The relationship between learning strategies and academic achievement in community college engineering technology students

The accelerating pace of technological change is creating significant challenges for teachers trying to prepare students for a lifetime of changing careers; most which have yet to be invented. To achieve academic and career success, students need to find and employ learning strategies that bridge the gap between knowledge and its application--between the classroom and the workplace.;A correlational research design was used to investigate the relationship between community college engineering technology students' use of specific learning strategies and their academic achievement. The Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) was administered to sixty-one (N = 61) students to determine (1) if a relationship exists between learning strategies and academic achievement for students receiving contextually-based instruction, and (2) to identify which learning strategies had the strongest correlation to academic achievement. Five Cognitive and Metacognitive Strategies sub-scales and four Resource Management Strategies sub-scales were correlated to the final course grade for each student.;The analysis of data included individual questions, sub-scales and scales. Descriptive statistics, the Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient, Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient and Coefficient of Determination were used to determine the strength of correlation between variables.;The results of the study indicated that students did not equate any of the Cognitive and Metacognitive Learning Strategies with achievement while three of the four Resource Management Strategies showed significant, but moderate correlations. The Effort Regulation and Help Seeking sub-scales showed the strongest correlation to academic achievement.;The study concluded that students appeared to contradict the anticipated use of cognitive learning strategies while supporting the use of resource management strategies. The central finding of the study is that students in the study population recognized their use of strategies most strongly in terms of personal control. Students considered resource management strategies to be more essential to their achievement than cognitive-metacognitive strategies.