Abstract:

At the present, the teaching-learning process at the university has as one of its leitmotifs to encourage the active role of the students. This entails that students should be strategic in their own learning process, because this would facilitate the information acquisition, codification, recovery and support. In this study, the objective was to analyze the possible correlation between the used learning strategies by the students and their respective academic performance.

To this end, the abridged-ACRA scale to university students on learning strategies was used (Arias & Justicia, 2003). Such instrument integrates four strategy groups: information acquisition, codification, recovery and support. The study was carried out in the academic year 2013-2014 and 70 students from second and third courses of the Degree in Physiotherapy participated in the study. The average age of the sample was 21.10 (SD 2.78), and 54.3% of them were women. All the participants signed an informed consent on the voluntary participation in the study and to allow the researchers access to their academic achievement. The academic performance was calculated based on the marks obtained from the courses studied and passed until the moment of this study. The marks obtained in each course ranged from 0 to 10.

The main results observed were the higher use of learning strategies (total ACRA score) by women (p<0.001) when compared to men. There are no significant differences between courses when compared students from both courses. Regarding the amount of use for each strategy that integrates the tool, there are significant differences in 14 of 44 strategies by gender (higher for women), and in 2 of 44 strategies by course (higher for third course). Concerning the dimensions of the scale there were significant differences in D1 and D2 by gender (higher for women) and there were no significant differences by course. To the subscales, there were significant differences in information acquisition, codification and support by gender (higher for women), and no significant differences were observed by course. There were significant differences for 6 of 13 factors by gender (higher for women), and only for 2 of 13 by course. There were no significant differences referent to academic performance by gender, however it was significant by course (higher for third course). In the correlation analysis between the different variables and academic performance, there was only a significant positive correlation between academic performance and factor 8 (social support).

The academic performance of the students from the Degree in Physiotherapy seems not to be linked to the amount of use of strategies or groups of strategies, except for the strategies related to social support. This fact could mean that other variables would be implicated with higher academic performance among our students, thus suggesting that other studies employing other instruments in order to assess the relationship between learning and academic performance are needed.

Keywords:

Learning strategies, Academic performance, Physiotherapy.