An Experimental Study On Promoting Senior High School Students’ Learning Autonomy By Reflective Learning

One of the most difficult and key points for the new round of curriculum reform is theproblem to change the way of study. Along with the advancement of curriculum reform,learning autonomy paralleled with inquiry-based learning and cooperative learning approachhas caught more and more attention. Reflection is also an essential part for learners’development, but in China most of the researches focus on teachers’ reflective teaching. Infact, the improvement of students’ reflective learning ability is the ultimate goal of theseresearches and students’ are the subjects of education. Now, some scholars will combinereflection with autonomous learning, and the term reflective autonomous learning appeared,but there is few empirical researches in this respect yet. Because of the heavy learning tasks,high school students are in desperate need of autonomous learning ability. Based on this, theauthor chose senior high school students as subjects of the experiment.The purpose of this experimental study is to improve high school students’ ability ofEnglish autonomous learning through reflective learning strategies. The research subjects are120high school students of Grade One from Haixing NO.1Middle School. They are fromtwo parallel classes, Class Three is the experimental class and Class Four is the control class.The whole experiment lasted for12weeks. Reflective learning strategies are applied to theexperimental class while the control class is on normal path. In the experiment, variousresearch instruments are used such as: test, questionnaires, interview, reflective diary andothers. Before and after the experiment, test and questionnaires are given to all the subjects,the data collected are analyzed with SPSS13.0. In addition, the students in the experimentalclasses are required to write reflective journals every week, which aims to observe the changeof students’ autonomous learning consciousness. After the experiments the teacherinterviewed20students from two classes to investigate deep into their changes of learningattitudes and emotion.Both the qualitative data and quantitative data collected lead to the conclusion thatreflective learning can improve high school students’ autonomous learning ability. Before theexperiment there are no significant differences between the test achievements of the twoclasses. After that the student’s grades have significantly improved more in the experimental class than in control class. The data of the questionnaires before and after the experimentsalso shows that students’ interests and autonomous learning awareness developed rapidly inthe experimental class. During the interview, the students themselves also mentioned that thetraining of reflective learning methods enhanced their ability of supervision and control overtheir learning process. The diaries we can easily reflect that students’ ability of reflection andself-regulation are improved.