Shirley L. Yu

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.

The academic and social experiences of children with and without insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus were investigated. Measures included the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-III, the Peabody Individual Achievement Test-Revised, and a parent interview. Results indicated that children with diabetes scored lower on some cognitive and academic measures compared to children without diabetes, but their school and social life was not remarkably different. Few differences were found between children with early onset and late onset of diabetes. The findings suggest that poorer management of diabetes is associated with greater school absences, which in turn are associated with lower grades in school.