Capturing students’ learning/study strategy use

Overview

Students use a variety of learning strategies when they prepare and study for their courses. However much of this work focuses on using closed-ended questions which prompt students with a set of strategies. In this work, we ask students with an open-ended question to describe how they studied for a specific exam (e.g., Zepeda & Nokes-Malach, 2021). Then based on their responses, we classify which strategies they use and which strategies they don’t report using.

The Goal

To use supervised machine learning for text mining techniques to capture the strategies students use in their own words to pinpoint which strategies students are using and whether there are more effective strategies they could learn about/apply.

The Application

Teachers

Are you curious what types of strategies students are using in your classes? With this development we will be able to easily classify the types of strategies students are using to study and pinpoint which productive strategies they are using and which ones might need more scaffolding.

Students

Would you like to know whether there are better approaches to your studying? With this development we will be able to easily classify the types of strategies you are using to study and pinpoint which productive strategies would be more useful to apply.

Status

We are currently in development and are looking for college instructors, middle school teachers, and high school teachers to partner with. If you are interested, please contact us.