Learning Contracts

Learning contracts are agreements between a teacher (or teaching team) and a learner (or occasionally a group of learners). They normally concern issues of assessment, and provide a useful mechanism for reassuring both parties about whether a planned piece of work will meet the requirements of a course or module: this is particularly valuable when the assessment is not in the form of a set essay title, or an examination.

This page concentrates on the commonest application, relating to assessment. Obviously, there are occasions on which the contract is much wider, specifying what the client/learner wants to learn; these are more common in consultancy agreements and go beyond the purview of this site, which is principally concerned with the institutional delivery of learning.

However, there is more to the principle of the learning contract than a convenient administrative device. It is based on the principle of the learners being active partners in the teaching-learning system, rather than passive recipients of whatever it is that the teacher thinks is good for them. It is about their ownership of the process.

Merely using the technique, however, does not automatically bring about this ownership and involvement. As Collins (1991) has pointed out, the contractual bargain is often one-sided, with all the obligations being on the side of the student, and none on the part of the teacher. The teacher does not even undertake unequivocally to award a pass mark to the resultant work: she will do so only if in her judgement it meets the required criteria.

After all, all assessments are based on a contract, which usually remains implicit. It is of the order of:

"The teacher undertakes that:

if the student produces such work as the teacher specifies,

to a standard which the teacher will determine (whether or not that standard is based on fixed criteria or personal whim, and regardless of whether the standard is known to the student),

the teacher will award a mark to that work.

The student indicates acceptance of this 'agreement' by producing the work"

That is a slightly unfair version, but only slightly. Matters can be improved by being explicit and transparent about the marking scheme. Learning contracts seek to make explicit this implicit deal, which should at least expose any one-sidedness, and ideally provide a basis for addressing it.

Initially, there may be considerable student resistance to learning contracts: they are not part of the rules of the educational game they are familiar with. The common cry is, "Just tell me what to do!" Nevertheless, if their negotiation is taken seriously (by the teacher as well as the student, and recognising the time which has to be put into tutorial consultations about them), they are very valuable ways of focusing attention on things which matter.

Form of the Contract

There are many forms which the contract can take (See Anderson, Boud and Sampson, 1996 for a guide), but the following represents a general example:
    

At the level of principle, however, it changes the student from being merely reactive, in the sense of responding to set demands to produce a 4,000-word assignment on this or that, to being proactive in taking the initiative in proposing work to meet the requirements.