Learning Strategies That Help Students SOAR to Success

Abstract

Students are expected to know how to learn but rarely are taught the learning strategies needed for academic success. There is a long history of learning strategy research that has uncovered many effective and independent strategies students can use to facilitate learning and boost achievement. Unfortunately, researchers have been less successful in devising and promoting integrated and uncomplicated study systems students can employ. A prescriptive strategy system, SOAR, combines four simple and empirically proven strategies that can be readily employed by students for various academic tasks. SOAR is an acronym for the system’s four integrated components: Select, Organize, Associate, and Regulate. Briefly, select refers to selecting and noting key lesson ideas. Organize refers to representing selected information using graphic organizers such as matrices and illustrations. Associate refers to connecting selected ideas to one another and to previous knowledge. Regulate refers to monitoring and assessing one’s own learning. SOAR is based on information-processing theory and is supported by research. Five empirical studies have investigated SOAR strategies compared to students’ preferred strategies or to another strategy system (SQ3R) and found SOAR to be more effective for aiding learning and comparative writing. Specific means for how to employ each SOAR strategy are described such as recording longhand notes and revising them for select, creating appropriate graphic organizers for organize, generating examples and using mnemonics for associate, and using distributed retrieval and error analysis for regulation. Although research on SOAR is just emerging as of 2019, it appears an effective and simple means for directing students in how to learn and study.

Teaching Postsecondary Students to Use Analogies as a Cognitive Learning Strategy: An Intervention

“…The final grade is composed of many components, such as exams, clicker points (daily warm-up questions), and an applied laboratory section. Each of these learning activities require different cognitive processing ( Mayer, 1996 ; Kiewra, 2005 ), skills, and knowledge. Given the myriad demands students faced in the course, it could be that one assignment-based analogies intervention was not powerful enough to explain statistically significant variance in the final course grade.…”

Learning by Teaching in the Wild: Domain, Grades, and School Track Matter

“…monitoring accuracy, see Fukaya, 2013). Accurate monitoring allows students to find knowledge gaps and to choose learning strategies accordingly, for instance, by restudying specific information (Fiorella & Mayer, 2016;Kiewra, 2005).…”

Investigating the interconnectedness among elements of face-to-face tutorials in distance education

“…Simpson (2018) further asserts that during face-to-face tutorials, students can interact and interchange knowledge and ideas which could lead to critical thinking, collaborative learning, motivation and give direction to self-learning. These elements enable students to build the needed synergies to contextualise concepts and develop problem-solving skills (Kiewra et al, 2020;Puspıtasarı and Oetoyo, 2018;Simpson, 2018;Wong and Li, 2020). Face-to-face facilitation still plays an integral part in distance education delivery in most developing economies, and Ghana is not an exception.…”