The development of learning strategies in higher education: impact of gender and prior education

This chapter explores development of students' learning strategies throughout higher education. It incorporates four data-gathering moments across three years of a professional bachelor program. The development of the knowledge society and the associated rapid developments in Information and Communication Technology have led to the need for flexible, self-regulated and lifelong learning employees. One of the research fields interested in developments in student learning in higher education is the 'Students' Approaches to Learning' tradition. The Full Information Maximum Likelihood (FIML) estimation was used to handle missing data instead of listwise deletion as research has demonstrated that this technique provides better estimation in samples in which a significant proportion of the data is missing. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated a good model fit for a model containing the original items for the relating and structuring and the critical processing scales at the first wave.