Ensayo

Learning Strategies of Successful and Unsuccessful University Students
Ali Simsek Jale Balaban Anadolu University, Turkey

Abstract
The purpose of this study was to assess the most commonly used learning strategies of undergraduate students and how these strategies were related to their academic performance. Toward this purpose, a 60 item Likertscale was administered to a sample of 278 undergraduate students. The students were selected based on their cumulative grand-point-average as the most successful and the least successful five senior-year students from each majoring area in the faculties of arts, engineering, science, communication, and sports. The Cronbach’s Alpha reliability coefficient of the scale was 0,93. Results showed thatsuccessful students used more, varied, and better learning strategies than unsuccessful students. Female students were more effective in selecting and using appropriate strategies than male students. There were a variety of differences among fields of study; students of fine arts used the strategies least, while students of sports used them the most. The most preferred group of strategies wasmetacognitive strategies, whereas the least preferred group was organization strategies. The same pattern was found for the level of success, gender, and field of study. The results overall imply that certain strategies contribute to student performance more than other strategies, and majority of university students are aware of this situation.

Keywords: Cognitivestrategies; Higher education; Learning strategies; University students.

Introduction

Learning strategies have long been an important issue in the field of education. It is generally accepted that instructional practices should assess and accommodate learning strategies of individual students. It is, however, not an easy task to design and implementtruly adaptive modes of instruction in public education because learning strategies may vary significantly from one student to another. Due to this nature, learning strategies have also been a critical issue for instructional designers because they are to develop instructional systems that are sensitive to learning strategies of each student, both in group instruction and individual learning contexts.Instructional designers and classroom teachers are generally aware that there are a number of learning strategies that students can select and employ. However, it is not clear on what basis students select certain strategies and why they prefer them instead of others (Gu, 2005; Simsek, 2006). For example, can the field of study be a factor in selecting strategies or does genderaffect the choice of strategy? It is also true that educators are curious about the relationship between the use of strategies and generating various learning outcomes such as
36CONTEMPORARY EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY, 2010, 1(1), 36-45
achievement, perseverance, and attitudes. One may ask if there is a meaningful correlation between the use of certain strategies and academicperformance or if the past achievement levels of students influence their choice of strategies. All these questions are critical and answers are worth to know for producing successful learning.
It is not surprising that students can use a wide variety of strategies in the learning process. Presumably, there may be as many strategies as the number of students. It is because each studentselects and employs a different strategy depending upon instructional variables such as individual differences, types of domains, teaching methods, amount of time, learning technologies, kinds of feedback, required level of mastery, ways of measurement etc. Needless to say that these variables are also important from the point of designing effective, engaging, and efficient instruction (Milano...