Students’ Approaches to Learning and its Relationship with their Academic Engagement and Qualitative Performance

Abstract

Introduction: Students’ approaches to learning are vary from surface to deep approaches. These differences may be related to students’ perceptions from subject or educational environment, their prior academic experiences or performance assessment mechanisms. This study was aimed to examine the students’ Approaches to learning and its relationship with their academic engagement and qualitative performance in Yazd public health school. Methods: This analytical study was done cross-sectional during 2017-2018 in Yazd public health school. A total of 158 students contributed in the study. The required data was gathered by ASSIST (Tait, et al. 1997) as a measurement for learning approaches; Reeve & Tseng (2011) academic engagement and Pham & Taylor (1999) academic performance questionnaires. Data analysis was done through SPSS 20. Results: Our results showed that 21.5, 31.0 and 41.1 percent of participants have the preferred deep, surface and strategic learning approach, respectively and 6.3 % of them have no any preferred learning approach. Also, academic engagement scores of students with different approaches to learning were statistically different but the same result was not confirmed about students’ qualitative performance. Conclusion: Disapproval of the relationship between students’ approaches to learning and their qualitative performance can be attributed to the students’ performance assessment mechanisms. At the same time, due to the heterogeneity in the results of studies in this field, further studies are considered necessary.

Keywords

• Learning approach
• Academic engagement
• Academic performance
• Student