What Predicts University Students’ Use of Learning Strategies?: Perceived Cognitive Demands, Instrumentality or Personality

The current study investigated how college students’ perception of cognitive demands, instrumentality and personality influent their learning strategies generally used for a specific course. A survey package consisting of a Cognitive Demands Questionnaire (Zhou, Phillips, & Turner, 2012), the Instrumentality Questionnaire (Husman & Lens, 1999), the Big-Five Personality Questionnaire (John, Donahue & Kentle, 1991), and part of the Motivated Learning Strategies Questionnaire (31 items for measuring cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies ,Pintrich, Smith, Garcia, & McKeachie, 1991) was administered to 494 participants near the end of the semester when students have already completed most of the course content and assignments. The results revealed that 1) Compared to personality traits and instrumentality, cognitive demands are stronger and more direct predictors for explaining students’ use of learning strategies; 2) Most personality traits associated with impulse control only have indirect influence on learning strategies through the coordination of self-regulation; 3) Self-regulation has a special role of coordinating cognitive demands, instrumentality and personality. The present results shed light on the very important role played by the local context of the specific demand characteristics of the assignments of a given course.%%%%A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Educational Psychology and Learning System in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Philosophy.%%%%Summer Semester 2016.%%%%July 5, 2016.%%%%Cognitive demand, Instrumentality, Learning strategy, Personality%%%%Beth M. Phillips, Professor Directing Dissertation; Sherry Southerland, University Representative; Jeannine Turner, Committee Member; Yanyun Yang, Committee Member.