WHAT IF ALL COURSES ARE ONLINE: LEARNING APPROACHES AND STRATEGIES OF STUDENTS OF MEDICAL SCIENCES AND THEIR PERCEIVED LEARNING ACHIEVEMENT AND SATISFACTION

Students’ learning goal orientation, motivation and strategies have been shown to have a significant relationship with their academic achievement. While learning styles are more stable, learning goal orientation and strategies are more likely to be adapted in different learning situations. For example, a student may change his/her learning strategies from deep to surface approach if he/she does not find the course matching his/her expectation anymore. Or due to time constraint, such a mastery goal may be modified to a performance-avoidance approach, i.e., learning in order not to fail rather than acquiring a deep knowledge of the course topics.

The Covid-19 pandemic has imposed that higher institutions worldwide limit physical classroom contacts and, in some cases, opt for completely online teaching. Examining how students might have adapted their goal orientation and learning strategies is relevant in this context. Against this background, the present study investigates (1) the extent to which students’ course expectation and learning achievement goals are related to their learning approaches and time and resource management strategies, (2) the extent to which students’ learning approaches and time and resource management strategies are related to their perceived learning achievement and overall satisfaction.

To achieve the research objectives, the authors employed a questionnaire developed based on existing validated scales to collect the data. The questionnaire comprised different sections including background information of the participants, learning achievement goals (Elliot & Church, 1997), approaches to learning (Entwistle, McCune, & Tait, 1997), perceived learning achievement (Lim & Richardson, 2020). Back translation technique was used to translate the questionnaire from English into the French language. This questionnaire was administered online to all students from the Faculty of Medicine during the 2020-2021 academic year and 734 responses were recorded.

To answer the research questions, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) is to be conducted to validate the scales. Subsequently, structural equation modelling (SEM) will be performed to examine the relationship between the students’ background, course expectations, learning approaches and strategies to their perceived learning achievement and satisfaction. The data analysis is ongoing, and the results will be available at the time of paper submission. The results are expected to provide insightful implications for research in the field of online learning, instructions, and individual differences in learning motivation and approaches.