Assessment and Analysis of Use of Self-regulated Learning in Laboratory-based Extracurricular Undergraduate/First-year Graduate Research Projects

This paper in the Research category examines student use of the self-regulated learning (SRL) skills as a case study. In the previous studies reported in the literature, students’ SRL skills were often assessed by survey instruments that would primarily measure student’s perception of metacognition. In this paper, we utilize two sets of survey questionnaires, focused on student perception and actual achievement, respectively, on use of SRL skills in order to determine if there are any discrepancies between student perception and actual uses of SRL skills. This work was motivated by observations from our previous pilot studies that, when a survey questionnaire primarily measuring student perception on metacognition was used for data collection, indicated that uses of SRL skills by two different groups of engineering students, such as those in senior year and freshman year, are at a comparable level, although they would have quite different levels of knowledge in engineering and relevant technical skills. Our survey results and analysis in this paper for a group of engineering students participating in extracurricular research projects show that there are indeed considerable discrepancies between student perception and actual achievement on use of SRL skills.