Discipline: Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences
Subcategory: Education
Alicia Cooper - Virginia State University
Co-Author(s): Milton Faison
Given the importance of high academic achievement to later success in life, it is critical to identify the that factors contribute to this. One measure of academic achievement is GPA. A growing body of work suggests that non-cognitive factors, meaning factors unrelated to measures of intelligence, may be important for academic achievement. These include self-efficacy and metacognitive awareness. Study strategies can be defined as activities that students complete in order to assist them perform better academically. These include reading, problem-solving, and listening. This study was conducted to explore possible relationships between non-cognitive factors and study strategies and high-school students’ GPA levels. The goal of this research is to try to distinguish what non-cognitive factors and study strategies are more prevalent among students with a high-level GPA versus students with a low-level GPA. The information from this research study is important because being able to identify what study strategies and non-cognitive factors are more common among high-level GPA students, conclusions can be made about which non-cognitive factors and study strategies are most successful. This research study was conducted by giving college students (n=316) in introductory biology classes a survey which included questions about high school GPA, metacognitive awareness, specific study strategies, and a group of non-cognitive factors. T-tests were performed to determine which study strategies and non-cognitive factors were significantly different among the two different levels of GPA. The results from the study showed that students with higher GPAs had greater self-efficacy, knowledge about cognition, and regulation of cognition and greater use of reading, problem-solving, and listening as study strategies. Future research could investigate the use of these study strategies and non-cognitive factors in the low GPA group to see if implementing these study strategies provided an increase among these group of students’ GPA.
Cooper ERN Abstract.docxFunder Acknowledgement(s): No external funding
Faculty Advisor: Milton Faison, mfaison@vsu.edu
Role: The part of this research that I completed was the data analysis.