DEFICIENT LEARNING STRATEGIES: A SIGNIFICANT BARRIER FOR PERSEVERING IN POST-SECONDARY EDUCATION

Study program abandonment and student perseverance in post-secondary education are major challenges for post-secondary institutions, especially because their ability to maintain student clientele during the first year of study is increasingly difficult. For the purposes of this paper, we will focus on the challenges faced by students in terms of learning strategies. To address these difficulties, we asked students to identify the cognitive and self-regulatory strategies they wish to improve in order to succeed in their education. A descriptive analysis of 883 respondents has highlighted the important deficient learning strategies experienced by our sample: it is mostly time management, listening and reading strategies as well as the management of attention, concentration and memorization. In other words, students are not able to effectively manage their time (balancing family, work and studies) or able to estimate the time needed to devote to their studies. They are unaware of strategies to easily retain information they read in books or in photocopied or online texts, for listening to a presentation or a demonstration given by a teacher, for doing exercises to apply one or more of the procedures that they must learn, or for problem-solving. They have difficulty concentrating and remembering, which affects their academic performance.