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The authors followed 6 first-year medical students through their first semester in a problem-based learning curriculum to understand how they self-regulated their learning. The study, using a situated research strategy, resulted in a grounded theory built around the central phenomenon of stance. In short, learners illustrated different types of stances-proactive, reactive, retroactive, interactive, and transactive-that served to govern their perceptions of themselves and the environment, their selection of goals, and their adoption of learning strategies. Furthermore, recursive patterns of stances were longitudinally described as either evolving or shifting. Findings indicated that more successful students demonstrate an evolving, interactive-transactive stance that affected the ways they participated in the learning environment and the professional identities they were beginning to develop.The purpose of this naturalistic study of first-year medical students in a problem-based learning (PBL) curriculum was to generate a substantive, or grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) that could explain the development of and differences in students' strategic learning behaviors and performance outcomes. Consonant with this methodology, the phenomenon of focus, stance, emerged through the course of data collection and ongoing analyses undertaken over a period of one semester within the day-to-day context of the medical school. From the outset, the research investigated how medical students in a PBL context self-regulated their learning. Contextual BackgroundThe first self-regulated activity performed by the majority of first-year medical students, whom we call the "traditionals," at Valley Medical College was to organize a cooperative note-taking pool. 1 The "scribe service" assured subscribers that they would not

We conducted the present study to investigate whether college students adjust their study strategies to meet the cognitive demands of testing, a metacognitive self-regulatory skill. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the two testing conditions. In one condition we told participants to study for a test that required deeplevel cognitive processing and in the other to study for a test that required surfacelevel cognitive processing. Results suggested that college students adjust their study strategies so that they are in line with the cognitive processing demands of tests and that performance is mediated by the study strategies that are used.

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The Patterns of Adaptive Learning Survey (PALS) was developed to assess a trichotomous achievement goal structure, which included the following subscales: Task Goal Orientation, Performance-Approach Goal Orientation, and Performance-Avoid Goal Orientation. The use of the PALS in making inferences about these goal orientations was originally validated with a middle school sample of students. In this study, the authors computed Cronbach’s alphas and employed confirmatory factor analytic procedures to provide statistical evidence of the reliability and validity of inferences based on scores from the PALS at the fourth-grade and college levels.