Promoting the Self-Regulated Use of Effective Learning Strategies in Gateway Undergraduate STEM Courses

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Under the sponsorship of Dr. Uma Tauber at Texas Christian University and Dr. Mark McDaniel at Washington University at St. Louis, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early-career scientist investigating the effectiveness of a multicomponent strategy-training intervention on college student learning in Chemistry and Biology courses. The proposed research promises to have a far-reaching impact on student achievement and science by providing students with the tools necessary to overcome the barriers to using effective learning strategies and mastering course concepts when studying on their own. Because departure from science is particularly high among women, ethnic/racial minorities, and first-generation college students, the strategy-training intervention is expected to have the greatest benefit for students from underrepresented groups.Many students enter college with insufficient awareness of effective learning strategies and struggle to adopt strategies that promote long-term retention and understanding of content, which leads them to earn low or non-passing grades in challenging science courses. Despite a multitude of research supporting the effectiveness of retrieval practice (i.e., recalling information from memory), self-explanation (i.e., explaining how to-be-learned information is related to already known information), and distributed practice (i.e., spreading study strategies out across time) for improving learning and achievement in the sciences, little research has focused on promoting students’ use of these strategies when studying on their own. The current research proposes a multicomponent strategy-training intervention to address four barriers that prevent students from using these effective strategies during their own learning: (1) lack of knowledge about the strategies and how to use them to master course concepts, (2) not believing the strategy is effective for lasting learning, (3) lack of motivation to exert the effort that these strategies require, and (4) poor management of study time. Specifically, the proposed research aims to answer the following questions: Does a strategy-training intervention informed by the Knowledge, Belief, Commitment, and Planning framework (McDaniel & Einstein, 2020) lead to greater use of effective learning strategies compared to a control group? If so, does this increased use of effective strategies lead to improvement on measures of course achievement and persistence in gateway undergraduate science courses? To answer these questions, two large-scale experiments will be conducted in two gateway undergraduate Chemistry and Biology courses to evaluate the effects of the strategy-training intervention on (a) student knowledge and beliefs about effective learning strategies, (b) students’ self-regulated learning behavior, (c) exam performance, and (d) persistence in science.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.