaching and learning. Higher Education, 14, 221-238. Constructive alignment was designed for individual teachers in the classroom. But if educational is an eco-system, it should apply across the institution as well—institutions themselves should practice what they preach by putting in place systems that match the rhetoric of their mission statements. Few do, but when that is done we have a quality enhancement system that assures quality of teaching and learning as well. It hits for six the bean counters' view of quality assurance as ‘value-adding' and the presence of indicators that have little or nothing to do with quality teaching and learning.
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