Learner-Centred Learning Tasks in Higher Education: A Study on Perception among Students

Universities face the challenge of constantly improving the quality of higher education and changing the learning behaviour of students, from passive reactive learning to active self-regulated learning. Learner-centred, constructively designed learning tasks offer a great opportunity here. This paper investigates to what extent the learning process is challenged by these learning tasks, and how these tasks are perceived by the students, using a before and after survey of students studying at bachelor level in business courses at a German university. The paper starts with a short description of constructivism in the context of task design and the main characteristics of learner-centred, constructivist-orientated learning tasks: openness to problems, situation orientation, openness to solution paths, and degree of difficulty. Then the research method used is outlined before the findings are presented. The before and after survey shows that despite an increased complexity and workload, the motivation to deal with topics on the subject remained stable.