4.3 Associating learning with ...

Of the categories which arose, this one above the others was predominantly generated from the in vivo codes of the participants. In order to describe the learning taking place in the images, the most common method was to associate the learning with a specific activity, like 'reading.' Although some of these activities were rather vague, like 'working,' several involved assimilation or gathering of information and others some element of processing.Figure 11 - in vivo codes

Charmaz (2006) advises that later analysis is aided if codes preserve actions. Whilst that was not entirely possible using in vivo codes, those which did constitute actions have been extracted and used to generate a word cloud. Using the normal convention in Wordle where the size of the word/phrase indicates the frequency with which it was mentioned, we can see the significance which respondents attach to 'making notes' as an activity they associate with learning. For M, it is not an activity which constitutes learning in isolation however:

"This is my history coursework which involves lots of reading specialised texts and making notes on them and making notes on what I think of them and writing them and putting them in an essay."

And for R, there were good reasons for making notes:

"You write notes so you can remember stuff later when you need it. Sometimes when you write stuff out, it helps you remember it in the first place, but then you can come back to read it again"

Though she also recognised that their use wasn't always effective:

"In some subjects the teacher just writes the notes on the board and we copy it down. It's not very useful."

Even students engaged in activity in an art gallery were considered to be taking notes:

"I think they're probably doing A Level Art, so it's a bit like the science one, they're trying to get something out of what they're doing. They're trying to actually get the notes from it aren't they?"

3 'R's which in this case refer to reading, (w)riting and revising, are clearly prominent in Fig 10, indicating significance for the respondents. Whilst in some responses, each of the activities stood in isolation:

"When you're reading fiction books, you don't tend to learn what it says, but when you're reading text books, you like learn it ... you read it a couple of times, then it stays in your head.”

“With fiction books, you don't memorise it, you just read it for enjoyment."

But often the three are linked together within a common theme of examinations and assessment, like in the previous comment from M, or for T here:

"I know that when I'm studying, say revising, reading doesn't really work as effectively as reading and answering questions."

The majority of the codes indicated activities which were solitary like already mentioned and other like remembering, looking, listening, drawing and concentrating. Very few were indicative of interaction with others: discussing, answering questions, asking for help were of much lower prominence, suggesting that learning is a process mainly undertaken as an individual though not to the entire exclusion of all others as Section 4.6 shows.

These in vivo codes for activities indicative of learning would largely be considered lower order thinking skills, if held up against Bloom's Taxonomy. With the exception of "solving problems," there are few examples which illustrate higher order thinking skills like synthesising, hypothesising, composing, concluding, evaluating etc. However, whilst higher-order thinking may not be apparent in the codes, teasing apart the dialogue during the interviews occasionally allows it to be revealed:

"Well you don't copy them out from a book; you don't copy them word for word. You pick out bits you need. You've got to *do* something and think about it."

Or as C recognises in the use of a spreadsheet following a science experiment:

"Sometimes it's easier if you plug your numbers in and get a graph, rather than just looking a graph in a book. If you do it like that, you can see how it works, you can change it around and look at how it will change if the values change."