Support or affective strategies

These strategies are not directly focused on the learning of content. These strategies' main mission is to improve the efficiency of learning, improving the conditions in which learning is done. They include:

• Establishing and maintaining motivation, focusing attention, concentrating, handling anxiety, managing time in an effective manner, etc.

Some authors relate learning strategies with a determined type of learning. For these authors, all types of learning (whether they're by association or restructuring) are linked to a series of individual strategies.

• Associative learning: PRACTICE STRATEGIES
• Restructured learning: CREATION OR ORGANIZATION STRATEGIES.

SELECTING LEARNING STRATEGIES.

The student should choose the learning strategy that's the right fit for him, using several criteria to make the right choice:

• Learning contents (type and amount): the strategy used can vary according to what needs to be learned (facts or information, concepts, etc.), and according to the amount of information that should be learned. A student who only needs to learn the first column of the periodic table can choose a practice strategy: repeating each element's name as many times as is necessary. Or, the student can choose a mnemonic rule. These strategies can be used to memorize English vocabulary (information).
• Previous knowledge about the subject matter: if the student wants to compare the different types of airplanes that exist, and if he wants to classify them, he needs to know more than just their names.
• The learning conditions (available time, motivation, eagerness to study, etc.). In general, you can say that the less time and the more extrinsic motivation to learn, the easier it is to use strategies that favor remembering information literally (like practice strategies), and it gets more difficult to use the strategies that give meaning to the information or that reorganize it (creation or organization strategies).
• The type of evaluation they're subjected to: in most educational learning, the main goal is to pass the tests. So, it's useful to know the type of exam we'll be facing. It's not the same to learn the periodic table and to apply it to solve chemical problems than learning it to remember each element's symbol or atomic structure. Evaluations promote the understanding of contents and they help students use restructured learning strategies more often.