Gathering Information on Students' Learning Strategies Use: Questionnaires

July 1998: "Gathering Information on Students' Learning Strategies Use: Questionnaires" Sarah Barnhardt

Since its origin in 1997, The Language Resource has provided readers with information on the use of learning strategies in the foreign language classroom. Individual strategies and strategy combinations have been introduced, teaching techniques for incorporating learning strategies in the curriculum have been described, and findings from the past eight years of learning strategies research conducted by the NCLRC have been presented. The basis of information on learning strategies begins with the various instruments available for collecting this data. These instruments are useful to researchers, classroom teachers, and students- to basically anyone who is interested in expanding their own knowledge of the learning process and enabling this knowledge to impact on instructional techniques. This article, focusing on questionnaires, is the first in a series of articles presenting a variety of learning strategies instruments tested and used by NCLRC researchers, foreign language teachers and students. In the upcoming issues articles will look at interviews, learning logs/diaries, and observation techniques.

Learning strategies are thoughts or actions that learners use to help them produce, comprehend and remember information. Frequently it is difficult to observe strategies because they can be mental techniques. Learners themselves are often unaware of their strategies until someone, usually the teacher, raises their consciousness of their learning techniques. This is referred to as increasing learners' metacognition. Learning strategies instruments can help students become aware of their strategies and can also help teachers become aware of the strategies students are already using, those which may need to be explicitly taught, and the impact strategies instruction is having on students' strategies use.

Although there are many instruments available for gathering information on strategies use, there is no perfect instrument due to the often intangible nature of strategies. Each instrument has its own strengths and weaknesses. Many practitioners favor questionnaires because they are easy to administer and can be constructed to target specific information. Questionnaires can be either closed in which case students are given structured choices for responses or open in which case students need to come up with the response items themselves. Regardless of the format chosen, the questionnaire needs to be contextualized within language contexts (e.g., reading, vocabulary learning, dialogue practice) in order to elicit meaningful responses. Students can more accurately think about how they approach a reading task but have more difficulty conceptualizing what they do to learn a language in general. In other words, specificity of the task in the questionnaire increases the likelihood that responses will be meaningful, truthful, and accurate.

Closed questionnaires are useful if you are interested in finding out information on specific strategies. Some examples are ranking, checklists, and multiple choice. In a ranking questionnaire, strategies are listed and described and students rank order them from more to less frequently used or favored. A ranking list can give information about an individual's strategy use; information can also be collapsed across individuals to provide a class profile of favorite strategies. Some teachers use this information to create posters to hang around the room and remind students of possible strategies. In a checklist, students simply check off those strategies used for a given task. A checklist is useful for correlating strategies with situations in which to use them. Students complete a task or unit and note those strategies that they used and found effective. A multiple choice questionnaire can elicit information on the frequency with which students use certain strategies. Some sample items are: (1) Before you read, do you think what the story will be about? (2) While you read, do you imagine pictures in your head or imagine you are part of the story? (3) When you read a word you don't know, do you try to figure out its meaning by looking at the rest of the story? Response items could include: almost never, rarely, sometimes, usually, almost always. This type of a questionnaire can be useful if you want to find out which strategies are frequently or infrequently used in order to plan an instructional sequence. It is also a favored data collection technique for pre- and post-testing in a situation in which you want to determine the impact of strategies instruction on students' strategies use. Responses to this type of closed questionnaire are easy to tally and score. There is, however, an initial time investment in creating or locating an existing questionnaire. There is also the danger that students will respond either positively because they believe that that is the correct answer or negatively because they do not want to give what they perceive as the correct answer.

Open-ended questionnaires give students the opportunity to report on their own strategies. Items should be contextualized with language tasks and might include questions such as (1) What do you do before you start to read in [language]?; (2) What do you do while you are reading in [language]?; (3) What do you do if you don't understand something when reading? Open-ended questionnaires have high validity because students have to come up with the information themselves versus simply circling a response item or placing a check mark. We could assume that this type of reflective answer is more likely to be truthful. Open-ended questionnaires are generally easy to develop and administer and may even be given in the target language for more advanced students. However, open-ended questionnaires do require careful planning and time for analysis. Responses need to be identified as particular strategies and categorized as students rarely respond as clearly as "I use goal setting and background knowledge."

Questionnaires generally collect retrospective information. That is students think about what they think they do in a specific situation. They are not actually doing the task at the time they are completing the questionnaire which would be cumbersome. Due to the retrospective nature of questionnaires, there may be some concerns about their reliability. Would students respond exactly the same on a different day? One way to address this concern is to triangulate the data collection. A questionnaire does not have to be either opened or closed, but can be a combination of the two. Collecting information on strategies in a variety of ways and then examining the data for similarities will strengthen the reliability. Of course, reliability can also be increased by using another data collection technique in addition to questionnaires. The September issue of the newsletter will focus on individual, group, and peer interviews.