Abstract:

An examination is a tool to measure a student’s performance and his or her level of understanding. Many universities provide general revision guides for students to prepare them for examinations, and this guidance aims to increase the students’ awareness of strategies for revision and for understanding material before an examination. In fact, each individual student is more likely to have their own form of understanding and to operate differently in terms of organising materials and seeking information. In order to succeed in preparing materials before examinations, students need to understand the course materials that are provided by lecturers in the form of lecture slides, lecture notes and references, as well as their own notes. However, students sometimes suffer from a short period of time for revision, excessive amounts of learning resources provided, or poor quality of learning resources. These can lead to ineffective revision processes, some of which are time-consuming or lead to a low level of understanding.

In order to provide technologies to address these issues, we need to understand how an individual student uses learning resources and which resources or strategies work well for them. The result of a student’s engagement in learning resources is of interest from both educational and technological perspectives. From an educational perspective, different ways of using of learning resources may affect the performance of a student – for example, students who spend more time on past exam paper may have better results than students who spent more time on textbook.

This paper, therefore, explores the use of learning resources of postgraduate students at the authors' university in the UK. A questionnaire survey was used to identify patterns of students’ participation in the use of learning resources, their revision strategies, and difficulties students may have during revision.

From a technological perspective, we have gained an insight into what kind of tools students need to support their use of learning resources – for example, organisation tools are available to support students during revision, and students may gain benefits in term of rapid comprehension from having different point of views on learning content. This research also reveals strategies for using learning resources for revision as well as potential issues that need to be addressed. Additionally we propose potential ideas for designing presentation and organisation tools that may support a student’s revision.

Keywords:

Self-regulated learning, revision strategy, e-learning resources, cognitive tools.