In the past number of years, the upper secondary schools in the canton of Zurich have seen a major development initiative, launched by the canton’s department for upper secondary and vocational education (Mittelschul- und Berufsbildungsamt des Kantons Zürich, MBA), and aimed at establishing self-directed learning (SDL) in the classroom.
The promotion of SDL is based on the assumption that it helps students acquire skills that are pivotal to lifelong learning and, more specifically, required to successfully complete academic studies. There is a considerable body of research about the effects of SDL on academic achievement at all levels of the education system. By contrast, to our knowledge, there is a dearth of empirical studies about whether and in what ways previous experiences with SDL in upper secondary school influence students’ views on learning in general, and their learning practices in university in particular.
Adopting a qualitative and reconstructive approach, the present study addresses these questions: On the basis of narrative interviews (see e.g. Rosenthal 2011; Schütze 1983), learning biographies of actual university students who all experienced prolonged sequences of SDL during upper secondary school will be reconstructed. In doing so, this explorative research seeks to generate case-based insights into what ‘learning’ meant to the students over the course of their school career and while studying at university, and the significance they give to self-directed learning within their narratives of learning. To this day, the literature on SDL is mostly focused on questions of instruction design and teacher behaviour. The present study aims at broadening the scope by providing insights into the perspective of learners.
