Accountability for Learning Belongs to the Learner Janice A Wiersema & Barbara L. Licklider Iowa State University One goal of higher education is to develop productive citizens who solve challenging problems and seek new insights. A first step toward such an end is getting students to take charge of their own thinking, actions, and ultimately, their own learning. This paper examines findings from a phenomenological study of eight students involved in an interdisciplinary community focused on developing responsible lifelong learners. Although students’ descriptions of the nature of high expectations that impacted their learning were not surprising, it is significant that every student, independently, identified being held accountable for meeting the high expectations was critical for their development as learners. Implications for educators focus on holding students accountable for learning even when students do not like it. Students know it makes a difference. When faculty persist, so will students, and as they hold themselves accountable for learning they can become the citizens and professionals the world needs.

______________________________________________________ Wiersema, J. A., & Licklider, B. L. (2007). Accountability for learning belongs to the learner. Higher Education in Review, 4, 43-61.

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Higher Education in Review Accountability for Learning Belongs to the Learner

Today’s college students are tomorrow’s professionals who will be held accountable for their daily decisions and actions. Assisting students in becoming productive citizens capable of solving challenging problems and acting as lifelong learners is a primary goal of higher education. Getting students to become responsible learners—students who take charge of their own thinking, actions, and ultimately, their own learning— is one of the first steps toward achieving such an end. A series of studies, however, reviewed by Gardiner (1998), “consistently show that the college experience for most students comprises a loosely organized, unfocused curriculum, with undefined outcomes, classes that emphasize passive listening, lectures that frequently demand only the recall of memorized material or low-level comprehension of concepts” (p. 72). The good grades received from typical students’ practices, such as memorizing and recall, are not necessarily accurate indicators of their abilities to solve illdefined, real-world problems (Huba & Freed, 2000). In fact, as Leamnson (1999) points out: It requires little effort on their [students’] part to hear what is said and to repeat what they heard… As with all of us, students find that it takes little effort to “run through” well established brain circuits, but enormous effort, even momentary discomfort, to fire up previously unused regions of the brain and work those new synapses until they stabilize. Learning new things, in short, is strenuous. Students will avoid it if they can. (pp. 19-20) Meeting the challenges of the future requires not only content knowledge and technical skills, but also a willingness to do one’s own thinking and accept responsibility for one’s actions. The challenge, therefore, for postsecondary educators is to move from more traditional education to provide learning experiences that ensure students develop the cognitive capacities and dispositions necessary to become responsible citizens and professionals (Ducatel, 1998; Mullin, 2001). Logically, one of the practices that educators might adopt to assist students in taking charge of their own learning is to hold students accountable for meeting the challenges and expectations set forth in course syllabi. For the rest of their professional lives, students will be required to make choices about their thinking and actions. These choices will have consequences, both intended and unintended. In other words, as professionals, students will be held accountable for their thinking and

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for what they do. To develop tomorrow’s professionals, faculty must provide the opportunity for students to practice accountability—accepting responsibility and meeting expectations—in the safety of a postsecondary classroom. To best understand the notion of accountability in this article, a brief review of how accountability is used in the literature is appropriate. Literature Review Reviewing the research regarding accountability in education conducted over the past 40 years leaves us wondering whether the notion of accountability is so deceptively simple that educators may intuitively assume it a requirement for learning, or whether accountability is so complex that it can only be discussed under the umbrella of high-stakes testing. During the 1970s, the shift from a behavioral approach to education toward a cognitive approach emphasized the active and constructive role of the learner (Wittrock, 1979). From this perspective, the “learners are active, responsible, and accountable for their role in generative learning.… This concept of individual responsibility for learning is an old, important, and somewhat neglected idea in instruction” (Wittrrock, 1979, pp. 5-6). Consistent with this cognitive point of view, educators are responsible for teaching and students are responsible for learning. According to Leamnson (2000), learning is a private matter and only happens as it occurs in the brain of the individual. It follows, then, that learners must ultimately be accountable for their own learning. Educational reforms over the past decade, however, shift the notion of accountability for learning from the individual learner to teachers, administrators, and institutions in the form of high-stakes testing (Carnoy & Loeb, 2002; Colby, Ehrlich, Beaumont, & Stephens, 2003; Linn, 2000; O’Day, 2002). “Everywhere you turn—from Congress to the statehouse to local communities and parent groups—some people are trying to make other people more accountable for some thing in education” (O’Day, 2002, p. 293). According to Kohn (1998), the performance standards set out for schools are frequently offered not as guidelines (along with the help necessary to meet them) but as requirements to be imposed on educators. The operative word in such discussions is accountability, which almost always turns out to mean tighter control over what happens in classrooms by people who are not in classrooms. The effect on learning is comparable to the effect a noose has on breathing. (p. 197) These requirements can put pressure on teachers who in turn may place pressure and tighten control on students, thereby, removing opportunities

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for students to manage or direct their own learning. Research indicates that students under these conditions are less likely to learn successfully than peers in classrooms where teachers “facilitate” the learning process (Kohn, 1998). In other words, the more accountability that is put on the teacher to document narrow student performance, the worse the students actually do perform. Although many studies have yet to be conducted, much of the current research on the effect of high-stakes testing on education—trying to make other people more accountable for outcomes in education—is summed up by Linn (2000) in his study: I would like to conclude by summarizing a compelling case showing that the major uses of tests for student and school accountability during the past 50 years have improved education and student learning in dramatic ways. Unfortunately, that is not my conclusion… The unintended negative effects of the highstakes accountability used often outweigh the intended positive effects. (p.14) Notably absent, however, in the recent literature about accountability is reference to holding students accountable for doing the mental work required for meaningful learning. Weimer (2002) alludes to student accountability in her writing about who is responsible for what in the teaching and learning process: The approaches taken to deal with student immaturity and irresponsibility convey contradictory messages about who is responsible for what. Our actions, which set all the parameters and conditions for learning, create the impression that we are the ones ultimately responsible for student learning. We are not and never can be. The decision to learn is exclusively a student decision— one that we can and should influence, but never one that we can control. (p. 102) It is possible to find positive effects of student accountability in current education research, but all relate to studies involving cooperative learning (Blumenfeld, Marx, Soloway, & Krajcik, 1996; Gokhale, 1995; Johnson & Johnson, 2003; Slavin, 2002). Accountability is studied and discussed as individual accountability—the responsibility of each member of a team to master the content and contribute to the success of the team. Since cooperative learning is built on the notion of “sinking or swimming together,” it follows that individuals are responsible not only for their own learning, but also for the learning of their team members: “Individual

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accountability is the key to ensuring that all group members are in fact strengthened by learning cooperatively” (Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 1991, p. 20). It seems logical that if individual accountability is important for deep learning in teams, it ought to be important for all meaningful learning. In the phenomenological study presented in this paper, three graduate students and five undergraduate students in a leadership development program identified that being held individually accountable was crucial to their development as learners. Background Recently, we had the opportunity to combine our knowledge of human learning and the principles of learning organizations in a leadership development program for National Science Foundation (NSF) Scholarship for Service (SFS) students at a land-grant, Research I university in the Midwest. We developed the curriculum for the four consecutive, two-credit courses, and we co-facilitate the courses. As part of the NSF SFS program, students are awarded full scholarships in exchange for two years of federal government work in cyber security following graduation. The NSF SFS program is an interdisciplinary effort involving students and faculty in computer engineering, computer science, mathematics, political science, management information systems, and education. Fellowship recipients must participate in a two-year leadership development program in addition to the requirements of their majors. The leadership program is designed with an emphasis on: (a) learning about learning, (b) learning about self, (c) purposefully developing community, (d) deliberately practicing and refining skills to support and encourage the growth of self and others, (e) practicing metacognition, and (f) engaging in intentional mental processing (Wiersema, 2006). In addition to affording plenty of individual discussion time, weekly three-hour class meetings provide opportunities for students to participate in frequent team learning. According to the students, the knowledge, skills, and dispositions desired as outcomes of this program are certainly outside the experiences and comfort zones of their previous educational encounters. For example, in the past students were able to attend some classes without getting involved in discussions. We expected them not only to express and defend their thinking publicly, but also to challenge the thinking of their peers. Students had not been expected to use rubrics to critique their own performances or to set their own goals for growth and development. One of the greatest challenges for most of the students was engaging in regular reflection and recording their thoughts and feelings in journals.

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By the end of the first year, it was clear that these students were not only taking responsibility for their own learning, they were also developing into a productive community of learners. Evidence was found in their behaviors prior to and during class and in personal reflections captured in journals. For example, not only did students come to class having done the reading, they also met with each other outside of class to discuss the assignments and to challenge each other to think more deeply. Without prompting, students developed questions to engage each other in perspective taking or problem-solving. They began analyzing current events and applying theories studied in class to real-world situations. It seemed appropriate to try to discern some of the reasons for changes in students’ behaviors. In the study reported here, we sought to determine the important factors affecting student self-responsibility (accountability) for their own learning. Methodology This research project was a qualitative study designed to reveal the factors most responsible for students’ growth and development according to the perception of the students. “Drawing from a long tradition in anthropology, sociology, and clinical psychology, qualitative research has, in the last twenty years, achieved status and visibility in the social sciences and helping professions” (Merriam, 2002, p. 3). Procedures used in qualitative studies differ distinctly from the more traditional methods of quantitative research. “Qualitative inquiry employs different knowledge claims, strategies of inquiry, and methods of data collection and analysis” (Creswell, 2003, p. 179). In this section, we provide a rationale for the selection of phenomenology to guide the study, briefly explain our roles as researchers and our efforts to bracket beliefs and biases, and describe the processes used for data collection and analysis. Methods A constructionist view of the source of knowledge informed this study. “Constructionism is an epistemology embodied in many theoretical perspectives” (Crotty, 2004, p. 3) that rejects the views of objectivism— that truth exists in the world and is just waiting to be discovered. Instead, the constructionist stance is that “truth, or meaning, comes into existence in and out of our engagement with the realities in our world. There is no meaning without a mind. Meaning is not discovered, but constructed” (p. 9). According to this understanding of knowledge, individuals will likely construct meanings differently, even during similar experiences. This epistemology gives rise to a number of theoretical perspectives for conducting qualitative research.

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Phenomenology flows from an interpretivist theoretical perspective. Our desire to uncover the essence of the students’ experiences—to discover what contributed to their learning and development—made this an ideal phenomenological research study (Colaizzi, 1978; Moustakas, 1994). True to phenomenological studies, this methodology allowed the essence of how students experienced the phenomenon to emerge from the eight participants (Creswell, 2003). As developers and co-facilitators of the leadership program, we witnessed the phenomenon of learning in community and observed the students develop into responsible learners and effective team members (Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 1991). The growth we witnessed in these students far surpassed any similar successes with students in all of our combined years (almost 60) of experience in public education. Therefore, it was our desire to uncover the factors that contributed to this growth. Epoche Process In conducting this study, we realized that our own biases and beliefs are the result of many years of experience in education and are very strong. Therefore, as researchers, it was necessary to bracket our own viewpoints in order to uncover the essence of the students’ experiences. We did this by following the phenomenological epoche process. According to Moustakas (1994), the epoche is: a preparation for deriving new knowledge but also an experience in itself, a process of setting aside predilections, prejudices, predispositions, and allowing things, events, and people to enter anew into consciousness, and to look and see them again, as if for the first time. (p. 85) The best way for us to engage in this process was through reflection— identifying, first of all, our own beliefs based on our prior experiences of helping others learn and then our biases as a result of our interpretation of the students’ experiences throughout the learning opportunities in the leadership program. It became clear that before we could understand the phenomenon through the perceptions of the participants it was first necessary to make our beliefs, biases, and assumptions explicit: • Learning happens in the mind of the individual. • Each individual is responsible for his/her own learning. • Much learning occurs through social interaction. • Each individual has a responsibility to contribute to the learning of others.

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Interdependence is more complex and a higher state of being than independence. • Intentional mental processing and metacognition are critical for constructing meaning. • A safe environment enhances learning. • Interpersonal skills must be deliberately taught and practiced. • Development of community requires learners to engage in team learning opportunities. Reviewing this list frequently before engaging in the interviews and while working with the data allowed us to focus on the lived experiences of the students. Participants The “idea behind qualitative research is to purposefully select participants . . . that will best help the researcher understand the problem and the research question” (Creswell, 2003, p. 185), therefore, the participants were the cohort of students who experienced the observed leadership development phenomenon. The cohort was small enough that we had the luxury of not having to select a subset of participants. Of the nine students, eight consented to be a part of the study: four undergraduate men, one undergraduate woman, and three graduate men. Two male undergraduates majored in computer engineering, one in management information systems, and one in computer science. The female undergraduate student was also a computer science major. Two of the graduate students were computer science majors and the other was a math major. Although the eight participants, who had always received high academic grades, were in their fourth semester of the NSF SFS program, the retrospective study was designed to focus on their learning experiences during the first two semesters of the leadership development program. Data Collection The goal in data collection for a phenomenological study is to collect rich, meaningful data that accurately depict the participants’ interpretations of the phenomenon. The primary method used to achieve such data is the interview (Merriam, 2002). Phenomenologists usually use in-depth, semistructured interviews guided by open-ended questions to increase the probability of gathering comparable data across participants. In addition, this type of interview enables researchers to gather descriptive data in the participants’ own words to provide insights regarding the interpretation of their experiences (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003).

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Initially, one of us conducted a group interview with all eight participants; the open-ended questions in our interview protocol were emailed to students one week prior to the interview. The questions were as follows: • How are you different as a learner than you were one year ago? • How did those changes come about? • What was most important to you for your own growth and development? • If you could make one change, what would it be? Why? • Is there anything you believe should not be changed? Why? • What else would you like to tell me that would help me better understand your experience? Students were encouraged to engage in reflection before the meeting and bring any written thoughts with them. The group interview lasted approximately 90 minutes and was audiotaped and transcribed. The researcher who conducted the focus group also interviewed each of the eight participants individually. Because of our desire to uncover each individual’s own personal meaning for the experience that led to his/ her development as a responsible learner, we chose to use semi-structured interviews. Each 30 to 40 minute interview was audiotaped, transcribed verbatim, and rechecked for accuracy. Copies were made of each transcription for use during the analysis and interpretation of the data. Frequent reflection and periodic written self-assessments were requirements throughout the leadership development program. Reflections were recorded in journals. Student journals were photocopied and used as sources of data. At the end of each semester, students were required to complete self-assessments describing their growth and development as leaders. Those written self-assessments were also used as data in this study. Data Analysis and Interpretation Data were analyzed and interpreted by both researchers independently following steps suggested by Colaizzi (1978): (1) read all data, (2) extract significant statements, (3) formulate meanings, (4) organize into clusters of themes, (5) integrate into an exhaustive description, and (6) formulate the exhaustive description in as unequivocal a statement of identification of the phenomenon’s fundamental structure as possible. We started our analysis by reading through all data in order to familiarize ourselves with students’ perspectives by listening to the words of the participants as they described their experiences. Reading through the data a second time, we

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began coding using various colors to highlight significant statements. Rereading and sorting the coded statements allowed us to begin formulating meanings from the significant statements. Any discrepancies that arose were resolved by discussing individual interpretations and by returning to the data for additional evidence to support claims. Additionally, we identified themes through our discussions. The findings were validated by taking these themes back to the participants and asking for feedback. Since this member-checking provided neither new data nor any new insights about interpretations, we proceeded to the final step in the analysis—formulating the exhaustive description in as unequivocal a statement of identification of the phenomenon’s fundamental structure as possible. Findings The goal of phenomenological research is to use the themes that are identified to uncover a comprehensive description of the experience as perceived by the participants. The seven themes that emerged from this study were: (1) self-identified growth and development, (2) continuous reflection, (3) metacognition, (4) high expectations for addressing challenging tasks, (5) interdependence, (6) accountability, and (7) supportive environment. The fundamental structure of the NSF SFS leadership experience, then, as perceived by the eight participants, was a self-recognized transformative development resulting from being engaged in intentional mental processing before, during, and after being challenged by and held accountable for addressing complex, meaningful tasks in an interdependent and supportive environment over time. This complex statement gives rise to many possibilities for future research with implications for educators and students; for example, the impact of challenging students with complex, real-world problems; the importance of a safe environment for learning; or multiple ways to engage students in intentional mental processing. While most of these findings were not surprising, what was surprising to us was that each of the participants independently identified the importance of being held accountable for working hard at learning as being critical to their development. Indeed, this notion of accountability was not even one of our identified values and beliefs in the epoche process. Therefore, this paper addresses students’ identification that being held accountable for pursuing their own learning had a critical impact on their development as Pat commented in a journal entry: By assigning us to go back and look at things we’ve done or somewhat completed, reflect upon them and then apply new things

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to them we are learning more and getting more out of topics and materials. We don’t just read a chapter and then never go back, we are required to apply those things learned to new assignments later on. Pat seemed to understand that we expected students to fully engage in thinking and applying what they were learning, rather than simply reading an assignment for class and never again using the information. More importantly, he seemed to realize that this kind of expectation was causing him to learn at a deeper level. Early in the program, as facilitators, it was necessary for us to demand accountability. The expectations and the performance behaviors we asked of students were unfamiliar to them. The following journal entries reveal their struggles as they worked through resistance toward meeting our expectations: ...being pressured to share my own thoughts and ideas in more of a public setting than I am used to. (Pat) It was really hard at first. The standard was to try and do five [journal entries] a week, and for me that was impossible. Changing my own standard to four made it a little more accomplishable. (Cody) I guess if I didn’t have to, I probably wouldn’t [journal]. (Alex) Such comments from journal entries were common of all eight participants. It was clear from their journals and their conversations that these students were accustomed to doing just enough work to get the grades they wanted in many of their college courses. They even seemed to realize that if we had not taken measures to hold them accountable for meeting expectations, they would not have invested time in their own growth and development. Holding students accountable through their resistance to showing evidence of their thinking and learning was our responsibility as program leaders. This was not usually easy, nor pleasant, so we had to persist longer than they resisted. … at first I did it [journaling] simply because it was a requirement of being in the class. Over time it developed into a valuable tool for me, but the problem is that I wouldn’t have done it in the first place if I wasn’t ‘forced’ to. (Kim, end-of-year self-assessment)

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Higher Education in Review Knowing that it would be more or less a weekly requirement to share my personal feelings with a larger group, I realized that it was not something I just had to get through; it was something I had to become better at. (Pat, comment during group interview) I think the discussion we do in a large group gives everyone the opportunity to place ideas on a stage, including pushing those of use who are less prone to do so on our own. (Taylor, comment during group interview)

Even though the students may not have liked being held responsible for meeting high expectations, their reflections about their first year in the program reveal that they did realize the need for it. As students began to meet our expectations of demonstrating their thinking and learning, they became less resistant and started to recognize the value of being held accountable. They then began to reap the rewards of engaging in the hard work of taking charge of their own growth and development. One extremely shy student, Lee, found it very difficult to express his ideas publicly, and, despite accepting responsibility to contribute to the learning of others, it was a constant challenge for him to force himself to do so. We devised a strategy to support his practice. The following excerpt from Lee’s journal during February reveals his reaction to the plan: I kind of asked [my instructor] to keep me accountable for visible contributions to the team, and that if she feels I have not shown enough, she should let me know. She would like to see more effort. I think this plan will help others see me as more of a contributor, as well as allowing me to get more out of the course. The realization that being held accountable was critical to their development as professionals prodded the students to take the final step of holding themselves accountable for working at learning, as revealed by Taylor: “Knowing I have the inclination to allow myself to become disempowered, I have to force myself out of my comfort zone regularly.” Alex applied responsibility for learning to his other courses: I figured out how I was going to try and do it [get more out of lectures]. Instead of just sitting there like some wilting plant trying to just soak up the information like sunlight in the hopes that it would help me, I needed to make myself a lot more active in the class. A lot of professors are very bad at involving the class and

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making us active participants in our learning, but if they weren’t going to do it, I was. So I resolved to take notes in more of my own words, try my own little examples of concepts they were explaining and generally try to become a more active participant in the lecture process. As they resisted old habits, students became the responsible learners they needed to be: ...even though it’s tempting to just check things off a list and forget about them afterwards. To help with this new way of thinking, I had to become motivated to learn for myself, and not just to please others. I could complete half of the activities or not do much reading if I really wanted to, but since I know it’s for my personal development and I would only be disabling myself, it becomes worthwhile to put a true effort into the activities. (Kim) …I have learned that I need to take … responsibility for learning the material. On the other hand, I have also thought much about how I can take leadership in my less challenging classes and take it upon myself to go beyond the required class work. In both cases, I have to take leadership to learn. (Cody) I believed what I was told, ‘this learning is for you.’ This has allowed me to have a different kind of expectation (maybe even a higher expectation) than I have for other classes. I do not set out to learn a certain set of material; I set out to learn as much as I can. (Kevin) These comments, taken from student self-assessments at the end of the first year in the program, are but a few of many such statements students made that disclosed their pride in taking responsibility for their own learning. Our desire is for all students to successfully complete the journey of becoming professionals who do their own thinking and own their choices of actions. Indeed, these students moved from wanting to be told what to do to requesting open-ended challenges to control their own learning (Cranton, 1994), as Doug suggested with this comment during the group interview: I think maybe last year, like when we had our syllabus, we had this set thing, all these things we were going to do, whereas this year, it’s like really flexible, we can say, “Oh, we actually want to

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Higher Education in Review do this instead, this would be a lot better for us.” …But we really didn’t know then, and now we know the things that help us. Limitations

Limitations are inherent in the nature and purpose of this study. The role of the researcher must be a consideration in every scholarly inquiry, but certainly impacts a descriptive qualitative study in specific ways. Not only were we the researchers, but as co-facilitators of the courses, we also experienced the phenomenon of learning in community with the participants. It was our experience that provided the passion to conduct the study, but that passion also had the potential to bias the results. Therefore, we took numerous precautions to increase the validity of the findings. Chief among these, prior to collecting the data, was to engage in the phenomenological epoche process to recognize our biases and beliefs. We returned to the list often throughout the study—during data collection, analysis, interpretation, and reporting the findings—which kept us always mindful of our biases. To further address potential concerns about validity of the findings, additional strategies commonly followed by qualitative researchers were employed. Multiple data sources—focus group interview, individual interviews, journals, and self-assessments—provided a plethora of information. This triangulation of the data allowed us to build a coherent justification for the themes that emerged. Returning those final themes to the participants for feedback (after graduation) provided a check on the accuracy of the interpretation of the data. No new data or insights emerged during this member-checking. Additionally, since the purpose of this phenomenological study was to uncover the essence of the participants’ experiences of learning in community, the findings are limited to a specific small group of students— seven men and one woman, in a Midwestern university, during the first year of a two-year program. Since data were collected early in the fourth semester of the program, it is possible that the time lapse had some impact on the data. The purpose of this research was to identify key components that contributed to the growth and development of specific individuals. No attempt has been made to generalize the results to other populations; however, early observations from our work with three other groups of students learning in community indicate that similar results may be occurring. Therefore, findings related to students accepting accountability for their own learning are important enough to suggest implications for educators.

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Implications for Practice Students enter postsecondary education with a vast array of prior experiences with formal education that shapes their beliefs and practices related to learning. Some of those experiences place much of the accountability for student learning on institutions and educators. This can lead to college students becoming entrenched in the paradigm of learning in which they come to class expecting to be told what to do and how to think, check assignments off a list, and take tests that measure how much information has been stored in short-term memory. Students may have experienced an education system in which much of what they are asked to do and to learn has little meaning in their lives. They may have, therefore, developed habits of going through the motions to meet minimum requirements in order to receive the grades they want and then moving on to the next class in pursuit of a degree. Not all students engage in the mental work necessary to make their own meanings of their classroom experience—considering neither the relevance for their current studies nor the implications for their future professional lives. Unfortunately, however, their lives beyond college will require that they learn continuously, holding themselves accountable for their own learning and for their own actions. There are practices which postsecondary educators can employ to better prepare students to meet the challenges they will face as professionals and citizens. Deceptively simple among these practices is to hold students accountable for meeting the expectations set for them. Professors want (expect) their students to be diligent, to engage in every learning opportunity planned for them. According to Weimer (2002), “students will start assuming more responsibility for their learning once we start making them accountable for their actions” (pp. 105-106). Unfortunately, educators may send messages that less is expected. For example, class interaction may require students to read and think before coming to class, but how do instructors respond when students have not done the preparation? Are students held accountable or does the instructor change the plan for the day to attend to those students who failed to prepare for class, by, for example, spending the vast majority of class time conveying content to students that students were to have studied on their own instead of engaging students in thinking related to the content? Our findings support a claim by Weimer (2002), “Expectations for more responsible student behavior are conveyed not by what we say but by what we do. And we compromise what we say when what we do contradicts it” (p. 106). If, in fact, we expect students to take responsibility for their own learning, our behaviors must consistently

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hold them accountable for doing the thinking required for learning. In addition, our findings reveal that students can identify, as a contributor to their growth, the importance of instructors holding them accountable for meeting expectations. Implications for Theory Since learning happens in individual minds, students have to think to learn. “Learning,” as David Perkins points out, “is a consequence of thinking—it’s less the doing than the thinking, the reflecting on that doing that counts” (as cited in Leamnson, 2000, p. 37). Although learning from experience is powerful for most individuals, rarely will they “extract all the potential meaning that is implicit or move beyond their current meanings without being challenged” (Caine & Caine, 1994, p. 156). According to Caine and Caine such challenge includes demanding students think critically: asking more than telling, exploring multiple perspectives, solving ill-defined problems, recognizing details while searching for big ideas and suggesting broad implications. Holding students accountable for the hard mental work of such challenges “allows students to begin to take charge of learning and the development of personal meanings” (p. 122). Further, engaging in deep thinking (which only the learner can do) “embraces reflection and metacognition activities. It emphasizes selfreflection and deeper learning” (p. 122). The findings presented above support the notion that students know they must be held accountable for doing the hard work required for learning, but they may not like it. As Weimer (2002), points out: “The students whose teachers have been telling them everything they needed to know from the first grade on, don’t necessarily appreciate having this support suddenly withdrawn” (p. 150). In fact, they may resist taking the responsibility for their own growth and development. “Overcoming the resistance is not something the teacher does for the students; it is something the teacher works to help students accomplish for themselves” (p. 157). Faculty will likely need to persist longer than students resist. Faculty must do whatever it takes to get students to think before, during, and after every learning opportunity via the expectations they set for students and the learning experiences they plan. Students must be reminded continually that the assignments are for them, not the professor—and professors must model that this is so by listening as students reveal their thinking. Students will come to accept being held accountable if the tasks they are asked to do have meaning, and they will come to appreciate the freedom and power associated with thinking deeply and taking responsibility for their own learning.

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Conclusion Becoming a responsible learner via holding oneself accountable for learning is probably best summarized by Alex, one of the participants in the leadership development program, “At first we tried to refuse to do what you asked. Then we did it because you made us. And now we do it because it works!” This is a path students likely take as they maneuver through their educational experiences before they realize learning is for them, not their instructors. The message is clear. As educators we must hold students accountable for all we ask them to do, even when they do not like it. They know it makes a difference. When we persist, so will our students, and as they hold themselves accountable for learning they will become the citizens and professionals the world needs.

References Bogdan, R. C., & Biklen, S. K. (2003). Qualitative research for education: An introduction to theories and methods (4th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Blumenfeld, P., Marx, R., Soloway, E., & Krajcik, J. (1996). Learning with peers: From small group cooperation to collaborative communities. Educational Researcher, 25(8), 37-40. Caine, R., & Caine, G. (1994). Making connections: Teaching and the human brain (Rev. ed.). Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley. Carnoy, M., & Loeb, S. (2002). Does external accountability affect student outcomes? Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 24(4), 305331. Colaizzi, P. F. (1978). Psychological research as the phenomenologist views it. In R. Valle & M. King (Eds.) Existential-phenomenological alternatives for psychology (pp. 48-70). New York: Oxford University Press. Colby, A., Ehrlich, T., Beaumont, E., & Stephens, J. (2003). Educating citizens: Preparing America’s undergraduates for lives of moral and civic responsibility. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Cranton, P. (1994). Self-directed and transformative instructional development. The Journal of Higher Education, 65(6), 726-744. Creswell, J. W. (2003). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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__________________________________________________________ Janice A Wiersema wrote this article as a Ph.D. candidate in Higher Education at Iowa State University. Currently, Dr. Wiersema serves as a leadership development lecturer in Iowa State’s Information Assurance Center in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She can be reached at [email protected]. Barbara L. Licklider, Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policies Studies at Iowa State University, assisted with writing this article.