2017 Volume 65 Issue 2 Pages 225-238
The purposes of the present research were to investigate differences in the use of learning strategies and in perceived usefulness of learning strategies in the subject areas of mathematics, languages, and social studies, and to assess the relations between strategy use and perceived usefulness, and also relations among the 3 subjects. The participants, 257 high school students, completed measures of learning strategy usage and perceived usefulness. A one-way ANOVA revealed that organization strategies and elaboration strategies were not much used in mathematics, and that lesson induction strategies were not used much in languages, but that, even so, these strategies were perceived as being fairly useful. Path analyses revealed that perceived usefulness was positively related to strategy use in all the learning strategies in the 3 subjects, and that the relation between languages and mathematics was weaker than that between languages and social studies, and between social studies and mathematics. These findings suggest that future intervention studies might focus on teaching different learning strategies in different subjects, based on the differences among subject areas.
