Learning Companion

Abstract

The Learning Companion (https://companion.epfl.ch) is an online tool that is being actively developed at EPFL since 2017 to help students implement effective learning strategies described in the book “Apprendre à étudier, Guide à l’usage des étudiants en sciences et en ingénierie” (Tormey & Hardebolle 2017). The tool features three different modules, one focused on study habits, a second module focused on effective problem solving, and a third one focused on multidisciplinary project work.
This project mainly builds on top of the first module about study habits. The goal of this research project is to translate the existing questionnaire into German, so it will be (available and) helpful to more students in Switzerland and validate the German version of the questionnaire with students from the University of Teacher Education Bern. The following aspects of self-regulated learning are assessed through the questionnaire: metacognitive self-regulation, using strategies to organize new study content and elaborate on it, effort regulation, and time management (these are all concepts assessed by the most used self-regulated learning questionnaire from Pintrich, Smith, García, and McKeachie, 1991). Additionally, metacognitive concepts such as epistemic beliefs are assessed (i.e., what do students think about knowledge and knowledge acquisition? Are people simply born good learners and intelligence innate?). Last, we assess how much students use other students or their teachers as a resource for help when they have trouble with their assignments. Concretely this project proposes to:

• Create and evaluate multilingual versions of the Learning Companion
• Investigate differences between populations. We are interested in using the tool to qualify different levels of self-regulation as they vary across disciplines.

The analyses in a nutshell: While the psychometric values of the assessed scales should be better (given that they have been used a lot), they nevertheless are useful to predict study success and duration (link to a paper follows).

Below we attach the main findings and analyses of this project. You can also find the item formulations in French and their translation in German in the appendix of the document.