Relationship between students’ conceptual knowledge and study strategies‐part 1: student learning in physics

Recent reviews of research into students' conceptual scientific knowledge have suggested that future studies should go beyond identifying and describing students' conceptual knowledge, and focus more on student learning characteristics related to the development of better conceptual knowledge. In parts 1 and 2 of this paper we describe studies of the relationship between students' propositional knowledge (as measured by concept‐mapping tasks) and their study strategies (as measured by a self‐report questionnaire) for 'electricity' (part 1) and 'photosynthesis' (part 2) in first‐year university courses. The results show that deeper and more meaningful study strategies are associated with better propositional knowledge. They also show that, depending on context, prior knowledge has both a direct and an indirect impact on post knowledge. The indirect impact occurs as a result of the effect of prior knowledge on the adoption of study strategies.