Occupational Therapy Students in Norway: Do Their Approaches to Studying Vary by Year In the Program?

Abstract

Approaches to studying may be influenced by students' age, maturity, and experience in higher education. Students' approaches to studying may develop toward deep and/or strategic approaches and away from a surface approach as they move through the curriculum, which is generally considered a positive development. This study aimed to identify differences in approaches to studying among first-, second-, and third-year students enrolled in an occupational therapy program. Three cohorts of students (n = 160) from one university college completed the Approaches and Study Skills Inventory for Students (ASSIST) along with sociodemographic information. One-way analyses of variance were used to identify differences in approaches to studying among the student cohorts. The scores on the ASSIST were largely similar between the cohorts. However, first-year students had higher scores on the surface approach and on syllabus-boundness, compared to third-year students. There was a linear trend of decreasing scores on these two scales: from highest among first-year students to lowest among third-year students. With few exceptions, students in three cohorts showed similar levels of deep, strategic, and surface approaches to studying. More efforts should be placed on assisting students to adopt a deep and/or strategic approach to studying and to reduce a surface approach.

Associations Between Occupational Therapy Students’ Approaches to Studying and Their Academic Grade Results: A Cross-Sectional and Cross-Cultural Study

“…We also assessed how much of the total GPA variance was explained with the blocks of independent variables, and the analyses were performed for the total sample and for each of the countries separately. As previous studies have noted very few differences between students in different year cohorts (Bonsaksen, Thørrisen, & Sadeghi, 2017), year cohort was not included as an independent variable for analysis.…”

Student characteristics associated with dominant approaches to studying: Comparing a national and an international sample

“…A notable exception is a study among Norwegian occupational therapy students [37] that revealed that students without prior higher education were more prone to adopt a surface approach to studying. However, studies exploring temporal changes in preferred approaches to study throughout the course of an education program have yielded inconclusive results [16,[31][32][33][34]. For instance, Bonsaksen et al [32] demonstrated a decrease in surface approach between first and third-year occupational therapy students, while Shah et al [34] reported a gradual shift from deeper to more surface learning among health sciences students.…”

“…However, studies exploring temporal changes in preferred approaches to study throughout the course of an education program have yielded inconclusive results [16,[31][32][33][34]. For instance, Bonsaksen et al [32] demonstrated a decrease in surface approach between first and third-year occupational therapy students, while Shah et al [34] reported a gradual shift from deeper to more surface learning among health sciences students. Our results question the importance of maturity in understanding students' approaches to study, although it should be noted that the age distributions in our samples were quite narrow, with the majority of students being aged between 20 and 24 years (national sample: 71.7 %; international sample: 57.6 %).…”

“…Studies have demonstrated that factors related to the learning environment may influence students' approach to studying, such as workload [4,24], teaching methods [4,25,26], teacher approach [27,28], and assessment and feedback procedures [4,29,30]. Some studies have suggested that students embrace more productive approaches to studying as their study experience increases [16,31,32], while others have proposed the opposite, i.e., a gradual shift from deeper to more surface orientations [33,34].…”

Student perceptions of the learning environment in Norwegian occupational therapy education programs

“…The data collection procedure, which included three subsequent measurement occasions, moved the field of study beyond those of previous studies merely comparing cohorts of students [39,40] and allowed for the assessing the stability of group differences across time. However, the study did not address individual changes in perceptions of the learning environment across time.…”