*For the uninitiated, a Toniebox is a little speaker. They work with special figurines, called Tonies. The kids put a Tonie on the box and it starts playing whatever is loaded. Some read stories, some play music, and some are like little screen-free “shows” that teach the kids about concepts and sing. By the way, this is not a paid advertisement; we don’t do that on our site! My family just really loves our Toniebox.

Coach Hippo is all about helping develop healthy habits, like exercising, eating a variety of whole foods, getting enough rest, and importantly, believing in yourself. The result is that my daughter is constantly asking us to “Do Gym Class” with her, and runs around the house signing songs with lyrics like, “the best I can be” and “I am a super star, today I will shine!!”.

I love that she is developing confidence, and that this is part of what she is learning as healthy habits. I have been thinking a lot about mindset, motivation, and self-efficacy lately, with relation to my daughter and also my college students.

This brings me to the point of today’s blog, a paper by Héctor Ruiz-Martín, Fermando Blanco, and Marta Ferrero examined how secondary students report studying, and the associations these choices have with students’ beliefs in their own abilities (1).

There have been a number of surveys conducted over the last 20 years asking what students report doing when they study, and attempting to link those results to student achievement. The bulk of this work has been conducted with students in higher education, and typically looks at academic achievement and students’ predictions about how well the strategies will help them. This 2024 paper by Ruiz-Martín and colleagues seems unique to me because they studied younger students (i.e., secondary) and their self-efficacy. Understanding student attitudes towards various strategies, and how engaging in them affects their belief in their own ability to achieve (i.e., self-efficacy), mindset, and anxiety related to testing is, I believe, essential if we hope to promote evidence-based study strategies and see students adopt them.

The researchers collected data from students in grades 7 through 12 from a number of schools across Catalonia (the northeastern region of Spain). Ultimately, their final sample was over 3,400 students. The researchers administered two surveys to the students.

The first survey contained questions about the study strategies that students use, drawing heavily from the previous research in this area. The students indicated how often they engaged in the various study behaviors described in the study, such as retrieval practice, various forms of elaboration, rereading, highlighting, copying, etc.

The second survey assessed the students’ beliefs and attitudes toward learning. The scales assessed:

• self-efficacy—students’ confidence in their ability to achieve in school,

• learning goals—students’ interests in learning at school,

• performance goals—students’ interest in getting good grades,

• control beliefs—students’ beliefs that they can control factors related to their success

• growth mindset—students’ beliefs that their abilities could be improved

• examination anxiety—stress and anxiety associated with tests

Finally, the researchers gathered information from the schools about the students’ final grades.

The researchers collected a lot of data, and so there are a lot of important findings in their paper. I will focus here on the things that I found to be the most interesting.

Reported Strategy Use

Most students, nearly 78%, reported never being taught how to study.

Unsurprisingly, “rote learning” was one of the most frequently reported approaches to studying, while retrieval practice was one of the least frequently used strategies (at least as reported by these students). When retrieval practice was reported being used, it was most often associated with rehearsing information after reading it. Spaced practice was also a low-prevalence strategy in their data.

Effective Strategy Use and Achievement

Some were! There were correlations between retrieval practice use and higher grades, but the correlations were low (~.20, for example). Spacing was not associated with higher grades. Of course, we know that long-term learning and getting good grades are not one in the same. And, importantly, the association between evidence-based strategies, such as retrieval practice and elaboration, and achievement were higher than with the low utility strategies, such as highlighting or copying notes. The authors keenly point out that while correlation does not mean causation, the lack of correlation can imply lack of causation. The lack of correlation between highlighting and copying and achievement suggests that these strategies do not cause changes in achievement.

Beliefs and Attitudes Towards Learning

The data suggested students viewed their grades as a higher priority than learning. More students had a growth mindset than a fixed mindset. These two results may seem contradictory given the theory, and the authors discuss this at length for those interested.

Most interesting to me, effective, evidence-based strategies (retrieval practice, elaboration, etc.) had a greater association with positive attitudes towards learning than the low-utility strategies (highlighting, rereading, copying, etc.). In other words, the students using effective, evidence-based strategies were more likely to have higher self efficacy, for example, compared to those that did not report using the effective strategies.

The low utility strategies, like rereading, copying, etc., did not correlate with self-efficacy. This means that use of these strategies is distributed among those with higher and lower self-efficacy, suggesting these strategies do not have an effect on self-efficacy.

The authors conclude that effective, evidence based strategies were largely the ones that were associated with student achievement and positive attitudes towards learning.