This work is part of a 3-years research project[1] conducted over a sample of first-year students from 11 degrees of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV). One of its main goals is to identify which are the most used strategies by excellent students (the ones with the higher university access mark of a certain degree) that can explain their success. We compare these strategies with the ones used by regular students in order to precise effective models that can be extended to all students. As far as we know, this is a new approach for determining which trends are involved in the success of university students.

Firstly, we have done a qualitative analysis of the individual reports of each student of the sample, taking into account whether they belong to the excellent students group or to the regular student group of each degree. Secondly, we have selected a representative sample of both groups to conduct individual interviews thoroughly with them in order to know which are the perceptions that both groups have about being an excellent student: how do they work, which are the problems that they can find and how do they solve them. In other words, how do they prepare the classes and how do they study the different subjects.

Our theoretical frame is based on the perception that learning strategies can be considered as a conscious and intentional organized set of actions conducted by the learner in order to obtain a learning goal in certain social frame. Moreover, these actions contribute to the knowledge-construction of the learner (Gargallo, Suárez-Rodríguez, and Pérez-Pérez, 2009). In these actions we find several types of aspects: affective, motivational, metacognitive (self-organization, self-assessment, and self-regulation) and cognitive (use of skills for learning, understanding, memorizing, etc.).

[1] Research Project “La excelencia en los estudiantes universitarios desde un enfoque longitudinal: Análisis de factores incidentes y diseño de un modelo de intervención”, supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación de España inside the Programa Nacional de Proyectos de Investigación Fundamental, in the frame of the V Plan de Investigación Científica, Desarrollo e Innovación Tecnológica (2010-2012) (Funded by Plan E, PGE), directed by Prof. Bernardo Gargallo (code EDU2009/08518). 

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