Education – and higher education – are powerful vehicles for transformative socio-economic change at individual, community and societal levels. The Australian Universities Accord interim report is emphatic in suggesting that for Australian society to thrive, participation in higher education must increase by at least 300,000 Commonwealth-supported students by 2035 and an additional 900,000 Commonwealth-supported students by 2050. Around 60% of the additional students in the system will need to come from groups currently underrepresented in Australian higher education, from low SES backgrounds, from regional and remote areas, and from First Nations communities (Clark, 2023, pg. 14).
The great barrier to this aspiration however is that the underrepresented learners are also often disadvantaged in terms of having the requisite skills and knowledge bases to cope with university-level learning demands. The Matthew Effect, where the more you know the more you learn is a real and cruel feature of most Western education systems. The effect is more than anecdotal and is indeed rationalised by schema theory.
The more developed a learner’s schema is on a topic the more connections they can make between existing understanding and new contexts of learning. This makes the learning of a new topic easier and then increases the likelihood of learning something more complex thereafter.
Learners from higher socio-economic backgrounds, through greater access and thus immersion in cultural capital, not only have likely had increased opportunities to develop knowledge related to their field of study during their childhood, but also have had an increased propensity to develop schemata that contain metacognitive abilities, habits and motivations that are essential for maximising cognitive development. And thus, the gap perpetually widens.
The Accord continues and states that if we want universities to tackle the participation problem head-on, it will require all institutions to actively support students from all backgrounds to achieve greater equity. For those at the mercy of the Matthew effect, providing scaffolded learning support to help students achieve their qualification in minimum time and with minimum debt is a must.
What this scaffolding entails however, is rarely defined. What a learner with a less developed schema needs is a program that is carefully designed to address the deficiency and one that focuses on creating continuous opportunities for them to build and strengthen schema. To achieve this, courses within a program must speak to each other, they must help reinforce ideas and they must incrementally build knowledge to satisfy the exigencies of the science of learning. Programs that are not designed in this way favour learners who can fall back on already-developed schemata and support networks: programs that are not designed this way exacerbate the Matthew Effect.
The next post will explore how a program can be designed.
References
Clarke, M. (2023). Australian Universities Accord Interim Report – Department of Education, Australian Government. [online] Department of Education. Available at: https://www.education.gov.au/australian-universities-accord/resources/accord-interim-report.
I’m Paul Moss. I’m a learning designer at the University of Adelaide. Follow me on Twitter @edmerger
LEARNING DESIGN by Paul G Moss 