Measuring and Promoting Self-Regulated Learning Using Spaced Questionnaires

Abstract

Self-Regulated Learning addresses key students’ competences for performance in higher education, particularly in engineering disciplines. Assessing these competences helps identify students’ gaps and provide appropriate support towards their development. Currently, the main self-regulated learning assessment tools are questionnaires with a large number of items administered in one session, for example, the MSLQ has 81 questionnaire items. Rather than snapshotting the students’ self-regulated learning competences in a single session, this manuscript proposes a novel assessment approach, the SMSRLQ, which includes 150 questionnaire items (81 from the MSLQ and 69 from other questionnaires) but spacing the items weekly and providing feedback monthly. The spaced approach was experienced on several Egyptian universities using a social network service (Facebook) and distributing students into control (113) and experimental groups (107). Many variations in the students’ answers are observed, with statistically significant differences between 11% to 30% in MAE and MAPE indicators. Variations in standard deviation, reliability and clustering between the approaches also were identified, demonstrating that there are clear differences between the two administration approaches. Regarding monthly feedback, the results show that it enhances students’ participation and improves their self-regulated learning competences: 77% of the experimental group respondents found that their self-learning knowledge was developed after the study, compared to 50% of the control group respondents.

Keywords

• Higher education
• self-regulated learning
• spaced questionnaires