An Investigation into the Learning Styles and Self- Regulated Learning Strategies for Computer Science Students

Abstract

Student-centred educational paradigms place a high level of responsibility on learners to control and self-regulate their personal learning processes. In these new educational paradigms, it is essential to understand students' preferences and the self-regulated learning strategies they use in order to enhance the learning process. This paper examines the different learning styles and self- regulated learning strategies used by students in a core computer science course. An Index of Learning Styles and a Self-Regulated Learning Strategies Questionnaire were administered to second year students studying programming languages concepts and paradigms. Results show that aspects of students' preferred learning styles had a significant impact on academic performance in the midterm examination. Further, consideration of the self-regulated learning strategies used by students provides evidence that metacognitive strategies were the least popular strategies among students. This suggests that students are not aware of important self-regulated learning strategies and may benefit from educational interventions focusing on these strategies. These results have implications for future teaching of the course, and are being used to guide the development of an online collaborative learning objects repository that aims to improve self-directed student learning.