Relationship between Cognitive and Metacognitive Learning Strategies and Academic Success in Medical – Surgical Nursing Courses

Introduction: Students’ academic achievement has always been a concern of education authorities. One of factors in academic achievement is attention to effective components on the learning, including learning strategies. Thus, the present research was done to determine the relation between cognitive and meta-cognitive learning strategies and academic achievement in medical surgical nursing cources of Islamic Azad University-Khorasgan branch. Methods: In this correlational study, all 5th and 6th semester nursing students (n=88) in 2012- 2013 were selected. Data were collected by means of Pintrich MSLQ questionnaire of learning strategies and also students’ average score in surgical internal courses was considered as students’academic achievement. To analize the data, single group t test and Pearson Correlation were applied. Results: The means of cognitive strategies and metacognitive strategies were 122.78±18.8 and 37.84±6.7, respectively. The difference of cognitive stratetegies’ scores with the scale mean was significant at P=0.0 01. It was also significant for metacognitive strategies at P=0.01. The mean score of rehearsal strategy 13.04±3.65 was more than the score average (p=0.05), as was the mean of semantic expansion strategy 19.19±4.63 (P<0.01). The mean scores for organizing strategy (12.06±3.91), and critical thinking (15.82±4.40) were not significantly different from the scale mean. Also, the mean score of the students’GPA was significantly correlated with the amount of students’ use of cognitive strategies (r=0.28, p=0.05) and metacognitive strategies (r=0.24, p=0.02). Conclusion: Since cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies were recognized as crucial factors in students’ academic achievement, exploring and promoting them can lead to improvements in students’ academic acheivement.