Answers to in-text task

The text asked you to rank these in terms of their importance to your learning. The truth is that there is no one definitive answer to the ranking, there are just different alternatives. Identifying what is important will depend on a number of factors in some cases, but there are some obvious resources and situations that will help you to learn at university.

More details about the nature of these are given in Table 5.1 in the text.

The activities listed here fall into a number of categories, but ranking activities will always depend on your own objectives. If you wish to look at ‘learning’ (based on what you learn about the issues you are presented with in your modules), then you might have a different set of rankings from those if you wanted to look at ‘performance’ (based on how well you perform in an assessment), although good learning should always lead to a good performance of course. Your lecturers would almost universally say that learning is more important than assessment, since your learning will stay with you beyond university, but your performance in an assessment would only last until your final exam in that subject.

So to rank these in terms of learning means that lectures would be first, followed by seminars or tutorials, reading a chapter of the textbook or academic journals, using a course or textbook website, receiving feedback on your work, asking for help from a lecturer, and discussing your learning with other students. These will be most helpful from a learning perspective.