It is always interesting to read about autonomy in general education publications. A lot of interesting work is being done that, in my opinion, we do not draw enough on in language research. An example is a recent article by Michael Ponton and Christine Schuette in the international Journal of self-directed learning, titled ‘learner autonomy profile: a discussion of skill combination to measure autonomous learning’. In the article the authors describe how they built on previously developed measures for autonomy to create new, integrated autonomy scale (‘the Learner Autonomy Profile’) that measures an adult learner’s desire, initiative, resourcefulness and persistence. They performed a statistical analysis of well over 2000 participants of previous studies that used the individual autononomy measures and found a strong linear relationship between the different economy measures.
It is refreshing to see this type of scientific approach to the study of autonomy where, at least in language learning studies, the use of statistics seems to be avoided at all costs.
Has anyone used the Learner Autonomy Profile?
Ponton, M., & Schuette, C. (2008). The learner autonomy profile: a discussion of scale combination to measure autonomous learning. International Journal of Self-Directed Learning , 5(1), 55-60.
