Improving Study Skills by Combining a Study Skill Module and Repeated Reflection Seminars

Björn Hedin,Viggo Kann

doi:10.1155/2019/9739854

Abstract

If students have a broad spectrum of study skills, learning will likely be positively affected, since they can adapt the way they learn in different situations. Such study skills can be learned in, for example, learning-to-learn courses. Several studies of such courses have been done over the years, but few of these have been carried out in longitudinal naturalistic settings, where the effect has been evaluated over several years in nonexperimental settings. In this paper, we present a novel approach for learning study skills, as a part of a course running over three years. The course starts with a learning-to-learn module, followed by 11 follow-ups that include, among other things, peer discussions about learning strategies with the aim of promoting self-regulated learning. This evaluation shows which study skills the students were most interested in trying, how successful they were in continuing to use the study skills, and which effects the students believed the study skills had after trying them. No significant change was found in how satisfied the students were with their overall study technique immediately after the initial module, but in the long term, 78% of the students believed the course had promoted their ability to analyze and adapt their study habits. We conclude that our approach could be a useful way to get the students to improve their repertoire and use of study skills, and we believe that the students also will improve general self-regulated learning skills.

Highlights

Getting a degree from a university requires lots of time and effort from students
Program Integrating Course (PIC) has currently been spread to 24 programs at KTH, Linkoping and Uppsala University. e courses studied here are given by the authors to Media Technology students (70 students starting each year) and Computer Science and Engineering students (170 students starting each year) at KTH
(5) About six weeks later, the students write a new text, reflecting on how the attempt to try a new study skill fell out, and discuss this at a new seminar. After these two first seminars, the Program Integrating Course will continue to bring up questions about how the students are studying in their current courses in every seminar, that is, in twelve seminars during three years. ere are other topics of the course that are related to study habits, for example, the PIC module on the topic procrastination [15, 20]

Summary

Introduction

Getting a degree from a university requires lots of time and effort from students. A typical 5-year education nominally requires 8000 hours of studying. A common explanation for failing in educational settings is based on the “just-world hypothesis” [1], a cognitive bias according to which “people get what they deserve,” and that the reason for failing a course is that not enough effort was put into studying, and by studying more, the problem will be solved. Time-on-task can in some cases be directly harmful since it can lead to surface learning strategies [3]. Instead of using time as a measure, productive time is a better measure, described as the factor of the time that a student spends on appropriate learning activities [4], and focusing on increasing productive time is often better than on increasing time-on-task in general (ibid)

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Conclusion