Outcome Expectations and Learning Effectiveness in an Internationally Oriented Classroom

Abstract

With the increasing changes in the purpose of university functioning and demographic profile of students, teaching and learning pedagogies need to undergo a transformation of structure, process and technology. The paper reports the findings of a study exploring the gap between changing expectations of students and innovative pedagogical responses in an international classroom in an Australian university. An autoreflective narrative analysis method is employed in exploring the convergences in outcome expectations of a classroom pedagogy against a theoretical model developed for the study. The findings suggest that student expectations are increasingly emphasising practical relevance of the outcome displacing knowledge acquisition. The pedagogical preferences, in turn, are shifting more to the experiential learning than through deeper level investment of research and reading.

Key Words:

• Outcome expectations
• learning culture
• expectation gap
• pedagogical priorities
• nominal group technique