Improving Study Skills by Combining a Study Skill Module and Repeated Reflection Seminars

If students have a broad spectrum of study skills, learning will likely be positively affected, since they can adapt the way they learn in different situations. Such study skills can be learned in, for example, learning-to-learn courses. Several studies of such courses have been done over the years, but few of these have been carried out in longitudinal naturalistic settings, where the effect has been evaluated over several years in nonexperimental settings. In this paper, we present a novel approach for learning study skills, as a part of a course running over three years. The course starts with a learning-to-learn module, followed by 11 follow-ups that include, among other things, peer discussions about learning strategies with the aim of promoting self-regulated learning. This evaluation shows which study skills the students were most interested in trying, how successful they were in continuing to use the study skills, and which effects the students believed the study skills had after trying them. No significant change was found in how satisfied the students were with their overall study technique immediately after the initial module, but in the long term, 78% of the students believed the course had promoted their ability to analyze and adapt their study habits. We conclude that our approach could be a useful way to get the students to improve their repertoire and use of study skills, and we believe that the students also will improve general self-regulated learning skills.