Article 21:
The LASSI in AUI, Morocco
by Lahcen Ghechi
University of Ifrane, Morocco
Center for Academic Development (CAD)

The Center for Academic Development at AUI (Al Akhawayn University of Ifrane, Morocco) offers three academic support courses to all its freshman year students to enhance their learning and study skills, information literacy skills, and critical thinking and analytical skills. The first of these courses, Learning Strategies and Study Skills, is designed to help the students develop learning strategies and study skills that are necessary for success at university. The students are trained in the three areas of strategic learning (i.e., Will, Self-regulation and Skill). They are instructed on how to increase their self-efficacy and improve their attitude towards their own studies through self-motivation. They are also trained to self-regulate and take responsibility for their own learning through tasks that require them to reflect on as well as evaluate their current study and life habits and implement new strategies to improve their learning; they are introduced to how to manage their time and structure their work, set realistic short and long term goals, monitor their progress as well as evaluate the effectiveness of their strategies in achieving their goals. Finally, the students are trained in university-specific study skills such as active listening and note-taking, interacting with their professors, previewing and reviewing course material, selecting main ideas, self-testing, test preparation and test-taking.

Upon a recommendation made by the Course Development Committee in the summer of 2008, the University agreed to purchase the LASSI pen and paper inventory for all its freshman year students and a subscription for the LASSI Online Instruction Modules. The Committee chose the LASSI among the many other instruments that are available commercially or free of charge thanks to its widely attested diagnostic strength.

The LASSI inventory is a 10-scale, 80-item diagnostic and prescriptive assessment of students learning behavior; it was decided by the Course Development Committee to be used primarily as a diagnostic test to assess the students’ awareness about their use of learning and study strategies related to skill, will and self-regulation components of strategic learning; it was believed that the LASSI pre-test scores would raise both the students’ and their professors’ awareness as to which kind of learning strategies the students used and how they used them. We thus hoped that by analyzing the scores the students’ responses would turn in, we could obtain somehow reliable information about the learning areas the students would need to improve in order to succeed in university. It was also reckoned that administering a LASSI pre-test at the beginning of the course and a post-test at the end would help faculty evaluate the course and adjust its instructional units to better cater for the students’ most urgent learning difficulties.

In our case in which academic support courses are part of the common core courses, it was aspired that by administering the LASSI inventory to all the students before taking the course we could persuade the most skeptical of them about the extent to which they were all in dire need of a course that could smooth their transition from a mainly teaching environment to a learning environment, and from a Moroccan educational system to an American one. In other words, we believed that because the students were expected to learn soon after they started taking the course that academic support courses, workshops and tutoring are ordinarily offered in most universities only to so-called ‘under-prepared’ or ‘at-risk’ of failure students, their LASSI scores would hopefully improve their attitude towards the course and thus increase their motivation to adopt it as a means to improve their academic performance and succeed in university.
 
The following is a brief outline about how the LASSI inventory and the LASSI online instruction modules were used in the Center during the Spring semester, 2009.

The students took the LASSI pre-test in the first week before any academic support instruction was offered. As English is the third or fourth language for most of the students, instruction as to how to complete the survey was also given in spoken Arabic and French. A help sheet including instructions on how to take the LASSI test and a glossary of ostensibly difficult words was prepared in advance and handed to them along with the test. After scoring the pre-test, most students recognized they had problems in some of the areas as indicated by their scores. Only a few of them reported that the results the pretest turned in did not quite match the learning difficulties they had been previously diagnosed for.

The scores were used to guide the students’ choice of the LASSI online instruction modules they were required to complete individually and independently of their instructors’ guidance. The LASSI online instruction modules offered the students a valuable opportunity to reflect about their academic strengths and weaknesses and gave them guidance as to how to work out strategies to solve issues related to their will, skill and self-regulation and improve their academic performance. 

Because we do not expect the students’ academic behavior to change in one semester, though we assume it may improve a little, and because we are more concerned about whether and how the students will be able to transfer the newly acquired learning strategies and study skills offered by the course and through the LASSI Instruction Modules to other courses in their regular programs and use them spontaneously in other environments (the library, at home, etc.), we decided to withhold the administration of the post-test until the same students have completed the two other CAD courses and taken at least six of their majors courses over two semesters. Moreover, it is feared that a post-test right after and as part of an academic support course in which LASSI instruction modules are assigned will tend to turn in rather inflated and thus unreliable information about the students’ improvement.

Therefore, we believe that it is too early to make any sound verdict about the effectiveness of the course and LASSI and about how or whether the newly acquired learning and study strategies will enhance the students’ academic performance. As we do not have a control group of students who have not taken the course and the LASSI test and instruction modules, we are unable to assess with a reasonable degree of precision whether and to what extent the course and LASSI will have some positive impact on the students’ learning. We are currently thinking of developing an adapted academic behavior assessment instrument and administer it to two groups of students, those who took the new course and LASSI in the Fall, 2008 and Spring, 2009 and those who took a previous academic support course prior to Fall 2008 and which did not include LASSI.

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