R3 2.13 August 23, 2024 Student Perspectives on Changing Study Strategies: What Does It Cost, and Will It Actually Work?

Students are open to trying optimal study strategies, but persuasion hinges on what they perceive the payoffs will be.

Summer hiatus is over, and I’m charging in to the new academic year with some projects I’m really looking forward to. Chief among these is the launch of my new book A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Student Names: Why You Should, Why It’s Hard, How You Can, coming out with University of Oklahoma Press in November of this year. I talk more about the reasons why I wrote the book and what to expect from it in this LinkedIn post, and next week I’m getting to lead the first of (I hope!) many faculty workshops focused on practicing the key techniques from the book. Learning names is particularly germane to the start of the semester – so definitely reach out if you’d like to know more, and I hope that your own name learning efforts pay off this coming semester.

The new year also brings more new work on student success, including the opportunity to help reboot and refresh the first year student success initiative I worked on years ago at my university. A big part of what we are working to promote in this program reboot is, first of all, the sense of “relentless welcome” that Peter Felten and Leo Lambert talk about in their fantastic book Relationship-Rich Education. We hope to operationalize this concept through practices like compassionate communication and supportive course designs that elicit and reward productive effort.

That productive effort also flows from some familiar sources: student motivation, metacognition, and self-regulated learning ability. These interconnected issues turn out to be major predictors of academic persistence – that dry edu-speak term that I personally translate as “students achieving their and their families’ hopes and dreams for their hard-won and costly college education.” Regardless of what you teach, whether you lean low-tech or high-tech, whether you’re online, F2F or somewhere in between – we all want students who are capably in charge of their own learning. And institutions that plan to survive and thrive for the long term definitely can’t afford to ignore anything connected to academic persistence.

This leads us into the article I picked for this issue of R3: a qualitative study of what students believe about the cost and value of different study strategies, and how those beliefs relate to their openness to trying better ones.

Citation:

Broeren, M., Verkoeijen, P., Arends, L., & Smeets, G. (2024). Utility value is key. Exploring factors that contribute to student motivation for effective cognitive learning strategies in higher education. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 38(4), 1–11.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.4220

Paywall or Open:  

Open

Summary:

This qualitative study aimed to uncover factors that motivate students in higher education to adopt effective cognitive learning strategies when studying on their own. First-year university students engaged in structured focus group discussions and completed a questionnaire on preferred strategies and overall motivations to study. Findings revealed that students frequently blend more effective strategies with less effective, surface-level techniques, driven largely by perceptions that particular methods have worked for them in the past. Utility value, particularly how strategies align with performance-oriented goals, significantly impacts their motivation. Additionally, students tend to try to balance study with non-academic activities to reduce perceived costs.

Research Question (from the article):

“What factors contribute to student motivation for using effective cognitive learning strategies during self-study in a higher education context?”

Sample:

217 first-year students enrolled at a Dutch university of applied sciences (58% female, 42% male).

Method/Design:

Participants completed a learning strategy questionnaire focused on goal orientation (extrinsic versus intrinsic, preference for challenging course material) and self-reported frequency of using seven learning strategies including reading, making a summary, underlining, self-testing, studying the night before, copying notes, and reading summaries generated by others. Open-ended questions asked participants to describe why they study in a particular way and how they developed those strategies for themselves.

Focus groups were then conducted in which participants were asked to expand on their strategies with specific examples, whether they would be willing to change their current strategies, and the motivations for using or not using three specific learning strategies: retrieval practice, spacing, and self-explanation. Responses were prompted with questions that specifically emphasized ability beliefs (whether participants felt capable of using the strategy), expectancies of success, perceived value, interest and enjoyment of the strategies, and the perceived costs (emotional, loss of alternatives, time and energy costs). These responses were transcribed and coded using a rubric.

Key Findings:

-       Major themes that emerged included 1) whether or not students had found specific learning strategies to be successful in the past, 2) a strong focus on what students perceived were the most valuable outcomes associated with different strategies, 3) student efforts to balance study with other activities, and similar ways to manage costs of studying generally, and 4) an overall willingness to start using different study strategies, if their current ones were not producing the desired results (e.g., good grades).

-       When directly questioned with the prompt “Would you be willing to change your current study strategies,” 43% responded “yes,” 31% responded “maybe,” and 26% responded “no.”

-       Interestingly, students did endorse retrieval practice, self-explanation, and spacing fairly frequently, but the top two that they spontaneously mentioned were making summaries and reading.

-       Students reported taking a number of deliberate approaches to managing the overall demands of studying and reduce perceived costs of the strategies they used, such as intentionally alternating study and non-study activities and being mindful of overall work-life balance.  

Choice Quote from the Article:

“Previous studies have often focused on why students fail to use effective strategies, and have not thoroughly researched student motivation for the use of effective cognitive learning strategies. This study addressed that gap by investigating what contributes to students' motivation for using effective cognitive strategies in a higher education self-study context.”

Why it Matters:

I've long been intrigued by how the cognitive and motivational aspects of learning play off of one another, and similarly, with research pinpointing the intersections between these areas. It’s something that I reflected on a while back in this Substack post, and that always catches my eye when I’m exploring learning sciences literature.

Besides the fact that motivation-cognition intersections are inherently cool to study, there’s also the very practical point that the design of learning activities is only as effective as students' willingness to actually complete these activities. This article includes lots of delightfully authentic quotes from students talking about why they make particular choices about how to spend their study time – a good reminder that while we faculty can influence study practices, students have the ultimate say.

I was also happy to see the article’s sophisticated analysis of how motivation works, a discussion that ought to put to bed any remaining simplistic notions of motivation as “just wanting it” or coming to a course with a high level of pre-existing interest in the content. As the article explains, expectancies and perceived costs are part of a surprisingly intricate calculus involved in decision-making about learning (or any other significant endeavor). Even with strong desires to succeed, if the paths to achieving goals are unclear, unlikely to work, or excessively costly, students will opt out.

This is crucial because the most effective learning strategies often demand more effort than less effective ones do, or at least they require a more concentrated effort in shorter periods of time. My observations suggest that strategies like retrieval practice, while potent, also expose gaps in one’s knowledge that simpler strategies like rereading might mask. This kind of honest feedback is vital for genuine progress but can be daunting, thus forming part of the “emotional costs” discussed in the article.

Consider the decision-making calculus from the perspective of our own faculty professional development. Imagine a workshop promising to revolutionize your teaching, leading to enthusiastic praise from students, a fun and stress-free semester, and accolades from peers. Wouldn’t you jump at the chance to go? Well, maybe. The decision to attend would probably hinge on a lot of things – whether you buy into the promise of all those great outcomes, certainly, but also on the costs involved— time, money, the hassle of travel, the convenience (or not) of when and where the program is happening. Without all those factors lining up to make an airtight case for the program, you – a reasonably rational actor, just like your students – would probably give it a pass.

Lastly, in this article I was struck by the students' overwhelming preference for creating summaries, a strategy that rarely makes an appearance in this kind of research (at least from what I’ve seen). Given its popularity, this warrants further systematic investigation to compare its effectiveness with other strategies like self-quizzing, and perhaps also exploring what factors might enhance or diminish its utility.

Most Relevant For:

Faculty; instructional designers; student success program leaders and staff.

Limitations, Caveats, and Nagging Questions:

This was a qualitative study, framed as exploratory questions and information-gathering rather than formal hypothesis testing. As a qualitative study, it was done appropriately (in my opinion) and the coupling of closed-ended and open-ended items allowed for multiple perspectives on the phenomena in question. I do think it would be interesting to follow it up with a controlled experimental study of some type. Perhaps students could be exposed to different persuasive messages crafted to highlight utility and value in exchange for costs; actual impacts on study practices could then be measured and compared. Or, different messages could be created to match a given student’s goal orientation and motivation-relevant beliefs. That would be a great use of the rich qualitative data that the authors gathered, and would let us student success folks springboard off of what they found into ways to move the needle on this difficult issue in teaching and learning.

Although I appreciated the two-pronged research strategy of coupling the questionnaire with focus groups, it seemed that not as much useful information came out of the questionnaire answers. Students did endorse intrinsic as well as extrinsic motivation on the goal orientation questions, which is an encouraging reminder that cynical views of student motivation are likely inaccurate (as well as unproductive).

As far as leads for what kinds of interventions might be most effective, I was also struck by the clear connection between past results and willingness to invest in new strategies. This study strongly suggests that the most receptive window for enticing students to make these investments is right after they’ve experienced a let-down or failure. I think there are probably some powerful combinations of mindset messages, offers of support, and information on effective strategies that would fit well in that receptive window.

If you liked this article, you might also appreciate:

Abel, M., & Bäuml, K. H. T. (2020). Would you like to learn more? Retrieval practice plus feedback can increase motivation to keep on studying. Cognition, 201(March),104316. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104316

Cavanagh, S. R. (2016). The spark of learning: Energizing the college classroom with the science of emotion. West Virginia University Press.

Hui, L., de Bruin, A. B. H., Donkers, J., & van Merriënboer, J. J. G. (2022). Why students do (or do not) choose retrieval practice: Their perceptions of mental effort during task performance matter. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 36(2), 433–444. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3933

McDaniel, M. A., Einstein, G. O., & Een, E. (2021). Training college students to use learning strategies: A framework and pilot course. Psychology Learning and Teaching, 20(3), 364–382. https://doi.org/10.1177/1475725721989489

Miller, M.D. (2014).  Minds online: Teaching effectively with technology. Chapter 8: Motivating students. Harvard University Press.

Pintrich, P. R. (1999). The role of motivation in promoting and sustaining self-regulated learning. International Journal of Educational Research, 31, 459–470. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0883-0355(99)00015-4

 File under: 

 Motivation, motivational theory, student success, study strategies, retrieval practice, spacing