Browsing by Subject "defensiivis-pessimismi"

In recent years, prolonging of university studies has been one of the most commonly reported educational problems in Finland for educational and psychological reasons and for economical perspectives as well. The interaction between intellectual, emotional and motivational dimensions of learning is very complex (Hakkarainen, Lonka & Lipponen, 2004), and it has been found in previous studies that when facing challenging situations, individuals apply different strategies to cope with them (esim. Cantor, 1990; Määttä, 2007; Lonka, 2015). Achievement strategies are formed on the basis of prior experiences and success expectancies, and strategies have been found to be related to individuals’ performance (Cantor, 1990; Onatsu-Arvilommi & Nurmi, 2000). The intention of this study was to investigate what kinds of relations have been found to exist between achievement strategies and success in university studies. The study was conducted as a narrative literature review and the aim was to gather the essence of some previous studies as well as to open up some new perspectives for future research. For the purpose of this study, six international articles that examine the relation between achievement strategies and success in university studies were selected. The differences and similarities of the articles were examined for both in terms of their results as well as their research methods. In the light of the research articles it can be concluded that the relation between achievement strategies and success in university studies is evident. The studies gave equal evidence that the users of optimistic strategy apply an active and task-focused approach towards their studies and demonstrate high engagement to achieve their goals and they also succeed well in their studies, whereas task-avoidant strategies correlate negatively with success expectations as well as academic engagement, and they also predict poor academic success. These findings are in line with other research concerning the linkage between strategies and success in other than university contexts. Despite the consistence of the research subjects and the study results of the articles, some differences were found in the constructions used for studying the phenomenon and also how study success was defined and operationalized, which sets limits to drawing general conclusions on the field of research. In possible future research these differences should be taken into account, in order to be able to make broader conclusions about the relations between achievement strategies and university study success.