Refining questionnaire-based assessment of STEM students’ learning strategies

Abstract

Background: Learning strategies are considered a key aspect for academic performance not only for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) students. Refining their assessment thus constitutes a worthwhile research purpose. The aim of this study is to examine the 69-item LIST questionnaire (ZDDP 15:185-200, 1994) with the aim of shortening it while keeping its factor structure and thus its potential for describing learning behaviour and for identifying significant changes therein. This includes exploring if reduced scales remain internally reliable, both in terms of reliability measures and content, and to examine if they stay sensitive enough to capture developments in a pre-post design. Results: Our cohorts consist of STEM students (N = 2374) from different engineering courses at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany, typically predominantly males, some with insufficient background in mathematics or non-native speakers of German. The data was analysed using various statistic methods, e.g. reliability measurement and confirmatory factor analysis. Our findings show that about half of the original items (36 out of 69) are sufficient, reliability holds (Cronbach's α > 0.7) and more variance is explained (56.17 % as compared to 45.65 %). Most content-related changes occurring when eliminating so many items survive critical scrutiny. Conclusions: The study shows that it is possible to refine and considerably shorten the LIST questionnaire to the effect that all but one factor are kept intact. This will simplify future research enormously. Furthermore, the refined factor structure suggests reconsidering the postulate of metacognition as an easily accessed facet of learning behaviour-thus implying promising research perspectives.

Cognitive Loads and Training Success in a Video-Based Online Training Course

“…Therefore, the finding that a higher level of germane load corresponded to higher ratings of subjective learning success and professional competence is not surprising. This result also corresponds to research on learning strategies [7]. In addition, participants passed more modules and felt more competent when they reported to have been confronted with higher intrinsic load (i.e., more difficult tasks).…”

“…Learning strategies are commonly assessed by using multiple items. Instruments that are sufficiently reliable and valid have been developed for measuring learning strategies [7].…”

Direction of collaborative problem solving-based STEM learning by learning analytics approach

“…The SLS Questionnaire developed by Griese et al (2015) was used as the postquestionnaire, concerning students' learning strategy during their STEM learning. The SLS Questionnaire contains nine factors, Organizing, Elaborating, Repeating, Effort, Attention, Time Management, Learning Environment, Peer Learning, and Using References, and includes 27 items (see Appendix 3).…”

“…Since STEM education is an integrated learning approach (Kelley & Knowles, 2016;Lou, Liu, Shih, & Tseng, 2011), it is important for both educators and students to understand the coherence, integration, and learning approaches of STEM so that they can apply an effective learning strategy in STEM teaching and learning. As indicators of learning behaviors, it is necessary to make sense of students' cognitive learning strategies in STEM education, such as whether and how they use their learning strategies during STEM learning and when solving STEM problems (Griese, Lehmann, & Roesken-Winter, 2015).…”

Learning Strategies in Engineering Mathematics

“…In fact, the item deleted (I find myself thinking of completely different things) has no direct implication to the learning situation, and therefore is no heavy loss. It is not the aim here to shorten or otherwise modify the LIST questionnaire, though calculations have shown this to be possible and reasonable (Griese, Lehmann, & Roesken-Winter, 2015b).…”