Repetition Over Reasoning? Patterns of Learning Strategy Use in Undergraduate Physics and Biology Across Modalities

To effectively integrate and teach learning strategies, it is essential to understand how students use these strategies prior to interventions, as well as how these patterns vary across course modalities and disciplines. In this study, we analyze open-ended student responses about the learning strategies they expected to use in in-person and online introductory physics and in-person biology courses. Contrary to the epistemic culture that biology involves more memorization, we found more monitoring and marginally less rehearsal strategies being reported in biology compared to physics while the online physics students reported significantly less use of rehearsal and greater use of metacognitive regulation. These findings suggest that physics students may benefit from interventions to help students broaden their learning strategy repertoire.