"I've Studied so Hard for This Course, but Don't Get It!" Differences between Student and Faculty Perceptions.
One of the continual challenges of college teaching and learning is that students must adapt to academic demands that differ from high school. Students say: "I studied hard, but didn't get it!" and professors grumble: "Why don't they get it!" This study compared the learning and study strategies college students used in a course with the learning and study strategies their professors believe to be most important for success in the course. The learning strategies investigated here derive from an extensive body of cognitive research that indicates different ways in which students learn affect the quality of their learning and long-term intellectual growth. There are different types of learning demands upon college students. Some academic tasks require recall of specific terms or facts. Rehearsal is a study strategy for learning discrete information. Elaboration helps students build connections between ideas by stressing connections between the ideas already known and their currently learning experience. Organization accomplishes this through study strategies such as clustering, outlining, and distinguishing between the main ideas and supporting ideas in a text or lecture. Two additional learning strategies identified and assessed in the current study were peer learning and seeking help. The study was conducted after fall midterms, with 501 freshman and upper class undergraduates from a private university with a total enrollment of 1500 students. Gender was approximately balanced within each class. Freshman responded to the Motivated Strategies for Learning (MSLQ) questionnaire in freshman seminar courses that deal with diverse topics (but share some common learning objectives). Upper class courses also represented a wide range of academic disciplines. The MSLQ is a self-report instrument that has been used extensively in previous research that investigated college student motivation and learning strategies (Pintrich, McKeachie and Smith, 1989; Pintrich, 1988, 1989; Pintfich & Garcia, 1991; and Pintrich and DeGroot, 1990). Students respond to a seven-point scale with the extremes marked by "not at all true of me" or "very true of me". For example, one item is: "When I become confused about something for this class, I go back and try to figure it out." All of the items direct the respondent to the course in which they receive the survey. The MSLQ is scored as separate scales, each sensitive to different aspects of motivation, learning strategies or resource management. A survey asked faculty to rate the extent to which rehearsal, elaboration, organization, critical thinking, peer learning, and help seeking were required to do well in their course. The results clearly indicated considerable discrepancies between the learning strategies faculty believe as important in their courses and the strategies that students report using in the course. Combining freshman and upper level student scores showed the students believed rehearsal to be more important than what faculty judged as important. However, faculty judged elaboration, organization, critical thinking, peer helping, and seeking help more important for success in their courses than the students. The discrepancy was greatest for the cognitive strategies associated with deeper processing: elaboration, organization and critical thinking. Comparisons within either the freshman class or the upper class students showed a similar pattern, with freshman having a greater underestimation of the need for critical thinking and seeking help with their peers than their more experienced peers. …