The LASSI at City University of Hong Kong
by Dr. Eva Wong and Dr. Kevin Downing,
City University of Hong Kong

Introduction

At City University of Hong Kong, our experience with LASSI began in 1996. In the beginning LASSI proved to be a useful tool for individual students and teachers in terms of analyzing and improving particular skills and strategies. Over time we have found it valuable to integrate LASSI results with other information in the University. This paper is a brief description of that ten-year history.

The Hong Kong Universities General Council (UGC) has issued a mandate on the adoption of outcomebased teaching and learning (OBTL). That mandate requires a four-year curriculum and places responsibility for providing evidence for effective student learning squarely upon the University. Therefore, it was decided to use the LASSI as one institution-wide measure of the effectiveness of the learning environment, and of the 'added value' that City University provides to students. This decision was made following a pilot run involving some 1,800 volunteer freshmen from the September 2005 intake. In September, 2006 the LASSI was made compulsory for all freshmen at City University. Handling the LASSI and other institutional data for approximately 5,000 new students who would take the test three times during their undergraduate careers (entry, interim and exit tests) clearly required a more integrated approach with our institution-wide information systems.

The LASSI data system provided by H&H worked well for programme-level or even departmental purposes, but it was not sufficient for managing the large data sets generated and used at an institutional level. Therefore, we worked with H&H to develop a system which clearly identified each student who completed the LASSI and allowed the data to be stored centrally at City University for further analysis.

The Information Systems at City University

The integration of administrative systems to achieve better efficiency and effectiveness is one of the main objectives of City University's information technology strategy. The student information system (SIS) used at City University is SunGard SCT Banner which was purchased in mid-1997. In February 1998, Admissions went live as the first module of the SIS. In the ensuing years, implementation and development continued on the student system and by 2000, City University had a fully integrated SIS, from admissions to graduation, with a suite of web-based functions to deliver services directly to end users. Once the student system was established and functioning well, human resources went live in 2001, followed by an alumni system in 2002. Given this context, it was decided that AIMS (our internal name for the Banner system) would be used for student identification for LASSI completion. Therefore, in common with all other student related data, the resulting LASSI data of individual students would be stored inside AIMS so that more detailed analyses and correlation with other data is facilitated.

Integrating the LASSI with City University Systems

With students required to take the LASSI on three separate occasions as their undergraduate study progresses, it is crucial that only designated students are allowed to complete the questionnaire at specific time frames; in other words, freshmen on entry, Year 2 students in semester three, and graduating students in their final semester. Consequently, the Enterprise Solutions Unit, which is in charge of administrative computing at City University, developed a programme in AIMS which checks students' IDs for their privilege to take the LASSI. This programme was then released to the University e-portal, the most familiar interface for students, to make it possible for only designated students to complete the survey. As soon as a designated student is identified, the programme automatically connects him/her to the LASSI system and provides LASSI with our invoice number, school number, student ID, student name and email in order to allow each student to complete the questionnaire. Once the student starts completing the questionnaire, he/she is in the LASSI environment and the normal functions and features of LASSI are available. On completion, the student can print out a copy of the results for personal records, and the raw data are stored in the LASSI system. H & H Publishing then provided a tailor-made programme to allow City U personnel to do a batched download of our students' LASSI data on a routine basis. This data download includes full responses to the 80 questions and the consolidated percentiles of the 10 LASSI items with a date stamp to mark when the test was taken.

These batches of data are then uploaded into our Banner system according to the student IDs so that individual LASSI data pertaining to each student is stored together with the individual's other academic and related data. This final step allows us to track the number of times each student has completed the LASSI survey, and prevent ad hoc completions which might confound our results. With the LASSI data properly stored in AIMS, we can now use the standard web functions to make the results available to individual students as part of their academic and learning profile. Our students are used to getting their academic and other related information via the University e-portal which provides single sign-on facilities to AIMS. By making the LASSI results a composite part of their records on AIMS, student retrieval is easily facilitated within their familiar learning environment.

Conclusion

In addition to providing easy access to their own results, aggregated results from the entire class in any course are provided to teachers in order to allow them to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses in learning and study strategies for their classes and devise appropriate teaching and learning activities which address the specific identified learning needs. The system used to disseminate this information is our elearning platform, Blackboard Academic Suite and every credit-bearing course at City University now has a Blackboard component which contains class based LASSI information. Using the single sign-on function between Blackboard and AIMS, the ESU has provided a further programme which ensures that the aggregated LASSI results from each course can be accessed by the corresponding teachers via the standard class list function. All academic staff are familiar with the University e-portal which provides access to their Blackboard courses and by successfully integrating the LASSI scores into our standard information systems, we have ensured that both students and teachers are better informed and can readily use this data to improve our learning environment. Finally, this combination of systems has allowed those responsible for institutional research to ensure that data from a variety of sources is integrated for more efficient analysis and publication. Consequently, university staff take a renewed interest in both the practical and academic uses of the LASSI, some of which is evidenced in the publication list which has resulted from this initiative, and City University has taken another important step to ensure that improvements in our learning and teaching environment are demonstrably student-focused and data driven.

Publication List

Downing, K.J., Shin, K., & Wong, E. (2006) 'Social and Cultural Factors in Metacognitive Development. IUT.' (Improving University Teaching) 31st International Conference, Dunedin, New Zealand, July 2006.

Downing, K.J., Cheung, H., Shin, K., & Wong, C. (2006) 'Thinking About Thinking Online.' International Conference on ICT in Teaching and Learning, The Open University of Hong Kong, July 2006.

Downing, K.J. & Shin, K. (2006) 'Developing Metacognition with LASSI Online.' International Conference of the Asia-Pacific Educational Research Association, Hong Kong Institute of Education, November 2006.

Downing, K.J., Kwong, T., Shin, K., Lam, I. & Chan, B., (2007). 'Does problem-based learning enhance metacognition?' International PBL Symposium 2007 – Reinventing PBL, Republic Polytechnic, Singapore, March 2007. (Invited paper).

Downing, K., Ho, R., Shin, K., Vrijmoed, L. & Wong, E. (2007). 'Metacognitive Development and Moving Away.' Educational Studies. Vol.33, No.1 1-13, 2007.

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