A Student-Centered Approach to Identifying Strategies and Obstacles to Learning for Undergraduate STEM Courses

What motivates, and demotivates, students in their engagement in at-home work for high-stakes assignments, such as test preparation and writing and revising papers? This paper outlines a student-centered method to identify learning strategies and obstacles students actually use and face versus what’s reported as most advantageous in the literature. This method provides awareness and agency of strategies and obstacles to attempt to change student behavior and perceptions. The three research goals were 1) identifying learning strategies and obstacles with a student-centered design method, 2) mapping the strategies and obstacles to the Expectancy-Value-Cost Model (EVC Model) (2015) of motivation theory, and 3) analyzing the effectiveness of those strategies and obstacles and reporting the results to students in between major class assessments. Our results show that across Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines and student levels, students use and encounter similar strategies and obstacles. Additionally, both students and instructors gained valuable insight into student behavior and workload.