Investigating students’ Reflection of Learning experience and perception on achievement of Graduate capability in experiential Learning through an interdisciplinary project

摘要

Educators in higher education experience paradigm shift by adopting experiential education in engaging students in their learning process from conventional lecture system. Experiential learning enables students to acquire knowledge and skills through hand-on experiencing, particularly in interdisciplinary subject area. In line with the American education which require a student to take a wide variety of courses from different discipline, commonly known as general education: literature, science, the social sciences, the arts, history, and so forth prior to focusing on a specific field of study, a one-shot interdisciplinary project-based learning was conducted in Fall 2016 semester for students undertaking various subjects in American Degree Program (ADP) at Taylor’s University, Malaysia. Lecturers in ADP believe that this project besides serving as an authentic purpose for the acquisition of knowledge and skills in most of the content area, it also promotes the acquisition of critical thinking skills and achieve the graduate capability as prescribed by Taylor’s University on its students. The dependent variables were participants’ reflection of learning experience, leadership ability and perception on achievement of Taylor’s Graduate Capability (TGC). Participants were requested to answer an online questionnaire in Google sheets. The questionnaire consists of 5 points Likert scales survey questions with 54 items which capture the three dependent variables with high reliability, i.e. Cronbach Alpha of 0.972. The collected data will be analyzed using statistical package, SPSS. Results from independent sample T-tests and Pearson Moment Correlation Coefficient showed that there is positive correlation between reflection of learning experience and achievement of TGC, and there is no statistical significant difference in the means of reflection of learning experience and perception on achievement of TGC between Freshmen and Sophomore participants. Result also show that participants who involved in organizing the AmFest: American Festival project (Group Leader) have very high positive correlation among their leadership capability, reflection of learning experience and achievement of TGC. The critical reflection from participants were collected and summarized to validate its consistency with the results obtain from statistical analysis.