Publication Date

2025

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

First Advisor

Britt, M. Anne

Second Advisor

Durik, Amanda

Degree Name

M.A. (Master of Arts)

Legacy Department

Department of Psychology

Abstract

College students have difficulty selecting effective learning strategies, often due to their perceptions of cost and value of these strategies. The goal of the present study was to examine ways to increase students’ perceptions of value to outweigh their perceptions of cost to help them select an effective learning strategy (generation). Students were randomly assigned to one of five conditions in an additive design: no treatment control, experience comparing generation to a less effective learning strategy, experience plus information about its application to one’s life, experience and application plus evidence of the effectiveness of generation, or experience, application, and evidence, plus an explanation of how the generation strategy works. At the end of the session, students were asked to select one of the two strategies for a subsequent learning task and were asked to provide their perceptions of value and cost for each strategy. The results revealed that students’ perceived value was a significant positive predictor of their selection of the generation strategy, whereas perceived cost was a significant negative predictor. Furthermore, there was little evidence of any direct effects of condition on students’ perceived value or selection of generation; however, a mediation analysis revealed that students’ perceived weighing of relative value and cost mediated the relationship between condition and selection. Overall, the findings point towards the idea that value and cost play a role in strategy selection, and certain variables could have a potential influence on these perceptions of value and cost.

Extent

99 pages

Language

en

Publisher

Northern Illinois University

Rights Statement

In Copyright

Rights Statement 2

NIU theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from Huskie Commons for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without the written permission of the authors.

Media Type

Text

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