Table 1 Conceptions of teaching and learning

Limited

Teaching is defined as transmitting instructor’s knowledge (expert-organized information) to students (Smith et al., 2005)

Learning is defined as accumulating facts to satisfy the demands of course assessments (Prosser & Trigwell, 1999)

“The concepts themselves are so hard that there’s no intuition at first. The intuition has to be fostered and you have to show the examples, you have to walk through the examples first before you can talk about anything at all. So, you definitely start from a blank slate. So, you have to create something there. And that means there’s more lecturing involved, more direct conveying of information.”

“Learning is when I give students what they need to learn—the material, whether that's telling them the information or telling them what kind of problems they need to be able to solve or where to get information.”

Intermediate

Teaching is helping students acquire instructor’s (expert’s) knowledge and develop skills (Prosser & Trigwell, 1999)

Learning is acquiring content knowledge and developing skills to satisfy certain personal goals or curiosity in addition to the demands of course assessments (Prosser & Trigwell, 1999)

“Teaching is not just having them recite the material. Anyone can read it from the book. My role is to help them understand it and be able to use it. And also give them strategies for the effective mastery of the material. If I don’t explain, if I don’t help them learn, they will not do it.”

“Learning is being able to use knowledge. It’s not sufficient to just know facts, you have to be able to put it into practice. For the lab, that’s very straightforward—can you operate the instrument? Can you draw conclusions from your data?”

Complete

Teaching focuses on students’ worldviews and changing understanding of the subject matter (Prosser & Trigwell, 1999)

Learning focuses on conceptual development and change through active construction of one’s own knowledge (Prosser & Trigwell, 1999)

“It’s being able to set up an environment where you’re getting the students to go from basic recall and remembering and being able to list out facts to getting them to the point when they’re categorizing, and then finally analyzing and creating stuff. When you’re learning you’re able to get to the point where you’re doing those higher order things.”

“Learning is being able to take knowledge in and to make it your own… To me, anything that you learn, whatever it is, it’s as if you’re learning another language, as if you’re learning another way of thinking, and so, learning is gaining that ability to think under the constructs of whatever that particular discipline is.”