Listening to Students' Voices: What University Students Tell Us about How They Learn

The strategic learning of college and university students begins with their acquisition of knowledge about their academic context and its learning opportunities and demands. However, traditional assessment measures isolate the student outside of the authentic learning context, which limits the information available from these tests. In contrast, this study explores and describes the insights that university students can contribute to an assessment of their study problems and strategies within the authentic context of the Assessment Interview Process. Utilizing a problem-solving perspective to analyze the students' retrospective verbal reports, this ethnographic study organizes the students' insights regarding the development of strategies to solve study problems into the Strategic Learning Model. Twenty sessions between nine students and five interviewers/tutors were reported. The dimensions of this heuristic, described in this study, provide the structure needed to better understand the processes used by students as they encounter study and learning difficulties and develop appropriate study strategies. (Author/SLD)