Self-regulated learning in a college course: Examining student metacognitive study strategies, grit, self-efficacy, and performance
Year: 2018
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: A goal of cognitive and educational psychology is to understand how people learn. Much progress has been made in separately identifying the motivations and learning strategies that impact student learning. However, it is unclear how these motivations and strategies relate with each other over time. The goal of this dissertation was to integrate and expand upon these separate lines of prior work in an educational context, the college classroom. In the first part of this dissertation, I examined the types of study strategies students reported prior to three separate exams and their subsequent exam performance. Students spontaneously reported using a variety of study strategies. Only a subset of those strategies was related to exam performance and those relations differed across the exams. In the second part, I examined the relation of these study strategies within a self-regulated learning framework. Specifically, I investigated the relations amongst students’ grit, study strategies, exam performances, and self-efficacy for the course. Student’s initial grit was positively related to using more constructive strategies, self-efficacy for the course, and exam performance. However, the relation between grit and exam performance was mediated by more proximal factors such as constructive strategy use. This finding suggests that although grit is associated with beneficial learning outcomes, it is mediated by other more proximal factors. In the third part, I evaluated whether these relations held true when a students’ ethnic background (minority vs. majority) was entered as a moderator. There was a trend in which some of the relations between grit and performance were not present for students from underrepresented ethnic backgrounds. Taken together, this work suggests that a student does not have to be gritty to be self-regulated as the use of constructive strategies and self-efficacy beliefs can assist students in obtaining those outcomes, especially for students from underrepresented ethnic backgrounds.
Author: Cristina D. Zepeda
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2921385373