The objective of this study is to understand the study strategies used by students in an introductory physiology course and the relationship of those strategies to overall student learning outcomes as measured by quiz grades. Research was conducted in a highly structured “flipped classroom” course in which students pre-view material (e.g., watch pre-recorded lectures and complete learning guide questions) before attending class. During class they engage in active learning activities in small groups. We hypothesized that students who study before coming to class will earn higher quiz grades. To investigate this, we asked two research questions: 1) What are the most frequently used study strategies by students? Do these differ by average quiz score? and 2) What is the influence of different study strategy approaches on quiz averages? Undergraduate student participants were drawn from a 4-credit introductory human physiology course taught at a large research university from Fall 2020 – Spring 2025 semesters. On a mid-semester survey, students were asked to report how often (1 = never; 4 = always) they used 22 different study strategies, which were later grouped as before, during, or after-class study strategies. Quiz scores were averaged across the semester to examine the relationship between study strategies and academic performance. Of the 845 students enrolled in the class in the semesters that were studied, 282 consented into the research study, completed the study strategy survey and had quiz grades available. Descriptive statistics were calculated for each study strategy and for the composite variables. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was used to examine differences in study strategy usage by average quiz grade quartile. Pearson’s correlations and linear regression were used to examine the relationship between study strategies and the average quiz score. Across all semesters, the average quiz grade was 70.60% (SD = 15.17). The study strategy with the highest reported mean overall and across all four quartiles was completing the pre-quiz before class M=3.79; SD = 0.61. For all but the lowest quartile, reading the entire textbook chapter had the lowest reported frequency, M = 1.50, SD = 0.73. There was an overall difference across quiz quartiles in the “Strategies used before attending class” category, F(3,278) = 4.912, p = .002. These strategies were reported significantly less often by students in the lowest quartile than by students in the other 3 quartiles. “Strategies used before attending class” had a significant positive relationship with the average quiz score, r = .270, p < .001. The during and after class strategies did not have a significant relationship with the average quiz score. The overall regression model was significant, F(3, 272) = 6.613, p< .001, R2 = .068. “Strategies used before attending class” was the only significant predictor of average quiz score, β =1.027, p < .001. These results suggest that studying material before attending class increases student performance on learning assessments in a flipped classroom environment. This abstract was presented at the American Physiology Summit 2026 and is only available in HTML format. There is no downloadable file or PDF version. The Physiology editorial board was not involved in the peer review process.
Branchaw et al. (Fri,) studied this question.