Catherine Tang

Effects of Modes of Assessment on Students' Preparation Strategies

Catherine Tang, Hong Kong Polytechnic

Reproduced with permission from Gibbs, G. (ed.) Improving Student Learning - Theory and Practice. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff Development (1994)

Introduction

Within an educational context, assessment takes up a considerable proportion of time, effort and resources. It occupies a central part in the lives of the students and can amount to up to 15% or more of their time (Crooks, 1988). As the students recognise assessment, especially the summative function as a continuous and important component of their learning process, they consciously or subconsciously vary their attitudes and strategies of learning in order to cope with the assessment system (Harris and Bell, 1986).

Study approaches

Studies have demonstrated that students engage in different learning approaches when attempting to accomplish a learning task. Each of the different approaches to learning encompasses a motive for learning and a set of appropriate strategies to accomplish the task. From both qualitative (Marton and Saljo, 1976) and quantitative (Biggs, 1987a) studies, two general approaches of learning have been identified: surface and deep.

Students adopting a surface approach have an extrinsic motive to carry out the task for some external achievements other than the present task itself. This approach aims at avoiding failure but with investing minimum effort. The accompanying strategy is to learn by rote (inappropriately) and try to memorise what is perceived as important. These students focus on isolated facts and fail to see the relation among the information. Rote learning here is used for the purpose of reproducing content, not of understanding it.

Students engaging a deep approach have an intrinsic motivation of felt need based on interest in the task. The strategies thus adopted are task specific and aim at seeking and understanding the meaning of what is being learned. Not only do these students relate the different aspects of the information with one another, they also relate them to their previous learning and their personal experiences.

Apart from these two mutually exclusive learning approaches, Biggs (1987a) has also identified an achieving approach which is rooted in attaining motivation in competing and gaining high grades. The strategies used are context oriented, aiming at maximising the chances of obtaining high marks, and involving systematic organisation and cost-effective use of time and effort.

Although surface and deep approaches are mutually exclusive in any given instance, the achieving approach can be associated with either the surface or the deep approach. A student can either learn the information systematically by rote in order to get high grades, or to get the meaning of the content, thus constituting a "surface-achieving" or "deep-achieving" approach respectively.

The "3P" systems model of teaching and learning identified three components of student learning - presage, process and product - which interact to form a stable equilibrium (Biggs, in press). Students' approach to learning is in this view a function both of student-related factors such as prior knowledge and experience, ability, preferred learning style and expectations, and of the teaching environment, including assessment. Thus, when exposed to a particular context, the students are differentially responsive to the teaching context factors such as curriculum, teaching and assessment methods, and institutional provisions and restraints, according to their perceptions of the teaching context (Biggs, 1987a; Entwistle, 1988; Meyer and Muller, 1990; Meyer, Parsons and Dunne, 1990; Ramsden, 1984,1988). Hence, in the actual learning situation, students develop a context-specific "study orchestration" in response to the perception of the requirements of the learning context (Meyer et al., 1990). Among all the contextual factors, assessment has been demonstrated to have a powerful effect on the learning process (Boud, 1990; Crooks, 1988; Entwistle and Marton, 1984; Entwistle and Ramsden, 1983; Heywood, 1989; Newble and Jaeger, 1983).

Backwash of assessment

The backwash of assessment on learning is closely related to the students' perceptions of the demands of the assessment rather than to what the teacher intends to assess. If a particular assessment is perceived to be requiring just passive acquisition and accurate reproduction of details, students will then adopt a surface approach and employ low level cognitive strategy such as rote learning and concentrate on facts and details while preparing for the assessment. When assessment is perceived to require a high level cognitive processing to demonstrate a thorough understanding, integration and application of the context knowledge, then the students are more likely to engage a deep approach in order to accomplish the task. This backwash of assessment affects particularly "cue seeking" students, who are constantly on the alert for cues that will help them prepare for assessment (Miller and Parlett, 1974).

The assessment dilemma

Given the effects of assessment on learning and understanding, what mode of assessment should one use to assess student performance in a given course or Chapter 6 Assessment and student learning unit? A short essay test to ensure coverage (and maximal "security")? Or an assignment to maximise depth of engagement? Tertiary teachers are continually faced with such questions, and at present there is little more than intuition to help formulate the answers. This question is the point of interest of the present paper, which aims at exploring the effects of students' perceptions of two assessment modes, written test and assignment, on their subsequent adoption of preparation strategies and on the assessment outcomes.

Method

The context of the study

The study was conducted in the Physiotherapy Section at the Hong Kong Polytechnic. The Professional Diploma course in Physiotherapy (PDPT) is a three-year programme, and its aim is to develop within the students the knowledge, skills and attitudes in the professional practice of physiotherapy, which include the ability to analyse and evaluate the practice in the context of the local health care system (Physiotherapy Section, 1990). The philosophy of the course is to enable the students to develop their potential as self-directed and motivated learners through questioning and a critical approach to learning. At the Hong Kong Polytechnic the medium of instruction is English, although the mother tongue of all the students and most of the teaching staff is Chinese.

During the course, the students have to learn both basic pre-clinical science subjects and specialised professional therapeutic procedures. The integration of theory to practice is reinforced in the subject of "Integrated Professional Studies" (1~), which requires the students to synthesise and integrate the theory and professional skills acquired in individual subject areas in a holistic perspective for the treatment and management of patients. This training prepares the students for clinical education, when they have to apply theory to practice and treat patients under supervision in various hospitals and centres. To achieve the objectives of IPS, students are expected to develop high level cognitive strategies such as critical and analytical thinking, relating, integrating, synthesising and application of knowledge.

The assessment of IPS has traditionally been by written tests consisting of short essay questions. Recently, course assignments have been introduced as an alternative mode of assessment on the assumption that assignments draw on higher level cognitive preparation strategies. However, teaching staff are worried that, as each assignment covers only one topic area, the coverage of the assessment syllabus will be very narrow, and a large amount of content will remain unassessed. On the other hand, short essay tests will be able to cover more areas, but there is the worry that they may encourage the students to adopt low level preparation strategies. Hence the present study was conducted to ascertain the effects of these two modes of assessment on the students' adoption of different preparation strategies.

Subjects

The subjects for the study were 158 Hong Kong tertiary students attending the first year of a physiotherapy programme. The first-year students were chosen as subjects because they have not been exposed to the assessment system of the course, and so any subsequent changes in their study approaches measured after the different modes of assessment might be attributed more confidently to their perceptions of the demands of these assessments, and their adaptation in study strategies in response to the respective mode of assessment.

Design of the study

The study was divided into two parts, the quantitative and qualitative studies.

The quantitative study

The quantitative study involved the examination of the students' general study approaches at the beginning of the academic year by the Study Process Questionnaire (SPQ) (Biggs, 1987b). The SPQ contains 42 self-report items operationalising the three study approaches, surface, deep and achieving, with their respective motives and strategies components with respect to the students' general orientation to learning. In the present study, a bilingual Chinese-English version of the SPQ was used. This version of SPQ has been widely used in local Hong Kong tertiary institutions and its translation has been found to be accurate (see Biggs, 1992).

A task-specific Assessment Preparation Strategies (APS) questionnaire was developed. The items of the APS questionnaire were based on the surface, deep and achieving approach items of the SPQ and were designed to explore the strategies which the students employed when preparing for the two modes of assessment under study. After a pilot study and factor analysis, the final version of the ASP questionnaire contains 30 items constituting five factors for each assessment with six items per factor. The internal consistency using the Cronbach's a varies from .55 to .60 (test) and .54 to .62 (assignment). Because of the different nature of the two modes of assessment, there were two versions of the APS questionnaire, one for the test and one for the assignment, each being specific to the particular mode of assessment. After each assessment, the students were asked to answer the APS questionnaire to indicate their strategies in preparing for that particular assessment. The five factors of the APS questionnaire are summarised below.

The students' performance in the assessments was indicated by three sets of assessment scores, one for the test (ASSTS), which was the total scores of the four short essay questions, and two for the assignment: (l) the scores awarded for the assignment (ASSAS) based on the relevance to the question requirements, the quality of the discussion, argument and presentation of the content, and (2) a score (ASSASOLO) based on the qualitative interpretation of the structural complexity of the assignment according to the SOLO taxonomy (Biggs and Collis, 1982). One mark was awarded for a multi-structural level, while two to five marks were awarded for various degrees of relational level assignments. Unistructural and extended abstract levels were not expected and were indeed not observed.

Path analyses of these quantitative data were carried out to explore the effects of the students' general study approaches, their actual preparation strategies for each assessment mode and their assessment performance. The causal model of the path analyses were based on the "3 P" model. The presage domain consisted of the scores of the six subscales of the SPQ: surface motive (SM), surface strategy (SS), deep motive (DM), deep strategy (DS), achieving motive (AM) and achieving strategy (AS). The process domain consisted of the students' scores in the two APS questionnaire (test and assignment). The product domain consisted of the three sets of performance scores (ASSTS, ASSAS and ASSASOLO).

The qualitative study

The qualitative study consisted of interviews of 39 randomly selected students from the sample to explore their perceptions of assessment demands and effects on the adoption of preparation strategies. Each student was interviewed twice, once after the test, and once after the assignment. The students' perceptions of the demands of these models of assessment were obtained through open-ended questions about what they thought they had to do in order to do well in the assessments, and the problems that they encountered during preparation. The interviews were then transcribed and the data analysed.

Results and Discussion

Quantitative analysis

Path analysis for test

The results of the path analysis for the test is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Path analysis for test

The results of these path relations demonstrated congruence between the presage general study approaches and the process assessment preparation strategies. On the whole, those students who were surface-oriented were more likely to employ low level strategies when studying for the test, while those who were normally deep-oriented had a higher tendency to employ high level preparation strategies. As for those students who were achievement motivated, their choice of strategies seemed to depend on what they perceived as the requirements of the assessment, and hence they responded accordingly.

Three specific assessment preparation strategies were demonstrated as effective for the test: focussed memorising, deep-professional and organising, that is, surface and surface-achieving strategies. The only exception to the general trend of surface dominance is that APST1: syllabus-bound and memorising was also directly influence by deep-motive DM. The explanation of this unexpected relation was clarified by the qualitative data. Some students reported in the interviews that they were basically intrinsically motivated to understand the content when studying for the test, but at the same time perceived that the test required them to memorise certain parts of the content, so they would do just that: memorise those facts after having understood them. This specific strategy is here called "deep-memorisation", which illustrates very strongly study orchestration in response to students' perception of task demands: deep-oriented students go deep with a strategy which may otherwise be considered surface.

Positive relations existing between test scores (ASSTS) and APSTl: syllabus-bound and memorising, APST3: deep-professional and APST5: organising suggest that students who just memorised the physiotherapy aspects taught in the syllabus, especially in an organised way, were likely to do well. The fact that APST5: organising showed the strongest direct effect on ASSTS suggests that to be organised is important when studying for a test. The negative direct effect of APST4: deep-academic on the test results indicates that students who tried to relate what they were studying to other subjects do not do well in the test. In other words, the test was not only not assessing the students' ability to relate to other subjects, but those who did inter-relate actually performed worse than if they had not. This finding is significant as it signifies a mismatch between the subject and test objectives.

The only presage factors which related directly to test performance are achievement motivation (positive) and deep strategy (negative).

These findings thus indicate (a) that an organising surface approach, involving systematic rote learning of focussed parts of the content, is an effective way of studying for the test, while (b) adopting deep strategies is counterproductive. It would seem to follow that deep-oriented students would be disadvantaged in this mode of assessment. This does not seem to be the case, however, because the indirect effects showed that deep-oriented students adapted to their perceived quantitative demands of the test and orchestrated their study approach by adopting the "deep-memorising" strategy, and hence were able to do well in the test.

Path analyses for assignment

Two path analyses were carried out for the model of doing assessment, one concerning the assignment as marked, and the other concerning the SOLO scores of the assignments. The results of these path analyses are shown in Figures 2 and 3.

Figure 2: Path analysis for assignment scores

Figure 3: Path analysis for assignment SOLO

As the factors involved in the presage and process domains for the actual assignment scores and the SOLO ratings are the same, the discussion of these parts of the results will be applicable to both paths. The path relations between the product and the other two domains will be discussed separately under the assignment outcomes and the SOLO scores.

The path relations between the presage and process domains indicate that the students' adoption of specific assignment preparation strategies was more affected by their overall presage motives to learn than their presage habitual strategies. On the whole, students who were extrinsically motivated (SM) were likely to cue-seek (APSA2), while students who were intrinsically and achievement motivated (DM and AM) were more likely to adopt a broad focus (APSAl) and professional perspective (APSA3) in writing assignments. This pattern of relationship is different from that of the test, which demonstrates a congruent relationship between the general learning strategies and specific assessment preparation strategies. One possible explanation for this closer relationship between general motive and specific assessment preparation strategies could be that writing assignments may be a new experience for most of these first-year students. Without previous experience about the task, and the lack of training in writing assignments, they cannot readily rely on their habitual strategies to handle the task. Under such circumstances, their motives, whether extrinsic, intrinsic or achieving, become a more relevant reference for the decision for the actual strategies to be employed. This relative lack of relationship between the students' habitual ways of learning and the subsequent adoption of preparation strategies in writing assignments but not in studying for tests reflects these Hong Kong students' previous experience with the local education system. This places high value on examination success (Hau and Salili, 1991), and hence the students are specifically trained in test-taking but not in writing assignments, which requires a different set of preparation strategies.

The actual assignment scores (ASSAS) which were directly affected by APSA2: cue-seeking and APSA3: deep-professional indicates that students who identified with the lecturers' expectations and approached the task with a professional perspective were more likely to do well. This may be associated with the fact that, in attempting a new task of writing assignments, cue-seeking on lectures' expectations and relating to patients would be helpful to adhere to the task requirements.

The actual assignment score (ASSAS) was also directly affected by some of the presage factors: deep strategy (DS) positively, and surface strategy (SS) negatively. These relationships indicate that habitual employment of deep rather than surface strategies is likely to lead to good assignment results. However, the path analysis also shows a positive relation between assignment results and surface motive (SM). This contradictory relation between surface motive and assignment results could have been mediated through the indirect effects via the preparation strategy APSA2: cue-seeking. Students who were extrinsically motivated might resolve by identifying with the lectures' expectations about the assignment, which in turn led to good assignment results.

The assignment SOLO scores (ASSASOLO) were only directly but negatively affected by APSA2: cue-seeking, indicating that students who were too concerned with trying to identify with the lecturers' expectations when writing the assignment might actually lose out on the quality of the structure of the assignment. However, this result is opposite to the positive effects of APSA2: cue-seeking on the actual assignment scores (ASSAS). This seems to suggest that the marking of the assignment emphasised mainly the relevance of the content rather than the overall structural complexity. The ASSASOLO scores were also related to five presage factors, positively to DS, and negatively to SS, DM, AM and AS. These two sets of path coefficients seem to indicate that the ability to structure an assignment is more related to the personal orientations of the students rather than the actual preparation strategies.

The finding that presage factors predict the assignment results better than they predict test results is in keeping with the fact that writing assignments is a new experience to most of these first-year students. In the absence of previous experience and knowledge of appropriate coping strategies, these students rely on their general approach to learning to guide them in accomplishing the task.

The qualitative interview analysis

The results of the path analyses provide a framework of the backwash effects of assessment. However, they fail to illuminate the details of the students' perceptions of the task demands of these two modes of assessment and the actual process of preparation. These gaps in the information were bridged by interviews of the 39 randomly selected students after each assessment.

Perceptions of test demands

Students tended to have either a quantitative or a qualitative perception of test demand, each encompassing a set of cognitive strategies and other attribution factors, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1 Quantitative and Qualitative perceptions of test demands

Quantitative perceptions see testing as assessing the quantity of information, and hence requiring low level cognitive strategies such as rote learning, memorising and reproducing. Success is also perceived as requiring effort and time, and by some as requiring external factor such as luck.

Qualitative perceptions see testing as assessing the understanding, integration and application of the content knowledge through processing with high level cognitive strategies. These students also perceived that they had an active control of the process through effort in systematic organised studying.

However, a group of students emerged whose perceptions of test demands did not seem to be totally identifiable with either the quantitative or the qualitative orientation. These students perceived the test required other understanding and memorising, a combination of both quantitative and qualitative demands. To these students, the main objective in studying for the test was to understand the learning materials. However, they also perceived the need to memorise some of the factual information after they had understood in order to do the test. This memorisation, here called "deep-memorisation", is achieved with understanding rather than just rote learning. The following comment helps to illustrate this perception that tests require a deep-memorisation strategy.

You may understand the principles, but you still have to memorise the points so that you can present all of them in the test, as this is the way marking is done - by the points, so you cannot miss any.

Other perceived test demands included good command of English, and some special skills and techniques such as organisation of study time and materials. These perceived demands could be associated with either a quantitative or a qualitative perception, depending on whether they were considered to be necessary for rote learning or for understanding.

Perceptions of assignment demands

The perceived assignment demands are shown in Table 2.

Table 2 Quantitative and qualitative perceptions of assignment demands

Quantitative perceptions of assignment demands are concerned mainly with the need to copy from journals owing to poor command of English.

Various qualitative perceptions have been identified by the students, and these included understanding the question and the content through high level cognitive strategies such as analysing, interpreting, thinking and reasoning, having one's own opinion and supporting them with evidence from journals, and relating to previous knowledge, to other subjects, to physiotherapy and to clinical practice.

Other perceptions of assignment demands included effort and time in establishing a large and organised knowledge base, good command of English, and the ability to work within the constraint of a word limit.

During the interviews, the majority of the students identified the perceived importance of group discussion, especially when doing assignments. This form of collaborative learning was perceived as a mutual support system when students were faced with a new and unfamiliar task. Interview data also revealed the engagement of deep preparation strategies during group discussion such as relating, integrating and application of knowledge. This form of collaborative learning, which was the spontaneous effort of the students is here called "Spontaneous Collaborative Learning" (SCOLL), and has been discussed in detail elsewhere (Tang, in press).

Comparing the different perceptions of the two modes of assessment, some demands were perceived to be relevant to both test and assignment, while others were specific to only one of the two assessment modes. These different perceptions of assessment demands influence the students' ways of preparing for the assessment. Students with a quantitative perception will very likely adopt surface strategies while those with a qualitative perception will engage in deep strategies. For cognitive strategies, high level strategies such as understanding, application of information, relating to other subjects and previous knowledge are requirements perceived to be necessary for both the test and the assignment. However, low level strategies such as rote learning, memorisation and reproduction were perceived to be relevant only to the test. Hence it may appear that there is a greater possibility for students to adopt a surface approach when studying for a test.

These 39 students were classified into surface and deep groups on the basis of the quality and cognitive level of the preparation strategies reported in the interviews for each mode of assessment, and the relationship between the process and assessment performance of the two subgroups was explored. Students who could not be clearly classified into either the surface or the deep approach were excluded from this part of the study. The differences between the surface and deep subgroups for the three sets of assessments scores are shown in Table 3.

Table 3. The difference in the means of assessment scores between the surface and deep groups

For the test, 17 students were classified as being in the surface group and 21 as deep, and there was no difference in the test performance scores (p >.05). For the assignment, 21 students were classified as being in the surface group and 15 as deep. The difference between the actual assignment scores and SOLO scores were both significant and in favour of the deep subgroup (p <.005). Thus, as deep strategies were perceived by the majority of students as being required for the assignment, students adopting appropriate deep strategies clearly achieved a better performance in writing assignments, as is also indicated in the path analyses.

Implications for Teaching

To return to the tertiary teachers' dilemma, the present results tend to confirm that the short essay test does provide a wider coverage of the test syllabus, but also that it tends to encourage the adoption of surface strategies owing to the students' quantitative perceptions of test demands. On the other hand, assignment, although narrower in coverage, tends to encourage engagement using deep strategies. However, it is not quite as simple at this.

Students' perceptions of task demands strongly influences their actual study approach when handling a particular learning task. Provided that they have the appropriate learning strategies at their disposal, students will orchestrate their study to accomplish the task. However, in the absence of previous experience and lack of a suitable repertory of coping strategies, students will have to rely on their presage study orientation or develop new coping strategies.

To facilitate the adoption of desirable preparation strategies, several practical implications for teaching can be drawn from the results of the present study.

Explicit and clear task demands

Evidence from the present study shows that learning context, especially the students' perceptions of the assessment demands, exerts a strong influence on the learning process and hence the learning outcomes. It is thus important that teachers should make these demands as clear as possible so that students can accurately perceive the intended task demands, and hence respond appropriately. In the education context, it is highly possible that these demands are not made explicit to the students, as Thomas and Rohwer (1986: 30) put it: "In the academic arena, ambiguity of purpose is more often the rule than the exception." In the content of the present study, the demands of test and assignment do not appear to have been explicitly explained, and the students are identifying the assessment demands based on their previous experience. Coming from an education system which places heavy emphasis on examinations, some of these first-year students may be prone to perceive tests as requiring low level strategies of rote learning and memorising, and they respond appropriately by adopting a surface approach. When writing assignments, in the absence of previous experience, students will have to rely more on their general study orientations when deciding on the preparation strategies, although many students who are surface-oriented will stand a greater chance of inaccurately perceiving these demands, and hence adopting surface strategies. Apart from clearly explaining to the students the requirements of writing assignments, Clanchy's (1985) suggestion of providing an accessible "bank" of good, medium and poor student assignment samples would be one of the ways of providing students with better guidelines for the new task.

Congruency of course objectives and assessment demands

The results of test performance outcomes showed that a surface approach was associated with high marks. On analysis of the test questions by the author and another staff member who is familiar with the philosophy and content of the subject IPS, it was found that most of these test questions were indeed assessing the students' recall of the knowledge taught in lectures. Hence students who had chosen the appropriate surface approach did well.

The setting of low level questions is contradictory to the objectives of the subject IPS, which emphasises a deep integrative learning. Boud (1990), Crooks (1988), and Synder (1971) have warned against this possible incongruence between the espoused high academic objectives and the actual assessment requirements-in-use. As students are sensitive to this hidden curriculum embedded in the assessment requirements, they will adapt and tune their learning according to the perceived demands.

Hence to facilitate the achievement of espoused (high level) course objectives, academics should be careful in the setting and implementing of objectives-in-use. Apart from employing appropriate teaching methods, another way to help ensure the consistency of the two would be to have a moderating system of course assessments so that any assessment activity set would be monitored against the espoused course objectives to ensure that what is being assessed is what should be assessed.

Coverage versus depth

One of the questions facing the teaching staff of the Physiotherapy Section, and in fact many tertiary teachers, is the dilemma whether assessment should aim at maximum coverage of syllabus (for "security" reasons) or at depth of understanding. By nature of the assessment method, tests will be able to cover a depth of understanding. By nature of the assessment method, tests will be able to cover a large part of the syllabus, but may appear to encourage a surface approach. The employment of any particular mode of assessment may seem to depend on the objective and content of the assessment syllabus. The question of the assessment dilemma may be more appropriately concerned with the design of a suitable assessment system rather than one assessment method versus the other.

As the results of the present study demonstrate that, although assignment may be concerned just with one topic area, its potential in inducing deep preparation strategies may imply that this mode of assessment could be introduced to the students at an early stage in the course so as to facilitate the development of deep preparation strategies. The students can then apply these to subsequent assessment by tests. The administration of assignment before test is also supported by the high percentage of students involved in collaborative learning when preparing for the assignment who developed high level preparation strategies. This timing of administration of different modes of assessment can be one way of arriving at a better designed assessment system.

Conclusions

The present study on Hong Kong tertiary students attending a professional education programme demonstrates the effects of different modes of assessment on student learning. At one end of the spectrum of research on student learning, theorists such as Riding and Cheema (1991) have emphasised the importance of trait-like and habitual learning styles in determining an approach to learning tasks. At the other end, straight phenomenography is based entirely on student perceptions of the context (see for example Marton and Saljo, 1976). The results of the present study do not only support the two ends of the spectrum, they also go beyond to indicate an interactive model between the presage personological and contextual influences on learning. For the test, the linear effects of presage factors (surface orientation and quantitative perceptions of task demands) on test performance is true up to a certain point. However, deep-oriented individuals orchestrated a deep-memorisation strategy which demonstrated the interaction between the study orientation and perception of the context. For the assignment, the path analysis indicated that presage orientation to learning better predicted the assignment outcomes than the process APSs themselves. Perception of task demands was overwhelming deep, yet many students did not adopt deep strategies, presumably because they did not have the requisite procedural knowledge of strategy to bring to the situation. In this circumstance, these students devised a coping strategy of spontaneous collaborative learning, and formed discussion groups. All these findings illustrate the interaction between the personal orientation and perceptions of task demands and their effects on learning. Given this interactive effect, and in view of the "stable" personal orientation to learning, effort should be put into curriculum design, and especially with teaching and assessment methods, so that a constructive and desirable learning context is created to facilitate a positive study orchestration.

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