Abstract:

Nowadays, like many others, health workers should have informatics (or Computer science) competencies. According to the Croatian national curriculum, Health high school students have at least one year of Informatics as an obligatory school subject. There are several specialisations in the Health school, such as pharmacist, nurse, physiotherapist, laboratory and sanitary technician. The students enrolling in different specialisations have different elementary school successes, abilities and motivations. Since Informatics is not part of the core subjects in Health school, we wanted to examine students’ motivation and learning strategies towards the Informatics school subject based on the enrolled specialisation. Therefore, we conducted a self-assessment survey among Health school students (all specialisations) during the Informatics course in the school year 2021/2022. The students took a self-assessment survey about their motivational and learning strategies in the Informatics course.

The results related to the learning strategies showed:
a) that girls are more organised than boys,
b) students with higher elementary school successes are more inclined to critical thinking than others, and
c) students with higher elementary school successes are more self-critical than others.

The results also showed no difference in motivation between students of different gender and the enrolled course. In this paper, we present our findings.

Keywords:

Motivation, learning strategies, self-regulation, Informatics, Health School.