By Althea Need Kaminske
I recently taught about effective learning strategies in one of my courses and, as I do every week, reserved a day for questions and clarifications. My students asked a version of a question that I get a lot about effective learning strategies: “If this is so effective, why isn’t it being taught in schools?”. I’ve talked about different aspects of this previously (and argued that in the U.S. our time and money would be better spent on school meals ) but I wanted to talk about a different challenge to simply teaching learning strategies and hoping for the best: studying can be complicated! Improving students’ knowledge and understanding of effective strategies would certainly be helpful – we’ve spent the last year writing a book hoping to do just that! – but it is only one component of effective studying and learning. When students are tasked with making choices about their learning a number of cognitive, motivational, behavioral, and contextual factors come into play. The suite of skills learners use to handle those factors is referred to as self-regulated learning (1).
Self-Regulated Learning
Pintrich (2000) defined self-regulated learning as “an active, constructive process whereby learners set goals for their learning and then attempt to monitor, regulate, and control their cognition, motivation, and behavior, guided and constrained by their goals and the contextual features of their environment” (2). In this framework, self-regulated learning occurs in a series of stages (1, 2, 3). First, in a forethought phase, learners must set goals and plan out their learning activities. Next, in a learning or performance phase, learners must engage in the learning task and monitor and control their learning. Finally, in a self-reflection or assessment/adjustment phase, learners must evaluate their learning and decide how they feel about it.
Even if a student understands that a certain strategy is effective, they may have trouble setting reasonable goals or assessing their performance. Without proper time management skills and academic motivation, this student may not see the full benefit of an effective learning strategy. This is reflected in a meta-analysis of psychosocial skills, study skills, and college outcomes (4). Researchers found that the best predictors of college (university) GPA were academic self-efficacy and achievement motivation, while academic self-efficacy and academic related skills were predictive of retention (persistence) (4). Academic success is about more than just knowing what works and what doesn’t. Self-regulated learning emphasizes that learning is a process that is greatly affected by motivational and attitudinal components.
I would like to note that there are a lot of interesting ways in which different learning strategies may influence self-regulated learning. See this review of student ability, self-regulated spaced practice, and performance in online learning by Carolina.
Does Personality Play a Role?
An intriguing question about student study habits and self-regulated learning is to what degree individual difference like personality may play a role. A recent study by Albar and colleagues (2022) investigated whether there was a correlation between personality traits and learning strategies (4). They measured the Big 5 personality traits (5) using the NEO-Five Factor Inventory-3 (6), and measured study skills using the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI) (7).
The Big 5 consists of Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (making the handy acronym: OCEAN). Each of these traits are mutually exclusive and fall on a spectrum. This means that where you fall on each of these traits does not depend on where you fall on the others. For example, it’s just as likely that someone scores high on both Agreeableness and Extraversion as is that they score low on Agreeableness and high on Extraversion (and are probably somewhat unpleasant at parties). Thus, while people may share similarities, everyone has a unique personality made up of these traits. Further, while it is possible for personality to change over time, on the whole these traits remain relatively stable. It’s unlikely for someone who is very agreeable to suddenly become very unagreeable, though there may be slight changes over time.
