Supporting Students in Their Self-Regulated Use of Effective Cognitive Learning Strategies in Higher Education

BACKGROUND The strategic selection and application of effective cognitive learning strategies as part of self-regulated learning contributes to long-term retention of learned materials and potential transfer of knowledge (Dunlosky et al., 2013; Fiorella & Mayer, 2016). However, research shows that, when higher education students make self-regulated decisions about their learning, they often do not choose effective cognitive strategies (Carpenter, 2023). As a result, recent years have seen an increase in multifaceted interventions that show promise for supporting students’ use of effective cognitive learning strategies (Carpenter, 2023; McDaniel & Einstein, 2023).

PURPOSE These multidimensional interventions are often resource-intensive, and run parallel to existing educational activities without supporting students in the application of newly acquired learning strategies in the learning context of their content courses. In addition, student motivation for effective strategy use in relation to students’ learning goals does not play a central role in current interventions. This dissertation addressed these two issues.

FINDINGS Two experiments which contained compact strategy intervention embedded into higher education course modules demonstrated that strategy instructions alone and strategy instructions together with metacognitive support can increase the self-regulated use of retrieval practice in real world learning situations. Second, a qualitative study and an experiment with an embedded learning strategy intervention showed that students already make regular use of effective cognitive learning strategies often in combination with other surface-level strategies, and possess basic strategy knowledge. Third, it was found that a crucial motivational factor that contributes to effective cognitive strategy use is the perceived utility value of a learning strategy in relation to students’ learning goals.

CONCLUSION Important implications are that effective strategy use can be supported with compact strategy interventions in authentic learnIng environments. These findings also imply that it may be potentially feasible and effective to build upon students’ current use of effective cognitive strategies (Miyatsu et al., 2018), for example with the aid of different types of co-regulation. Last, assuming that when students are able to attribute value to learning strategies and to what they are learning content-wise, they may be more likely to engage in active ways of learning, such as using effective cognitive strategies.