Academic achievement on first-year Portuguese college students : the role of academic preparation and learning strategies

This paper analyses the impact of learning strategies, gender, academic field attended and students’ entrance classification to the university on academic achievement at the end of the first academic year. The study, developed with 445 first-year college students (68.5% female), ages between 17 and...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autor principal: Soares, Ana Paula (author)
Outros Autores: Guisande, M. Adelina (author), Almeida, Leandro S. (author), Páramo, M. Fernanda (author)
Formato: article
Idioma:eng
Publicado em: 2009
Assuntos:
Texto completo:http://hdl.handle.net/1822/12181
País:Portugal
Oai:oai:repositorium.sdum.uminho.pt:1822/12181
Descrição
Resumo:This paper analyses the impact of learning strategies, gender, academic field attended and students’ entrance classification to the university on academic achievement at the end of the first academic year. The study, developed with 445 first-year college students (68.5% female), ages between 17 and 57 years old (M = 18.3; SD = 2.17), from the University of Minho (Portugal), implicated answering a questionnaire on learning strategies, which concerned five dimensions (comprehensive approach, surface approach, personal competency perceptions, intrinsc motivation and organization of study activities). Regression analyses showed that academic achievement was more related to students’ entrance classifications to the university than to their learning strategies, independently of the academic field attended. Despite the significance of the other variables, these results seem to highlight the relationship between students’ academic preparation and their achievement at the end of the first-year.