ABSTRACT
The starting point to our research was the observation that most of the adolescent and adult apprentices in vocational schools show a rather passive attitude in performing cognitive tasks. In a pilot study we interrogated some successful and some poor students in a 1 hour interview. From these interviews we learned that study skills and knowledge about strategies of most professional students are very modest. Students had some vague ideas about cribs and temporal distribution of learning, but in general they didn’t know how to integrate this knowledge into their everyday learning. That is, they didn’t know which strategy would be the most useful for a given task. From this pilot study and from studies conducted by others (Dansereau, 1978; Dansereau et al., 1979; Dobrovolny & McCombs, 1980; McCombs & Dobrovolny, 1980; Weinstein, 1978; Weinstein, Underwood, Wicker, & Cubberly, 1979) we concluded that learning efficiency of professional students could be increased by systematic strategy training.
