Exploring and understanding learning strategies used by learners to learn Business Studies

Abstract

Business Studies is one of the subjects in the Lesotho secondary curriculum, and its aims and Lesotho’s educational aims seem to align. Such goals include educating for socio-economic development with opportunities for entrepreneurship to produce self and wage employment jobs as well as opportunities for further education at international levels. However, reports show unsatisfactory academic performance in Business Studies to the extent that schools are phasing it out from the list of subjects they offer, allegedly as a result of that poor performance. One report showed that learners fail Business Studies due to lack of content and inability to respond to high- order questions requiring application, analysis and evaluation in examinations. The poor performance in Business Studies brings into question the issue of learning strategies learners use to learn this subject. This study employed a mixed methods approach to explore the learning strategies used by learners to learn Business Studies. Twenty-eight Business Studies Grade 11 learners were purposively sampled to participate in the study at one secondary school in Botha- Bothe district, Lesotho. Questionnaire, interviews and focus groups were used as data collection tools for this study and content analysis was employed to analyse and interpret the data. The findings show that there are many learning strategies used by learners to learn Business Studies in different contexts. Some of these strategies could be helpful and assist learners in acquiring sufficient content of Business Studies needed for examinations while others could help learners in the development of high-order skills