Can a brief, digital skill training intervention help undergraduates “learn to learn” and improve their STEM achievement?

Abstract

Students who drop out of their science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) majors commonly report that they lack skills critical to STEM learning and career pursuits. Many training programs exist to develop students’ learning skills and they typically achieve small to medium effects on behaviors and performance. However, these programs require large investments of students’ and instructors’ time and effort, which limits their applicability to large lecture course formats commonly employed in early undergraduate STEM coursework. This study examined whether brief, digital training modules designed to help students apply learning strategies and self-regulated learning principles effectively in their STEM courses can impact students’ behaviors and performance in a large biology lecture course. Results indicate that a 2-hr Science of Learning to Learn training had significant effects on students’ use of resources for planning, monitoring, and strategy use, and improved scores on quizzes and exams. These findings indicate that a brief, self-guided, online training can increase desirable learning behaviors and improve STEM performance with minimal cost to learners or instructors. Implications for future design of interventions and their provision to students in need of support are discussed.

The smartphone in self-regulated learning and student success: clarifying relationships and testing an intervention

“…More substantive interventions have provided more reliable outcomes with young adults. Researchers studying college students have had success with a 2-h online training that required limited instructor intervention (Bernacki, Vosicka, & Utz, 2019). There is evidence that a semester-long intervention that incorporates instructor modeling can improve beliefs about learning and the use of SRL strategies such as elaboration (Muis & Duffy, 2013).…”

“…Subsequent research can augment this intervention with attributes that have demonstrated success in similar efforts (e.g., Bernacki et al, 2019;Nguyen et al, 2018). Increasing engagement in the intervention will be key and there are indications that some level of 'gamification' can support technology based interventions (Schindler, Burkholder, Morad, & Marsh, 2017).…”

Student spacing and self-testing strategies and their associations with learning in an upper division microbiology course

“…Aside from these instructional methods, another important aspect of improving learning involves understanding how students manage their own independent learning time. A growing body of work finds that differences in college students' course outcomes are uniquely dependent on how students study (Bernacki et al 2019;Hartwig and Dunlosky 2012;Rodriguez et al 2018a).…”

Adapting implementation science for higher education research: the systematic study of implementing evidence-based practices in college classrooms

“…Implementation science. Implementation science is related to, but distinct from, higher education-relevant cognitive psychology (e.g., Dunlosky et al 2013 ), science of learning (e.g., Halpern and Hakel 2003 ), educational psychology (e.g., Bernacki et al 2019 ), SoTL (e.g., Corral et al 2019 ), discipline-based educational research in psychology (e.g., National Research Council 2002 ), and the learning sciences (e.g., Sawyer and Dunlosky 2019 ). Implementation science builds on effectiveness research in applied settings—an existing evidence base is essential for designing implementation research studies (Lane-Fall et al 2019 ).…”