figure a

One of the most common questions is ‘how do others use the MELT?’ When turning to the MELT, educators want more than a philosophy; they are looking for a framework that can give tangible starting points for facilitating sophisticated learning. This chapter provides examples of the ways that others have arranged MELT, to inspire educators to adapt the MELT to diverse contexts. Inspiration is provided through the diversity of contexts and approaches, rather than a narrow range of age- or content-specific resources.

Specifically, in this chapter shows how educators have used their own adaptations of the MELT to benefit student learning, with examples and links applicable to early childhood, primary, secondary, technical education, undergraduate, course-based master’s, and doctoral programmes. There are also examples that span across disciplinary learning and transdisciplinary projects, and those that are aligned to Direct Instruction or to discovery learning.

In terms of modelling the MELT facets, they maybe taught and learned in the sequence presented in Chap. 2. However, in reality, sophisticated learning is frequently non-sequential, messy and recursive. A linear, sequential approach can be used early-on with students in highly prescriptive activities, and in contexts where they have little experience: this is the case whether in primary, middle and secondary school, undergraduate, Master’s and sometimes the early months of Ph.D. studies. Once students can begin to make some decisions and display autonomy in their learning, they will employ the facets non-sequentially.

The figures below are screenshots of resources available online that are presented not to read in themselves, but to refer to the associated weblink.

3.1 MELT Connecting

MELT is applicable to many contexts. However, modifications necessary for MELT to work are needed for each context. Furthermore, how MELT should be implemented is determined by the specific contextual conditions. Only those individuals facilitating the learning have the requisite knowledge of the students, topics, desired learning outcomes and broader environment to make suitable professional judgements. For MELT to be effective, teacher engagement and autonomy are necessary.

To facilitate teacher engagement, experience and emerging evidence have demonstrated that the single most helpful factor for the successful adaptation and use of MELT is conversation. Through mature, inter-professional conversation, the MELT is defrosted and animated with the warmth of human interaction. These conversations may take place between colleagues, classroom teachers and coordinating academics, tutors at university, school and home, principals, librarians, learning advisors, and parents. Engagement, based around MELT, provides common ground and fosters discussions, collegial debate, disagreement, and ways to proceed. The most important conversations, however, are with and between students. A crucial pedagogical question is, ‘when and to what extent should we make the MELT facets and the continuum of autonomy explicit so that students may metacognitively follow, improvise and initiate?’

3.2 Many Models Across Educational Levels and Contexts

For ease of access, the following sections are arranged according to educational levels. However, approaches used at one educational level maybe pertinent to other contexts. It is advisable to consider scanning several examples.

The approaches used are for:

  • Early childhood—five-year-olds: song, rhythm and movement

  • Year/Grade 4/5: problem-based learning pentagon for teacher planning

  • Year/Grade 6: interactive introduction to investigation framework for direct student use in term-long projects, with issues chosen by students

  • Year/Grade 7: interactive introduction to investigation framework for student direct use in guided transdisciplinary projects

  • Year/Grade 8: interactive introduction to project-based learning pentagon for direct student use in an intensive three-week STEM project posed by an industry partner

  • Year/Grade 9/10: interactive introduction to MELT for direct student use in three-term projects with issues chosen by students

  • Technical and Further Education

  • First year of university: interactive introduction to RSD and use across two consecutive terms; multiple assignments in terms of marking criteria and feedback

  • Second year of university: Human Resource Management

  • Honours year: Medical Science

  • Master’s year 1: interactive introduction to RSD and use across two consecutive assignments, in terms of marking criteria and feedback.

  • Master’s year 2: student self-assessment using RSD in the early phase of the major research project (one semester full-time)

  • Doctoral studies: self and supervisor assessment of the proposal.

3.2.1 Early Childhood

Marsha Seebohm (a music specialist teacher at Elizabeth North Primary School in Adelaide) developed an exemplary tool for facilitating MELT in an early childhood education setting. In 2014, Marsha adapted MELT facets as lyrics to the tune of a widely-known folk song, ‘She’ll be coming ‘round the mountain when she comes’ so that it would be suitable for five-year-olds (Fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.1
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Research mountain, a song for 5 year olds. https://www.adelaide.edu.au/melt/k-12-education#early-childhood

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Examples of children singing Research Mountain, and the actions associated with the song, performed by an adult audience are available on the MELT website. As a teaching tool, it is in keeping with the tenets of active, embodied learning which are so important in early childhood education contexts. Marsha developed the song to provide young students with a sung and performed heuristic for inquiry learning. She is exploring the song’s use by teachers in their regular classes.

In addition to this example based on a folk song, another ECE version of MELT in action (based on a nursery rhyme) is on the website at www.melt.edu.au.

In this example, and some of the others below, there is no explicit mention of autonomy. Autonomy in these examples is an aspect for teachers who apply professional judgement in considering ‘how much structure and guidance do these students need?’ and whether to introduce ideas around autonomy or not.

3.2.2 Year 4/5 Primary

Year 4/5 teachers involved in a Science Technology Engineering and Maths (STEM) initiative at a government Primary School transformed the MELT into a Problem Solving Pentagon. The school had been introduced to an engineering design framework, the terminology of which was used to inform the Problem Solving Pentagon. The teachers used this for their own thinking about design in their lesson planning, but not explicitly to facilitate student learning. However, the motivation to develop the model was to facilitate student engagement in intentional learning in STEM (Fig. 3.2).

Fig. 3.2
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Primary/elementary school problem-solving pentagon. www.adelaide.edu.au/melt/k-12-education#primary

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3.2.3 Year 6 Primary School

The International Baccalaureate (IB) is a curriculum that is run in many countries, with separate but related primary years, middle years and diploma (senior years) programmes. The Primary Years Programme (PYP) of the IB involves a major student exhibition. This exhibition provides the opportunity for students in Year/Grade 6 to engage in sustained project-based learning for a full term, and then present their discoveries at a public presentation. Likewise, the Middle Years Programme (MYP) personal project is a major piece of work spanning around three school terms. In the exhibition and the personal project, students provide evidence of their ‘approaches to learning’ (ATL), which comprises ten major elements that span PYP, MYP and the Diploma Programme (Table 3.1).

Table 3.1 The international baccelaureate’s approaches to learning, mapped onto the MELT facets (see www.wcpss.net/Page/15023)
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MELT facets directly connect to the ATL, so I ran IB teacher professional development sessions that focused on the use of the MELT pentagon as a way that students and teachers could engage directly with ATL. Students in government and non-government schools in three Australian states and New Zealand used MELT to plan out the beginning of their exhibition (Year 6) or personal project (Year 9/10). There was a demand for these sessions because schools identified the beginning phase of research in the Exhibition and the Personal Project to be a conceptual challenge that was, at times, daunting. Teacher Professional Development on MELT in the IB was provided on school sites and in state associations. These MELT workshops were requested to better assist students to directly engage with, and become increasingly aware of, their own approaches to learning and how to represent that learning in an assessable ‘Process Journal’ (Fig. 3.3).

Fig. 3.3
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The Inquiry framework (IF), used directly with Year 6 students, so they can improve their understanding of their learning and communicate their reflective thinking. https://www.adelaide.edu.au/melt/k-12-education#primary

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3.2.4 Year 8 Subject-Specific: A Case Study

High School specific resources are available at https://www.adelaide.edu.au/melt/k-12-education#secondary

A specific set of resources for high school is called writE science (Writing and Reading Integrated with Talking about Experiments) which integrates a MELT framework developed for Year 8 Science and presents explicit ways of developing the facets. WritE science has been used to inspire otherwise uninterested students to engage in hands-on labs to foster literacy—reading and writing. In effect, the strategy provides a platform where an individual student’s preferences and strengths maybe used to address areas of weaker ability.

Specifically, writE science resources were developed and used across school terms, where these worksheets were applied each week to model and scaffold the skills that students need to gain so they can work towards carrying out an open-ended inquiry. Initially, writE resources present prescribed interventions early in the first term. These worksheets guide students through bounded, scaffolded, and then open-ended activities. In the last three weeks of term, students engage in inquiry projects.

Subsequently, a similar structure has been used at other levels, because the design is adaptable and widely-valued. This application has supported learning for first year university students, master’s students, and Year 2 primary students.

The following writeE worksheets illustrate how much detail, examples, help and modelling students may need to learn to be able to observe (generate data), to reflect, to analyse and to organise. The prescribed end of the autonomy continuum is as enduringly important for student learning as the unbounded end. As indicated in the resource below, it is valuable to provide examples of some of the scaffolding processes from prescribed to open-ended, so that students will be able to improve and work towards performing a skill.

The left-hand screen grabs are provided as images, not to be read, to give you an overarching sense of the process used. The resources are available at https://www.adelaide.edu.au/rsd/schooling/secondary/resources/.

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Observational skills are facilitated in this writE lab with a focus on four senses. In science labs, teachers often ask ambiguous questions, such as ‘what happens to the popcorn when heated?’ The question is ambiguous because there is a big difference between observations about ‘what happens to popcorn while it is being heated?’ and ‘what happens to popcorn after it has been heated?’ Requiring students to write down observations of an initial state helps them generate a baseline from which to compare. This process goes beyond mere observing; it is the generation of data. Following a focus on observation skills, write Science sheets are used for students to infer, identify independent, responding and controlled variables, hypothesise and pose researchable questions. These resources together develop student sophisticated thinking in a science lab context towards a culminating lab experience; designing their own experiment in writE Science 10.

figure d

Perhaps the simplest way to see the embedded differentiation in writE is to view the structure across a school term in resources 1, 2, 3, 4, 7 and 10 at https://www.adelaide.edu.au/rsd/melt/k-12-education#secondary .

By revisiting writE science in different terms, participating students engage with numerous ways of generating data. These methods of data generation require them to employ a variety of techniques from descriptive observation to measurement. By connection, students begin to understand that others’ information has also been ‘generated’. For students, this inquiry raises valuable questions about the trustworthiness of others’ information, because they realise all information has a similar epistemological status to their own data.

These ideas of connecting specific tasks and skills to MELT facets happened throughout the term in writE. Later in the school term, students were given a task that facilitated their application of the Year 8 biology skills to the design of their own experiment. In contrast with the popcorn example, there was no procedure given for data generation. Small groups of three students needed to devise their own question, including independent and dependent variables (embark & clarify), determine their own method of generating relevant data and apply it to the other four facets of MELT. This scientific strategy remains steeped in the literacy strategy and both have structural similarities of prescribed research to open-ended research. The aim is to facilitate student movement from emulating to improvising to innovating.

3.2.5 Year 7–10 High School Transdisciplinary Projects

In this case, students were provided with workshops that introduced each school’s version of MELT, often named the Investigation Framework, for Year 9 or 10. The introduction required students to reveal the sophisticated thinking they used in a highly interactive learning task run during the workshop. Based on their own ways of explaining their thinking, the six facets were introduced and mapped onto their own thinking, so that the students could connect with the wording (Fig. 3.4).

Fig. 3.4
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Skills that students identify that they use to engage in inquiry mapped onto MELT facets. Right column—student inventory of skills used during a learning activity in a workshop. Left column skills are matched with the MELT facets on the left

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Another approach provides a MELT pentagon which explains the facets in a rudimentary way. Then, students are invited to apply the six facets to a scenario, such as a climactic scene in a widely-viewed movie like Apollo 13. Equipped with this group practice of mapping MELT to skills used in the movie, students use the MELT to plan for and reflect on what they will need to learn in order to complete their sustained transdisciplinary projects.

3.2.6 Technical Education

In Technical and Further Education, the Innovative High Achieving Template for Enhancing Maths was developed as a tool for enhancing learning and supporting numeracy skills (Fig. 3.5), with its consoling motto, ‘Keep calm, and carry a pentagon’.

Fig. 3.5
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The innovative high achieving template for enhancing maths. https://www.adelaide.edu.au/melt/conferences/short-papers-arranged-by-theme#keep-calm-and-carry-a-pentagon

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3.2.7 Undergraduate

Many discipline-specific examples of MELT, especially in terms of assessment, at the undergraduate level are found at: https://www.adelaide.edu.au/rsd/examples/discipline/.

Much of the MELT evaluation studies have been conducted at the undergraduate level. One major study spanned 29 courses in five universities [2] and found that in the timeframe of a semester, explicit skill development makes a substantial difference in student learning. However, it was also found that there was a risk that the thinking skills developed may atrophy. A follow-up series of studies looked at the explicit use of MELT across multiple semesters of a degree in Media [3, 4], Oral Health [5] and Animal Science [6].

An example of MELT use across two semesters is in first year human biology, using the Research Skill Development framework: https://www.adelaide.edu.au/melt/university-learning#discipline

Some aspects of this use follow (Figs. 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8).

Fig. 3.6
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First year human biology diagnostic task: Early in the first semester, students were given two sources (left) from which they were required to take hierarchically structured notes (right). These notes were assessed according to the six facets as used in a task-specific marking rubric (Fig. 3.7).

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Fig. 3.7
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The rubric structure framed by the six MELT facets was used consistently for assessments throughout two consecutive semesters. The rubric below is specific to a bounded investigation, and Fig 3.9 is for an open-ended investigation, where the facet similarities allowing students to connect the skill set they have been building throughout the year due to the consistent use of MELT facets

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Fig. 3.8
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Students engaged in an open-ended group project gather life data from tombstones to address their own research question

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The rubric below is available in Word form www.adelaide.edu.au/rsd/examples/discipline/#humanbiology as are dozens of discipline- and task-specific rubrics. Comparing the rubric below with the one above, both use the six facets, but with criteria specific to the task. The above rubric is for a bounded activity, and has two levels delineating student autonomy. The rubric below is for an open-ended activity, and so delineates learning autonomy into four levels, in the context of the competence expected in first year biology (Fig. 3.9).

Fig. 3.9
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MELT facets frame the assessment rubric for open-ended human biology field research conducted in first year university

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Outcomes of this style of use of the RSD have shown substantial benefits for university students in a variety of disciplines and universities [2].

First Year Mechanical Engineering: Optimising Problem Solving Pentagon

In 2014, upper-level undergraduate mechanical engineering tutors (University of Adelaide) found that their first year students were not enthusiastic about learning to communicate in a course that focussed on graphic, written and spoken communication skills. These tutors, themselves second to fourth year undergraduate students, took the broad MELT parameters and created the first pentagon version, for direct use with the first year students they sought to support. Since that version of MELT, many of the models are introduced in a pentagon configuration especially when the explicit representation of students’ autonomy may detract from the learning priorities (Fig. 3.10).

Fig. 3.10
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The optimising problem solving pentagon. https://www.adelaide.edu.au/melt/ua/media/24/ops_rev5-1.pdf

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Further examples are similar in principle to the human biology rubric above, and include second year, third year and honours learning activities. Many details relating to these activities can be found on the RSD website www.rsd.edu.au.

Outcomes of the use of OPS have shown substantial benefits for First Year Engineering students [7].

3.2.8 Work Integrated Learning

The RSD framework, the first of the MELT has been used to assist in evaluating learning that takes place in industry settings. However, since the terminology of research may not resonate with most employers, Sue Bandaranaike from James Cook University adapted the RSD to develop the Work Skill Development (WSD) framework. Sue Bandaranaike envisioned that the WSD would be used with students and their employers during co-ops, internships, and other work placements—collectively called Work Integrated Learning. WSD use in employment contexts has led to a number of benefits for students, especially their capacity to articulate employability skills [8] (Fig. 3.11).

Fig. 3.11
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The work skill development (WSD) framework. https://www.adelaide.edu.au/monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/1719401/WorkSkillsDevt-2019.pdf.

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3.2.9 Course-Based Master’s Degree Programmes

MELT has been used in assessment orientations, in ways similar to first year biology examples. Numerous resources, such as examples, tools, descriptions and peer-reviewed journal articles, are available on a master’s-specific subsite of the MELT site https://www.adelaide.edu.au/melt-1.dev.openshift.services.adelaide.edu.au/melt/university-learning#masters-by-coursework.

3.2.10 Academic Research: Doctoral, Master’s and Early Career Research (ECR)

The Researcher Skill Development framework comprising a learning autonomy continuum delineated into seven levels, the RSD7, was formulated to bring in the unequivocally capital ‘R’ research into the learning process. The RSD7 can be useful for direct conversations with postgraduate doctoral degree (Ph.D.) students and early career researchers who are thinking about their academic trajectory. It enables conversations or personal reflections on what capacities and skills a researcher can employ, which skills and level of autonomy they seek to develop for the future, and ways to achieve skills and increased autonomy. A study showed substantial benefits arising from the long-term use of the RSD, commencing in Year 1 human biology and then through to the use of the RSD7 in a Ph.D. preparation year (called ‘Honours’ in Australia) for medical science [9] (Fig. 3.12).

Academic programmes based on sophisticated postgraduate research have also employed MELT successfully. For example, the International Bridging programme at the University of Adelaide asked each doctoral student and their supervisor to assess the student’s research proposal using a six-level marking rubric based on the RSD. An article explains the processes used, including the specific marking rubric generated and outcomes on the process [10] (Fig. 3.12).

Fig. 3.12
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The researcher skill development (RSD7) framework. https://www.adelaide.edu.au/melt/ua/media/48/rsd7_13nov_15_jm.pdf

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3.2.11 Interdisciplinary Studies and Digital Literacy

Two transdisciplinary contexts at the master’s level that use MELT-informed rubrics include addiction studies and climate change [11]. MELT characteristics provided advantages for facilitating fluid conversations across disciplinary boundaries.

Monash University adapted MELT to be used across disciplines in terms of Digital Literacy, and produced the Digital Skills Development framework (Fig. 3.13).

Fig. 3.13
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Monash university’s digital skill development framework. https://www.monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/1652437/DSD-document.pdf

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3.3 Outside the MELT Parameters

MELT characteristics pertain to a broad range of teaching and learning contexts, from early childhood to early career research. However, some contexts have requirements that may fall outside of typical educational settings, but which can still benefit from applying MELT characteristics. One example, provided by the University of Adelaide, consists of a MELT version that has been tailored towards the Peer Assisted Study Scheme (PASS, developed at the University of Wollongong). PASS leaders started with MELT, and adapted it to include new parameters which were better-suited to their sessions than the existing ones. These were organised around supporting students dropping in and seeking help for academic purposes and personal development. One beautiful characteristic of their model, the Pillars in Evaluation (PIE), was the facet ‘dynamism’, emphasising the centrality of fluidity (Fig. 3.14).

Fig. 3.14
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The pillars in evaluation (PIE). https://www.adelaide.edu.au/melt/ua/media/27/pie_poster_2017.pdf

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3.4 Conclusion: Commonality with Adaptability

Kevin, the graduate who recounted using Silver Fluoride in Cambodia experienced an undergraduate degree that used various versions of MELT—including the Research Skill Development framework and the Clinical Reflection Skills framework—in the first four semesters of the Oral Health degree. In the final year of the degree, students were required to engage in open-ended inquiry. Another graduate of the Oral Health programme said about the development of their sophisticated thinking from the first year that:

You have to research it, you don’t get fed stuff anymore. You have to go, research it, sit down, analyse what’s important and what’s not. So yes, it slowly did lead up to a better research in the third year. I think if we started researching in the third year, we wouldn’t produce a high-quality piece of work at all (italics added) [5].

This graduate appreciated that, as a student, starting the process of developing sophisticated thinking skills from first year enabled those skills to slowly build up and resulted in better research in the final year because of that ongoing, explicit development. Another graduate of the programme found this scaffolded, incremental, developmental process:

… encourages all its graduates to have a mindset of research on focused learning, lifelong learning and to know that study doesn’t stop at the end of the course… (italics added) [9].

The common framing of MELT adapted context-by-context and over time, enables students to take the specifics of any given learning activity, assessment task and individual course and begin to see the big picture by connecting all the parts that may otherwise seem separate. They will perceive, for example, not separate activities, assessments, courses or even separate facet development, but a multifaceted ‘mindset of research’ or other such sophisticated thinking gems. In a similar vein, a student engaging in the research-oriented fourth year of a Medical Science degree looked back on the use of the MELT and found:

Since the beginning [of First Year], they have given us assignments based on this criteria. You might not have liked the assignments, but because they have been consistently applying this structure to all of our assignments, we have come to think that way for science… [9]

The MELT used as a thinking routine, became for the student a heuristic to think scientifically.

As MELT expands across years of study, disciplines, and learning contexts, students are increasingly likely to be exposed to more than one application of the model. Two of the big advantages of repeat exposure are that (a) it improves student self-assessment and peer assessment, where students become attuned to the standards of the context, and (b) they become better able to work with increasing levels of competency and autonomy in each context.