How experiential learning enriches students

Dubai: Most post-secondary colleges and universities around the world attempt to develop students’ work and study skills in order to assist them in their transition to a new educational environment.

During the past academic year (2011-2012), I evaluated the impact of a new experiential learning programme that sought to quickly settle new students into college. The new student orientation programme involved more culturally respectful elements, such as the use of Arabic cushions and mats on the first day in classrooms as opposed to the traditional desks and chairs.

In addition, all new student classes had one Arabic speaker to assist translation of instructions and information. The emphasis of the two-day programme was to encourage a sense of belonging to each other through team games rather than a one-way dissemination of college rules and regulations. Student feedback from a formal survey and focus group meeting confirmed their positive evaluation of the orientation programme.

Experiential education began in the 1930s in the UK and then spread across to the US and Commonwealth countries such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It has always been associated with the outdoors where most of the learning activities take place. First established within schools such as Gordonstoun in Scotland, experiential education has evolved and moved beyond schools into a myriad of training formats such as Outward Bound, World Challenge (UK) and Absolute Adventure (UAE), and corporate training that target personal development, team-building skills and leadership development.

We wanted a programme that would welcome the young men into college and build their self-confidence and resilience as they began studies. The new programme used problem solving and critical thinking, often conducted among small competitive groups of students. It consisted of five main themes — problem solving and critical thinking, college rules/expectations, learner autonomy, team activities, and career and personal skills.

Typical activities

The college low and high ropes course also provided a challenge for the new students as they sought to overcome their fears, learn to work together as a team to overcome physical challenges, and to set higher personal soft skill benchmarks. Typical lessons could involve a hands-on activity such as the Tower of Hanoi (a logic puzzle where you move all the disks in the least number of moves from one tower to another without placing a larger disk onto a smaller disk), a discussion and reflection activity focused on an interesting source stimulus, or a robust physical task with competitive teams. Not all the themes were addressed simultaneously and some mental toughness goals that required the college ropes course were advanced or held back depending on the colder winter months.

Using a mental toughness questionnaire to measure the impact of the new experiential learning programme, the pre-test scores recorded in semester one indicated students with fairly low levels of resilience, confidence, life control, and challenge in the measured indices. By the end of semester two (June 2012), the students repeated the same questionnaire to measure the impact of the new programme.

The post-test results were surprising. Their scores actually decreased, apparently due to a greater self-awareness and honesty which produced lower self-reported scores in the second test. In other words, the students had become more grounded and realistic about themselves. However, the student feedback on the new programme at the end of the academic year was very positive — they indicated the programme activities were engaging, practical, and helpful with 81.5 per cent of the students reporting an improvement in self-confidence. However, they reported they sometimes did not understand the link between the activities and their formal academic work in the classroom.

— The author has lived in the UAE since 1995. He used to work for one of the UAE’s largest post-secondary educational providers but resigned to pursue his PhD research begun in 2004.

Up Ahead Next week — A look at 10 of 57 suggestions that arose from the author’s research ranging from societal issues to advice on classroom teaching.