The relationship between learning strategies and academic performance of fourth-year pharmacy students

Abstract

This study investigated the learning strategies employed by pharmacy students and their impact on academic performance, assessed through objective tests consisting of multiple-choice questions evaluating knowledge of pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences. A questionnaire survey and factor analysis revealed four learning strategies employed by the students. They were “Overview” of learning content, incorporation of “Daily-life” events, “Construction” of knowledge, and “Memorization” of discrete facts. Overview and Construction strategies align closely with the well-established deep-processing strategies, namely organizational strategy and elaboration strategy. Overview and Daily-life strategies positively correlate with Construction, while Memorization negatively correlates with the other three strategies. These correlations may reflect a difference between the deep-processing and shallow-processing strategies. The adoption of these learning strategies differed for the top performers and lower graders. The top performers exhibited a higher factor score in Construction than the lower graders, whereas the lower graders displayed a higher factor score in Memorization. Construction exhibited a weak but positive correlation with examination scores, while Memorization exhibited a corresponding negative correlation. Daily study hours were slightly longer for top performers; however, the difference was insufficient to conclude that learning hours were crucial for the differences in academic performance. These results underscore the influence of learning strategies on the academic performance of pharmacy students. Deep-processing strategies such as Overview and Construction hold more significant promise for improving their academic performance.