Journal of Advanced Academics

Teachers need to monitor students' self-efficacy judgments, as well as their mathematics learning, to provide optimal instruction. First, inaccuracies in self-judgments appear to be a major liability for elementary and middle school children. Classroom practice must cultivate the knowledge to succeed and should nurture the belief that one can succeed. Second, accuracy training can be incorporated in a curriculum. After students solve the problems, teachers can show them how well they judged their capability to solve the problems. Students who can assess what they know and do not know will become better self-regulated learners. Third, strategy training in mathematics is very important. Students learn various strategies in school to solve mathematics problems, but they may not apply the strategies if they do not see their value. Teachers need to show the connection between strategy training and self-efficacy judgments and how these psychological variables relate to better mathematics performance. Students who utilize strategies in problem solving will develop higher efficacy compared to those who do not utilize them. Fourth, accurate self-reflection is important to students' success in math. Teachers can help students to hone this invaluable self-regulatory skill by giving them frequent opportunities to evaluate what they have learned or where they erred after completing a task. Students' self-efficacy is strengthened with tangible indicators of progress. Finally, unrealistically low self-efficacy beliefs and not lack of ability or skill may be responsible for avoidance of challenging academic courses such as math. Teachers will have to identify these inaccurate judgments and design and implement appropriate interventions to change them.

Knowledge about self-regulation and motivation processes enables students to maximize their college career paths and allows universities to implement better intervention programs to encourage struggling students to persist and complete their educational studies. College administrators and instructors should focus on developing interventions to instill a healthy sense of self-efficacy in students and teach them how to manage their time effectively. Interventions in the form of learning how to learn courses and/or workshops should be designed specifically for first-year students to provide them with helpful adjustment strategies such as setting strategic goals, planning effectively throughout the first year of undergraduate study, and seeking help when needed. Furthermore, instructors of introductory-level classes should provide first-year students with successful peer role models to enhance their self-efficacy beliefs in completing their course requirements. For example, they can make available samples of past projects to their current students, which may allow them to observe successful peers and encourage them to believe that they can succeed. Equipping students with self-regulatory strategies and positive motivational beliefs earlier on in their studies will prepare and sustain their motivation for more demanding, upper level courses as they progress through their academic career.

Impacting the academic performance of high school students in core academic content areas is important because of the high-stakes nature of secondary school course grades relative to their vocational and post-secondary pursuits. Getting students to become more active, strategic participants in their learning by teaching them empirically supported learning strategies as well as specific forethought and reflective thinking skills is an important pathway to academic success. The importance of self-regulation processes also has been established in recent survey research with teachers and school psychologists showing that students who are referred for academic problems often have self-regulatory skill and motivation deficits. Intervention programs like the Self-Regulation Empowerment Program (SREP) can be conceptualized and implemented within the context of school-based service delivery frameworks. Tier I interventions typically occur at a classroom level and thus are designed to provide all students with the potential benefits of an intervention. With regards to classroom-wide self-regulation interventions, there are many empirically supported techniques that teachers can readily infuse into the daily routine of a school day, such as requiring all students to set performance goals, engage in progress monitoring, and utilize self-reflective processes. Students who do not respond (i.e., continue to exhibit poor test performance) to this general level of intervention support would be eligible to receive more intensive, Tier II pull-out programs, such as SREP.

Personal processes, the environment, and individual behaviors of both teachers and students are factors that facilitate students' use of self-regulation learning strategies in reading. Some environmental conditions, such as organization of materials and clear expectations, support the development and use of self-regulation learning (SRL) strategies in reading. Teachers who use explicit instruction and modeling of SRL strategies have more students who can use self-regulation to read for longer periods and respond to higher order thinking questions. However, there are highly self-regulated students (even though fewer numbers) in low self-regulation classrooms, suggesting that individual differences in SRL strategies exist among gifted students and perhaps some gifted students as early as fifth grade have already attained the individual ability to use self-regulated learning SRL strategies to read and learn. The combination of domain-specific strategy instruction in reading combined with the use of SRL strategies to support knowledge acquisition seems to help more students in the higher self-regulation classroom achieve and maintain focus during reading instruction.

In the face of shame, students may need to turn the global focus of their failures into more discrete behaviors that they can control. Instructors can facilitate this process by informing students of specific behaviors they can enact to support successful achievement, including study and volitional strategies. Students' use of multiple study and volition strategies can facilitate their self-regulation of stressful emotions and failure perceptions. These strategies provide students with options for controlling their learning. Study strategies provide students with multiple alternatives for connecting with course material while volition strategies provide students with multiple alternatives for boosting their motivation to engage in learning activities. Many entering college students are not aware of multiple learning strategies, particularly strategies needed for deeper processing, nor do they come to college with a repertoire of volitional strategies. Colleges and universities can identify common first-year classes, as well as major entry-level classes, in which instructors can incorporate class discussions about the use of multiple strategies to support students' learning and volition. Students should receive messages about the need to flexibly choose strategies to facilitate both short- and long-term goals. They also should be taught to confront failure by changing study strategies and/or initiating volition strategies. Instructors can show students how to use study strategies and volition strategies to help them become more engaged with course material to positively affect their academic achievement. Additionally, colleges and universities would do well to help instructors align their course goals, objectives, and assessments, thus eliminating the “guesswork” involved in students' study-related decisions.