Supporting Self-Regulated Learning and Student Success in Online Courses (Self-Regulation, Motivation, Emotion, and Skill Mastery of Online Learning: New Evidence From a Survey During COVID-19)

Self-regulation is a core concept associated with the metacognitive, motivational, and emotional aspects of learning. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a large-scale setting to collect new empirical evidence to test this conceptual framework in an authentic online learning environment. By reference to 64,949 participants enrolled at 39 universities in China, the authors developed the Undergraduate Online Self-Regulated Learning Questionnaire and estimated the associations among self-regulation, motivation, emotion, and skill mastery with regard to online learning across different subgroups of a diverse student body. The results demonstrated that males, rural students, lower-division undergraduates, first-generation college students, SEAM majors, and students at elite universities reported significantly lower UOSL scores. After controlling for motivation and emotion, these gaps decreased substantially and become statistically nonsignificant. The findings highlight the critical role played by targeted interventions in the creation of a supportive online environment for disadvantaged subgroups.

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