The purpose of this study was to develop an instrument to assess college students' efficacy beliefs for conceptual change and to examine the psychometric properties of the instrument. Participants were 692 students. Results of the confirmatory factor analysis supported the hypothesized single factor structure of Efficacy Beliefs for Conceptual…

In this study, the authors examined the effect of taking a learning strategies course on grade point average, retention, and graduation rate of 351 first-year students over their first 4 terms in comparison with 351 matched non-course takers. The course taught 4 learning strategies and 8 substrategies to help students overcome procrastination,…

Providing an incentive to make procrastinators study by giving a test on each chapter was compared with providing a learning strategy by requiring students to outline each chapter, with 82 students classified by level of procrastination. There was an advantage of almost 12% for the test condition among high procrastinators. (SLD)

Two experiments involving 226 college students were conducted to determine the relative effectiveness of increasing students' incentive motivation for studying and prescribing a text-processing strategy for them to use in studying. Findings suggest that the use of students' acquired learning strategies depends on their motivational levels. (SLD)

The effects of working in groups (WIG), goal-setting, and a control condition on self-regulated performance were compared for 126 college students (prospective teachers at high, middle, and low self-efficacy levels). A strong interaction between performance condition and individual self-efficacy level surfaced. WIG only increased performance of…

The coded elaborative outline (CEO) was evaluated as a strategy for helping students learn from text in five treatment conditions involving CEOs and standard outlines. Results with 182 undergraduates show that students required to write and submit CEOs scored higher than did students in the other 4 conditions. (SLD)