Understanding what to do and how to complete academic tasks is an essential yet complicated academic activity. However, this area has been under-examined. The purpose of this study is to investigate students’ understanding of academic tasks with qualitative and quantitative approaches. Ninety-eight students participated in this study. First, the study explored the kinds of tasks students identified as challenging, the disciplines in which these tasks were situated, the types of structures these tasks had, and challenges found in students’ task analysis activity. Second, the study examined the relationships between students’ task understanding and academic performance. The findings indicated that although students struggled with various tasks, they struggled even more when tasks became less pre-scribed. The results also showed that task understanding was statistically significantly co-related to academic performance and task understanding, particularly, implicit aspect of task understanding, predicted students’ academic performance. The findings supported Hadwin’s (2006) model of task understanding.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/1690 |
| Date | 31 August 2009 |
| Creators | Oshige, Mika |
| Contributors | Hadwin, Allyson |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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