Volume 7 (Issue 1) Download

What Strategies do Chemistry Students in Secondary Education use in their Study Process?

Alex van den Berg, Tom Drukker and Ron Delker

 

Abstract

At the Praedinius Gymnasium in Groningen, the Netherlands, there are many students whose performance declines over the years. Teachers have thought for some time that part of the explanation may be that students get stuck because they apply a limited number of learning strategies that at some point no longer suffice. Learning strategies are certain combinations of purposeful learning activities by the learner[1]. If the situation changes because subjects require deeper learning, some students do not know how to deal with this and persist in the strategies that they have been successfully applied for years. How can we help these students learn appropriate learning strategies? Since people are willing to change if the need to do so is also clearly visible [2], our first step was to find out when in the school career students themselves indicate that they get stuck because of ineffective strategies. To this end, we used a questionnaire that measures metacognition. Students completed this questionnaire. We found that students in grade 11 achieved the lowest scores on this self-assessment. Second, we interviewed students from grade 11 about which strategies they use. We scored the strategies on effectiveness. Results showed that students who regularly participate in academic competitions used much more effective learning strategies. With the results of the interviews we developed a lesson that focused on teaching effective learning strategies; that lesson was then observed and evaluated.