Good Practices and Learning Strategies of Undergraduate University Students.

Margarita Gozalo,Benito León-del-Barco,Santiago Mendo-Lázaro

doi:10.3390/ijerph17061849

Margarita Gozalo, Benito León-del-Barco + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17061849

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Abstract

The educational models currently in use in higher education aim to make students active participants in their learning process, while the lecturer is seen more as a facilitator of the said process. Students’ learning strategies (superficial approach—memorizing, deep approach—looking for meaning, and achievement approach—aimed at results) and their good practices are gaining in importance and the aim of this study is to identify university students’ good practices, which are related to their learning strategies. To do so, our research covered 610 students from different science degree courses at the University of Extremadura who anonymously completed the University Students’ Good Practice Inventory (IBPEU) and the University students’ Questionnaire to Evaluate Study and Learning Processes (CEPEA). The influence of context, understood here as the center or scientific field, was discarded. The factor ‘Actively learning’ was positively associated with the deep and achievement approaches; the factor ‘Interaction with lecturers’ was positively associated with the superficial approach and negatively with the deep approach; the factor ‘Cooperative work’ was also associated with the deep approach; while the achievement approach was positively associated with the factor ‘Optimizing time’ and negatively with ‘respect for different capacities’. These associations are promising as good practices can be learnt and evaluated.

Highlights

Whenever students start to learn, there are two essential questions: Why are they doing it? And how do they do it? The answer to the first question, depends on motivational factors.Answering the second involves looking at the chosen strategies and/or approaches to carry out the task: motivation and strategy, that is, the approach to learning adopted by the student [1]
The results indicated the preference of students with the deep approach for interactive methodologies and the opposite for students preferring the superficial approach
The need to control this possible relationship between the students and the center in which they studied led us to apply multivariant regression models that adjusted to the nested or hierarchical data. These models presuppose that students from the same context will tend to show similar behavior patterns

Summary

Introduction

Whenever students start to learn, there are two essential questions: Why are they doing it? And how do they do it? The answer to the first question, depends on motivational factors.Answering the second involves looking at the chosen strategies and/or approaches to carry out the task: motivation and strategy, that is, the approach to learning adopted by the student [1]. Whenever students start to learn, there are two essential questions: Why are they doing it? The answer to the first question, depends on motivational factors. Answering the second involves looking at the chosen strategies and/or approaches to carry out the task: motivation and strategy, that is, the approach to learning adopted by the student [1]. A learning approach includes the student’s intentions when faced with the tasks and the processes and strategies she/he uses to carry them out [2,3,4,5]. The concept of learning strategies has been interpreted in different ways. There are basically three different learning approaches described in the scientific literature. A superficial approach, the main motivation of which is to avoid failure, as well as the desire to “survive”

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