A survey of study skills of first-year university students: the relationships of strategy to gender, ethnicity and course type

Abstract

PurposeNot all students who did well in high school are successful in college, particularly in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) majors with the most affected student groups including women, first-generation or historically disadvantaged students. Certain study skills may be associated with greater success in college, yet these skills may be less regularly used by those underrepresented groups.Design/methodology/approachThis paper reports the results of a survey given to several hundred newly-matriculated students before they began their first courses at a selective, public research university in the United States. Students in nine courses responded to the survey, with 1815 total respondents. Logistic regression and linear mixed effects models were used to analyze the data.FindingsWe found three skills were associated with course grade when adjusting for incoming GPA, SAT math and reading and GPA of other courses. Self-testing and rereading were both associated with increased grades, and flashcard use was associated with decreased grades. Of particular significance, underrepresented minority (URM) students were less likely to reread than majority students, and flashcard use was more common in women and URM students.Research limitations/implicationsIt is possible study skills changed over the course of the term because participants were surveyed at the beginning of their courses. Our future work will expand the courses surveyed and include a post-course survey.Originality/valueInformation that some student groups use less effective study skills will allow instructors and student support services to provide more targeted and useful study strategy advice.

Moving the Needle: Evidence of an Effective Study Strategy Intervention in a Community College Biology Course

“…We did not find a significant effect of gender, race, or age on the study strategy choice of our students. This is unlike the results found in Williams et al (2021), which found students historically excluded based on race are less likely to start college using self-testing, and women are more likely to start college using underlining, highlighting, and flash cards. The lack of significant effect of demographics in our study may be because of the small sample size (and thus lack of power in our test).…”

“…Community college students also used spacing at the end of the course at levels higher than many undergraduates. They did not, however, increase their self-testing (50%) to levels equivalent to other undergraduate surveys, found to be 71% in Hartwig and Dunlosky (2012), 72% in Morehead et al (2016), and 62% in Williams et al (2021).…”

“…At the end of our classes, rereading remained common, but there were increases in self-testing (from 36.5% to 50%) and in making "diagrams, charts or pictures" (from 9.6% to 32.7%), and decreases in use of flash cards (to 38.5%). The use of drawing as a popular study strategy is rare in most surveyed students, reported at 13% for new undergraduates in Williams et al (2021), at 15% of undergraduates in Hartwig and Dunlosky (2012), and at 24% of undergraduates in Morehead et al (2016). We attribute this high use of drawing to the instructor's intervention, discussed further in later sections.…”

“…The research on study strategies has indicated some strategies have a higher impact than others. Generally, rereading, highlighting, and copying notes word for word are not considered strategies associated with improved learning (Dunlosky et al, 2013;Rodriguez et al, 2018;Williams et al, 2021). On the other hand, more generative strategies, such as self-testing and spaced studying, have significant evidence of success in both laboratory settings (Carpenter, 2012;Cepeda et al, 2006; Roediger and Butler, 2011) and classrooms (Karpicke et al, 2009;Rodriguez et al, 2018Rodriguez et al, , 2021.…”

“…Examples are completing practice problems or writing out course content without looking at notes. Self-testing is a strategy used by many students, with Hartwig and Dunlosky reporting 71% of students (2012), and Morehead et al reporting 72% of students (2016) saying they self-test, but this strategy is less often used by students historically excluded from STEM because of race or ethnicity (Rodriguez et al, 2018;Williams et al, 2021). Spacing is spreading out studying across multiple days (Carpenter, 2012).…”