Physiotherapy Students' Learning Strategies and Worries: Their relevance for behavioural science teaching

Abstract

of PhD Thesis Experience suggests tha t physiotherapy students’ acceptance of behavioural science material may be suboptimal. To explore this issue, physiotherapy and psychology students’ learning strategies and worries were examined by means of self-report questionnaires. The effects were assessed of sample, gender and year on Schmeck’s Inventory of Learning Processes (measuring deep-processing, elaborative processing, fact-retention, and methodical study), on worrying in general, and on five identified worries (coping with student life, relationships, evaluation, self-efficacy and self-esteem). No effects of sample were found for any of the learning processes scales. Psychology students generally worried more, found their teaching staff less approachable and worried more about coping with sfudent life. Physiotherapy students reported more worries about selfesteem and evaluation. Males reported more deep processing and worried more about coping with student life; females reported more worries about self-efficacy and esteem worries. Retaining facts and relationship worries declined over the three course years. Multiple regression equations were constructed for each of the four learning process scales. All 21 available demographic and worry variables were entered stepwise. The combined variables explained less than 10% of the variance in each model. General worry frequency and being female predicted infrequent deep-processing. Being older and general worry frequency predicted frequent use of methodical methods. Low self-esteem predicted infrequent fact-retaining and being older predicted frequent elaborative and methodical methods. These results are consisteht with theories of the effects of worrying and gender-related expectations on cognitive processing. Female physiotherapy students’ sub-optimal acceptance of the academically demanding aspects of behavioural science may be related to their negative selfevaluations. The variables examined explained a relatively small amount of variance in the learning processes scales, suggesting that other unexamined factors also influence students’ learning approaches. Physiotherapy, March 1992, vol78, no 3