Using the Biggs’ Study Process Questionnaire as a diagnostic tool to identify “at-risk” students - a Preliminary Study

Originally published: 2002

The Situation

The academic year in Ngee Ann Polytechnic is broken up into two 16-week semesters with a mid-semester break in week 8. Many modules require students to take a common test in week 9 as a learning progress indicator. The tests are graded in week 10 and the results are released to the students in week 11 or 12.

Students who fail more than one module are identified as being at risk of failing the semester, the result of which is to re-take the modules in the following semester, culminating in them taking longer than 3 years to complete the Diploma course.

These students are then counselled by the class tutor in the hope of motivating them to work harder. Academic intervention strategies such as peer tutoring and remedial classes are made available to the students. At the same time, letters are sent to their parents informing them of their child’s performance on the common tests. This keeps the parents informed of the ‘at-risk’ status of their children and it is hoped that there will be home encouragement to spur these students on to improve their learning performance. By week 16, the semester is over and the students have to prepare to take on the year-end examinations.

The Problem

On reviewing the situation in the light of learning literature and theories, the researchers felt that, while the ‘fear of failure’ mentality in the system does to some extent prompt these ‘at-risk’ students to adopt strategies to avoid unnecessary repeating of modules, the measures may not help as much in improving the quality of learning, which in turn is affected by levels of motivation and students’ learning styles and approaches. This ‘fear of failure’ appears to promote failure avoidance study tactics which tend to be more surface, short-term stop-gap efforts at just managing to help them clear the assessment check points and move on to the next semester. The deficit in learning usually still exists.

The researchers looked for an intervention tool that would better address the learning needs of the students.

The Intervention Tool

This study uses the Biggs Study Process Questionnaire (SPQ) as a diagnostic tool to identify the learning approaches of the students. The SPQ, a 42-item questionnaire, provides feedback on the learning approaches in the three domains, namely, the surface, deep and achieving domains which are further broken down into motives and strategies used. Surface motives are extrinsic such as fear of failing and surface strategies include reproductive or rote learning and “minimalistic” learning - learning that is just enough to meet the course demands. Such an approach often leads to poor academic performance.

The deep approach, on the other hand, is about seeking to understand and relate understanding to other subjects and to develop personal meaning for subject material. However, a deep learner may sometimes wander off-track and not follow course syllabi and outlines. Academic performance, especially in a more structured system, may also be adversely affected.

An achieving approach is about maximising performance while optimising efforts to achieve it. These are strategic learners who may use surface or deep approaches, whichever that can help them to get high marks.

In order to facilitate the administration of the questionnaire, a web-based version of the questionnaire and automatic generation of the feedback to students and class profile report to tutors were developed.

The Research Questions

The researchers wanted to investigate whether the SPQ could be used as a friendly diagnostic tool to enable tutors to identify the at-risk students, and if it could, whether it would be an effective tool to help students develop and use strategies that would help improve the quality and depth of learning.

The researchers based the study on the following hypotheses:

1. That students identified as low-achieving and surface from the Biggs’ SPQ are not academically successful;
2. That knowing their approaches to study is helpful to the students who want to improve;
3. That knowing students’ approaches to studying is helpful to the tutors teaching them in that they can use appropriate teaching strategies that matches their learning approaches.

The Research Procedure

At the beginning of the semester, a meeting was arranged with a group of first-year tutors. During the meeting, the Biggs SPQ, research studies on the study approaches of students and their outcomes were explained to the tutors. The tutors were then asked to volunteer to participate in the study.

The tutors then informed the students in their classes about the Biggs’ SPQ and that they will be visited by the researchers who will administer the SPQ during their mathematics tutorial classes which were chosen because the tutorials were computer-based. This happened during the third week of the semester. The researchers first explained the purpose of the study and emphasised the importance of responding truthfully to the questionnaire items to ensure the accuracy of a report they would receive telling them about their study approaches.

The students upon completion of the SPQ immediately received an on-line report of their study approaches, the outcomes of taking such approaches and strategies they could use for improvement (see Appendix1). As the Maths lab was not equipped with a printer, the researchers printed the reports off-line and passed them to the respective class tutors for distribution to the students during their lessons with them.

The researchers also printed a class profile for each class and highlighted the low-achieving and surface students to the class tutor. The class tutors were asked to confirm if the class profile matched their perception of the students’ learning behaviour.

The class tutors were then asked to go through the student report in class and counsel the at-risk students individually. They were also asked to monitor the progress of these students.

At the end of the semester, the researchers conducted focused group interviews with some of the students as well as a separate interview with the tutors. Also, the students’ overall performance in the semester (using the weighted average of each student) was correlated with the SPQ data.

Preliminary Findings

This study is not complete in that the researchers up to this point in time have not been able to interview the tutors. Findings reported here come from the focused group interview with students, correlation of the SPQ with the students’ weighted average, and some initial observations of the tutors.

In the group, there was 1 deep learner, 3 who are high on all three domains and 4 surface and low-achieving learners. Some salient points that surfaced from the interview are:

1. All the students had no difficulty understanding the report on their study approaches.
2. They all agreed that the SPQ reflected quite accurately on the way they study.
3. Most of the low-achieving and surface learners quickly browsed through and did not give any attention to the recommended strategies provided in the report. They said change would be difficult because they “had been studying like this for the last sixteen years.”
4. One of the high achievers said he did not take up any of the strategies recommended because he has his own methods of studying and he knows his strengths and weaknesses.
5. Of important note is the feedback from the deep learner who said that the report was very helpful to him because he realised that to be more achieving, he has to become more focused on the course syllabi when reading widely.
6. The students who were found to be low-achieving and surface reported were either lacking interest in the course, or not having any strong like or dislike for the course or simply did not like the teaching method used (preferring practical classes to attending lectures).
7. The surface and low-achieving students were not confident of passing the exams - in fact, they worry that they may have to take supplementary exams. This is not so with the deep and high-achieving students.
8. Those very high on the surface scale felt that the pace of the lessons in the course very fast.
9. One student who scored very low on all three domains (and therefore likely to be ‘at-risk’) reported that despite having very good lecturers who were “beyond his expectations”, he was not motivated to take a deeper or more achieving approach to learning.
10. However, the other students, especially the four students (3 low-achieving and 1 high on all three domains) who reported that most of their lecturers were not approachable and even ’sarcastic’, felt that having approachable and able-to-teach lecturers is key to helping them develop deep understanding of the subject matter.
11. Students who, regardless of their approaches, found lecturers unapproachable, resort to learning from their peers and the computer-assisted lessons, if any. On the other hand, students who have approachable lecturers preferred learning from these lecturers because “they are able to show more methods of solving a problem than the computer, sometimes short cuts.”

Read the complete paper:

» Identifying “at risk” students

(PDF, 41kb, 8 pages)

Authors

Shirley Williams
is an Educational Development Officer in The Teaching & Learning Centre, Ngee Ann Polytechnic.

Tay Mui Hua
is a Lecturer from the Mechanical
Engineering Department, Ngee Ann Polytechnic.

A/Prof Poh Sui Hoi
is from the Psychological Studies Division,
School Of Education, NTU/NIE