First-year university students' disposition and approaches to learning

Research on self-regulated learning has recognized cognitive processes that students select and execute to achieve their goals. When performing a task, the student analyzes the task characteristics, context and his own capacities, employing resource planning and management, adopting either deep or superficial learning approaches. To describe the relationship between "disposition to learning strategies and" and "deep and superficial learning approaches", the "Cuestionario de Formas de Estudio" questionnaire was applied to 344 1st year students from eight study programs of a Chilean university. The results show significant correlation (r greater than 0.30, p lower than 0.001) between disposition to learning strategies and usage of deep learning approaches, and between the aforementioned variables and the amount of weekly study time.