Yeo-Eun Kim

As the pursuit of multiple goals is an inescapable reality in everyday life, students are consistently challenged to self-regulate toward achieving an array of academic goals as well as social and well-being goals. Nevertheless, prominent self-regulated learning models are limited in explaining and guiding how students can self-regulate in the context of multiple goals. Hence, we developed the multiple goals regulation framework that reconceptualizes how students establish, pursue, and adapt an array of goals. We illustrate specific processes (e.g., goal prioritizing, goal shielding, goal switching) that students can engage in to self-regulate both within and between goals. The new framework contributes to the literature in three main ways. First, we challenge the traditional conceptualization of effective self-regulated learning that focuses on the persistent pursuit of a single academic goal without considering the interdependent nature of goals. Second, we facilitate a sustainable and adaptive cycle of self-regulatory processes by highlighting the importance of navigating and negotiating between multiple academic and nonacademic goals. Finally, our effort offers a more inclusive understanding of students’ lived experiences by acknowledging a diverse set of goals that are closely attached to their social and cultural identities.

Students often work on academic tasks in the face of an attractive alternative. In an experimental setting, we examined how students perceive temptation differently across time depending on their self-efficacy for self-regulated learning and autonomy-supportive contexts. Specifically, we focussed on how individual differences in self-efficacy for self-regulated learning interact with different autonomy-supportive contexts (provision of either choice or relevance) to predict students’ perceived temptation, affect, and performance across time. Results indicated that students low in self-efficacy for self-regulated learning perceived an increase in temptation across time, while those high in self-efficacy for self-regulated learning perceived a decrease in temptation across time. Moreover, we found that especially for students with low self-efficacy for self-regulated learning, providing choice opportunities or adding relevance to the task predicted lower temptation, higher positive affect, and lower negative affect.

Students’ cost perceptions have been associated with lower retention and academic performance in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Guided by expectancy-value theory, we examined whether relations between perceived costs and physics outcomes (i.e., engagement and achievement) varied as a function of self-efficacy or task values among undergraduate physics students (N = 1,124). We also examined whether the interactive relations were further moderated by course level in the curricular sequence. Overall, findings from moderated moderation analyses indicated that perceived costs were negatively related to different components of engagement (i.e., effort, persistence, procrastination, and choice) and achievement (i.e., physics course grades). However, the magnitude of relations often depended on levels of self-efficacy or task value. Some of the interactive relations between these variables also differed between introductory- and upper-level physics courses. Taken together, results indicated that higher self-efficacy or task values do not compensate for the negative effects of perceiving high cost on engagement. Moreover, cost perceptions were in some cases more negatively related to engagement when students reported higher self-efficacy or task values. Finally, mitigating cost perceptions may be particularly important in introductory undergraduate physics courses. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.