Donald R. Bacon, editor of the Journal of Marketing Education and notable pedagogical scholar, points out in the journal’s Editor’s Corner that perceived learning and actual learning are “distinctly different constructs.” An accurate understanding of those differences needs to be part of our thinking.
Definitions make the distinction clear. Bacon starts with learning: “the gains in knowledge or skills that a student possesses.” (p. 3) Perceived learning is what the student thinks he or she has learned. It’s a self-report, hopefully based on some sort of reflection. Actual learning “reflects a change in knowledge identified by a rigorous measurement of learning.” (p. 3) These “direct” measures may be test scores, case write-ups, or presentations scored with rubrics, for example. They don’t always have to be assessments made by the teacher. They could be peer evaluations offered by team members, which can directly measure how well a student worked with others, thereby assessing team skills.
The problem is that research has established that there isn’t a strong correlation between perceived learning and actual learning. According to one meta-analysis cited in the article, the correlation between self-reported knowledge and actual knowledge was 34 percent. There’s a small but important distinction here as well. The term used with discussing the correlation was “self-reported knowledge,” what students said they knew. In a lot of research and much less formal classroom inquiry, the question put to students is more along the lines of perceived learning gain. “Did this activity increase your knowledge?” “Do you know more now than you did at the beginning of the unit?” When the focus is on perceived learning gain, there was no correlation between the perceived learning gain and actual learning.
However, these results do not mean that perceived learning has no value. Bacon writes, “I suspect that perceived learning is closely related to general positive affect toward the learning experience.” (p. 4) A positive response that involves some emotion may well mean that the student’s motivation has been tapped. They are more interested, curious, engaged and most likely working harder than they would be if the learning experience were a negative one. Direct measures of learning assess content knowledge and/or observable, measurable skill development. They don’t measure attitudes toward learning and at some point, maybe even after the course is over, those positive attitudes can translate into more learning, say, by taking another course in the subject area. As Bacon points out, learning happens over time. That time window doesn’t always close when the course ends.
Bacon is rightly concerned about the comingling of measures of perceived and actual learning in the research literature. But it’s also important in how individual faculty are thinking about student learning. Are they “seeing” gains in student learning based on their perceptions? Are they asking students if they think they’re learning? Are they looking at objective measures such as test scores? Anything that positively influences learning is important and should be considered. The point made here is that when students report that they are learning, what they describe may not be a directly measurable change in knowledge or skills.
Reference: Bacon, D.R., (2016). Reporting actual and perceived student learning in educational research. Journal of Marketing Education, 38 (1), 3–6.
