Assessment item 2c Learning Contract: Final Report Value: 40% Due date: 07-Jun-2013 Return date: 28-Jun-2013 Length: 22 pages approx Submission method options Hand delivery (option applies to Internal only)

Alternative submission method

Task

Assessment 2(c)—Final Report
This consists of your final contract report, Sections I and II (although submitted as one final report).

This report will be graded. Probably the term learning contract is new to you: Don’t worry! It is explained in detail in the following pages.

What is a learning contract?
A learning contract has two parts:

? The first, or learning contract proposal (Assessment 2a), is a brief written document outlining:
• what you want to learn about within a specific topic
• why you want to learn it
• how you want to go about that learning
• how you intend to evaluate your learning.
? The second part, or learning contract report, asks you to present a report on your learning.

A learning contract is about learning through action. It means you can learn about something which is relevant to your needs now – within a specific subject area.

Your role
What you have to do
As the person undertaking the contract you need to:
1. complete the contract proposal on the Learning Contract form (Assessment 2a)
2. send a copy to by the due date
3. have it finally approved by your Subject Coordinator
4. undertake your contract
5. record results and reflect on your progress
6. prepare Section I of your contract report and send as a draft to your Subject Coordinator (Assessment 2b)
7. prepare and present a final report on your achievements to your Subject Coordinator at the end of the contracting period (Assessment 2c)
Weeks when proposals and reports are due are shown earlier under Due Dates and in the Study Schedule. Check these now.

You will have noticed that you need to prepare your proposal for the learning contract very early in the semester. This ensures you will have eight weeks or so to work on the action phase of your contract. The report on the contract is due at the end of the semester

THE TASK YOU HAVE TO DO IN THIS ASSIGNMENT IS GIVEN BELOW.

SECTION II

6. Learning in action (about 3-5 pages)

Your learning in action section must comment on your action regarding each of the strategies you listed in your methodology and also show if you introduced any new strategies or modified the original ones.

If you conducted interviews, see below for specific guidelines.

This is where you describe in some detail WHAT you did and what the outcomes were for each strategy. It is, in effect, your action theory in action. Give plenty of specific examples to illustrate what happened.

We suggest you use each strategy as a subheading to help you organise this section. Then, use the following questions to guide your description of the action on each strategy. The relevance of some questions will depend on your contract focus.

• What happened as you put your ideas/plans/strategies into action?

• How did your colleagues, workgroup etc. respond?

• What problems were encountered? Why do you think they arose? How did you address these?

• What worked? What didn’t?

• What did you learn about yourself from your assessment of your strengths and weaknesses?

• What changes did you need to make to your strategies to keep moving towards achieving your learning goal?

• Why did you need to make these changes?

Interviews

If you conducted interviews or surveys, set out this section as follows:

• Describe your experiences in setting up and conducting the interviews/surveys. Discuss any problems, and note any changes to your original method.

• Identify the major themes emerging from your data. These will generally be the same as the ones you listed in your methodology. However, you may have discovered some new ones as well.

• Use the themes as subheadings and summarise your results for all respondents under each theme. Don’t summarise each participant’s responses separately: combine the data and show where there is agreement/disagreement between the participants. If you want to, you can quote some responses (sparingly!) if you think they serve to illustrate the theme well. If you want to include the transcripts of your interviews—put them in an appendix.

• Include an appendix with a copy of your interview questions or survey, and your Subject Information Sheet.

7. Analysis and evaluation (3-4 pages)

Use each strategy you tried out (or theme you explored in the case of interviews or surveys) as a subheading for this section.

This is where you interpret the outcomes of your learning in action. You’ll need to think deeply about the implications of your outcomes. For each strategy or theme, ask yourself questions such as:

• How effective was the strategy/theme in helping me move towards my goal?

• What do these outcomes mean? Why?

• How do they affect me/my group/the people I interviewed? Why?

• What implications do they have for me/my group/the people I interviewed/the theme I was exploring? Why?

• What implications do they have for staff generally, but specifically for managers and leaders? Why?

• What are the implications for my community (relevant for some contracts)?

For each strategy or theme link your outcomes to the literature you read, showing where there is agreement or disagreement.

 
Example
‘I found Johnson and Johnson’s (1991) concept of interdependence was central to the effectiveness of my group. If this was lacking, our ability to solve problems was reduced’.
‘The women in this rural community are still having difficulty being accepted as farmers in their own right. Many businesses see the male farmer as the manager, and often refuse to talk to the female farmer re the business. This supports Alston’s (1995) and Dempsey’s (1992) findings that women were mostly seen as the helpers in the farm partnership, and were not equal in terms of management’.

Your ability to see links between the literature and your outcomes indicates to us that you can think critically about the outcomes and can see how theory and practice work together.

For contracts which are based on interviews or surveys:

In addition to the above, identify two major issues/problems emerging from the data. For example, if you were interviewing about management style, you might identify managers’ discomfort at relinquishing control as a major problem.

Then, develop a recommendation for addressing each issue or problem, based on your reading, but showing your ideas here, but based on and informed by the literature and your research. Identify major advantages and disadvantages of your recommendation.

Devote about a page to each issue/problem.

For all contracts:

Consider the following general questions re your contract:

• How did you handle the key events that influenced the achievement of the contract? What did you do well/not so well? Why?

• What unintended/unexpected outcomes occurred?

• What are the ‘what ifs’? Speculate briefly on what the outcomes might have been if you’d done things differently.

• How would you approach the goal next time around? That is, what changes would you make to your methodology?

8. Reference list

List all your references using APA referencing style. Attach any appendices, e.g. questionnaire, detailed tables etc.

9. Reflections on your learning (2-4 pages)

This is where you reflect deeply on your learning processes in your contracts.

Here’s where you step back from the content, which you’ve described in the other parts of your report, and think about how you went about doing the learning.
The Kolb Learning Cycle (Learning style inventory) and the Principles of Experiential Learning should form the basis for your reflections here. The Reflection Process as a Mindmap will help here also.

Did you feel more comfortable using one part of the Kolb Cycle in preference to another? For example, what time did you devote to reflecting on what happened as compared with actually doing the activity? How much time did you give to generating new ideas – to thinking about what to do next?

The learning contract process pushes you to plan, act, reflect and generate ideas from analysis, which is very similar to the finer points of the Kolb Cycle.

• What did you discover about the way you learn?

Did you learn mostly by:

• being told something?

• puzzling things out for yourself?

• emotional responses?

• intellectual, abstract thinking process?

• talking problems through with other people?

• observing others?

• letting ideas incubate in the back of your mind?

• consciously reflecting about your past experiences?

• trial and error, experimentation?

• other ways?

• a combination of some of these ways?

• what do you now have to offer about learning that would help someone just beginning this process?

• what would you do to be a more effective learner?

• look at the Principles of Experiential Learning. What connections do you see between these principles and your learning in the contract?

 
The Reflection Process as a Mindmap

 
Source: Developed by K.W. Cochrane and G.K. Watson, UNE-OAC.