Refining questionnaire-based assessment of STEM students’ learning strategies

Abstract

Background: Learning strategies are considered a key aspect for academic performance not only for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) students. Refining their assessment thus constitutes a worthwhile research purpose. The aim of this study is to examine the 69-item LIST questionnaire (ZDDP 15:185-200, 1994) with the aim of shortening it while keeping its factor structure and thus its potential for describing learning behaviour and for identifying significant changes therein. This includes exploring if reduced scales remain internally reliable, both in terms of reliability measures and content, and to examine if they stay sensitive enough to capture developments in a pre-post design. Results: Our cohorts consist of STEM students (N = 2374) from different engineering courses at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany, typically predominantly males, some with insufficient background in mathematics or non-native speakers of German. The data was analysed using various statistic methods, e.g. reliability measurement and confirmatory factor analysis. Our findings show that about half of the original items (36 out of 69) are sufficient, reliability holds (Cronbach’s α > 0.7) and more variance is explained (56.17 % as compared to 45.65 %). Most content-related changes occurring when eliminating so many items survive critical scrutiny. Conclusions: The study shows that it is possible to refine and considerably shorten the LIST questionnaire to the effect that all but one factor are kept intact. This will simplify future research enormously. Furthermore, the refined factor structure suggests reconsidering the postulate of metacognition as an easily accessed facet of learning behaviour—thus implying promising research perspectives.