To Achieve or Not To Achieve: A Self-Regulation Perspective on Adolescents' Academic Decision Making.

In 2 studies, the authors investigated the utility of the self-regulation model of decision making for explaining and predicting adolescents' academic decision making. Participants were mostly 9th and 1 lth graders. The 1st study consisted of all boys, and a 2nd similar study consisted of boys and girls. Measures included a newly developed assessment of decision-maki ng skill (the Decision-Making-Competency Inventory), select scales of the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory—High School Version, an assessment of the importance of academic goals, and teacher ratings of achievement behavior. Adolescents' valuing of academic goals and their decision-making competency were typically the best predictors of their achievement behavior. Older adolescent boys did not affirm achievement striving compared with younger adolescent boys and older adolescent girls. There is ample reason for research on decision making to intersect with that of academic achievement. From everyday decisions like deciding whether to study for tests to more weighty ones like high school course selection and, even more consequential, deciding whether to complete high school or go on to higher education, decisions related to academic achievement are some of the most salient in the lives of young people. Furthermore, decision making takes on increasing importance with age given that children's growing independence necessitates that they make more decisions for themselves. Thus, it is important to chart the development of decision making through the adolescent period using a theory that effectively captures the key features of this skill that relate to academic achievement and other aspects of adolescents' lives. Such a theory would provide guideposts to the kinds of skills that should be developing, as well as clues regarding ways to intervene, if these skills are found not to be developing as they should. There are three major shortcomings in existing models of decision making (Byrnes, 1998; Slovic, Lichtenstein, & Fischhoff, 1988). First, those based on classical expected utility theory fail to take into account information-processing limitations of the human mind. In effect, they are not accurate models of how humans actually make decisions. Second, most models are not powerful

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