INTRODUCTION Increased participation in university-level education world- wide in the late twentieth century (Scott 1995) involved a change from education for the elite to education for the masses. In the UK, participation increased from 6% of under-21s in the 1960s to about 43% of 18–30-year-olds in 2003. At the same time, funding per student in the UK fell by 36% in real terms between 1989 and 1997 (Department for Education and Skills 2003). Increased participation means greater diversity in student abilities, experiences, preconceptions and misconceptions, learning expectations, and career intentions (Archer and Hutchings 2000; Leathwood and O’Connell 2003; Jones and Thomas 2005). In this diversity with fewer resources, there are challenges. How can they be successfully addressed? An added challenge: how to help students engage with a subject they consider boring (see 1998 student comments on mineralogy in TABLE 1)? Students must learn much fac- tual mineralogical information that they will need to suc- ceed in subsequent petrology and geochemistry courses (e.g. chapter 3 in Bransford et al. 2000, for a discussion of knowledge transfer), even if some may consider such knowledge irrelevant to today’s students (Eaton 1995). This essay is based on the changes made to improve a first- year University of Liverpool course in which mineralogy is introduced together with aspects of petrology and geochemistry. Almost all of the enrolled students are geoscience or ocean science majors, though the majority have never studied geology before. My solution involved determining how my students wanted to receive learning material while making sure they understood what was expected of them in terms of commitment, how I would help them learn, how assessments would demonstrate it had hap- pened, and how this course would help them in the future. This approach, I subsequently learned, had much in common with Biggs’ theory of Constructive Alignment (Biggs 1999, 2003), which has had great credence at all levels of UK education. Biggs’ premise is that curricula should be designed so that the learning activ- ities and assessment tasks are aligned with the intended learning outcomes (e.g. an essay is a great tool to assess students’ ability to evaluate concepts such as uniformitarianism, but not a good tool to assess their ability to recognise minerals). Reflection on what happened will help formulate modifica- tions, which in turn will improve alignment and promote better learning (was the assessment unintentionally confus- ing in some way?). The constructive part means that students construct their own learning from the learning activities (e.g. active learning or problem-based learning), rather than just being guided by an expert (e.g. lecture). My course design took on the concept of alignment, but did not take a strictly constructivist approach. My instinct was to guide students through their learning (lectures) and give them opportunities to practise the required skills (formalised practicals) rather than use a purely constructivist learning approach. In recent publications on guided versus con- structivist approaches (e.g. Jervis and Jervis 2005; Kirschner et al. 2006), it has been suggested that the advantage of guided over unguided problem-based approaches begins to diminish only when learners have sufficiently high prior knowledge to provide their own “internal” guidance. First- year students need help and guidance. GET TO KNOW YOUR STUDENTS’ LEARNING PREFERENCES Diversity can be ethnic or cultural, but in education it includes variations in student learning styles and prefer- ences. Most teachers know, anecdotally, that different stu- dents learn differently. Much research has been done on this topic (e.g. Kolb 1984; Gardner 2000; Entwistle 2001), and studies suggest that learning-style differences do affect how learning takes place, such that some students may be advantaged or disadvantaged by a particular learning mode (i.e. lecture). However, setting up individualised learning for each student’s preferences is not the answer pedagogi- cally or logistically (see Coffield et al. 2004 and Draper 2005 for excellent reviews). A better approach is to bear in mind student diversity but not be a slave to it; as Sadler-Smith E LEMENTS ,V OL . 3, PP . 113–117 APRIL 2007 Alan P. Boyle * * Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3GP, UK E-mail: apboyle@liverpool.ac.uk Using Alignment and Reflection to Improve Student Learning 113 G reater participation, and the associated increase in student diversity, has changed university education worldwide. The old ways of teaching a small number of well-qualified committed students do not work as well with large classes and more diverse student needs. This essay documents one approach to this challenge. It involves understanding student needs and preferences better, developing a range of ways to deliver learning and assess the results, and finally reflecting on the outcomes. The annual process of reflection allows changes that improve alignment of course aims with their delivery and assessment, and results in improved student learning and perception of the subject. KEYWORDS: teaching mineralogy, assessment, learning preferences, student diversity, VARK