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

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.

Programme Integrating Courses Making Engineering Students Reflect

“…The evaluation shows, among other things, which effects the students believed the study skills had after trying them (see Table 6). 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, 77% of the students believed the course had promoted their ability to analyse and adapt their study habits [30]. The proportion of students who believe that PIC has promoted this is largely the same in different years and in different surveys.…”

“…The effects of programme integrating courses have been analysed in a sequence of publications, several of them only published in Swedish [22,25,[27][28][29][30]. In this section, the results of these publications will be summarised.…”

“…Hedin and Kann [30] have studied the effects of the programme integrating course PIC2 with respect to study skills. The course starts with a learning-to-learn module, consisting of the following parts:…”

Study Behavior in Computing Education—A Systematic Literature Review

“…In this case, one could argue that study time, or time engagement in a study activity, should be categorized as a habit; however, the use of videos and posts would be considered a study tactic. In Hedin and Kann [70], the focus was on study skills, listed as preparing before lectures, smart note-taking, repetition, planning the upcoming week, maintaining a study diary, reading the course literature in three steps, and not procrastinating. However, most of these constructs are tactics, except for planning and procrastination, which are terms under "strategies. "…”

“…Furthermore, three papers explored the starting time of assignments as tasks, both discussing starting early [2,45] or late [59]. Start and finish times, which are closely linked to procrastination, were the focus of seven papers [8,40,51,70,81,95,105].…”