The present study investigates the impacts that a sudden change to online instruction had on undergraduates' engagement in self-regulated learning during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Using reflexive thematic analysis to examine college students' written responses, we identified four themes that illustrated the challenges of emergency remote learning: feeling disconnected, discordant, and distracted; struggling to engage amid lost autonomy and personal stressors; experiencing academic burden and burnout; and encountering both caring and disregard from instructors. The implications of these findings highlight the importance that learning contexts and social connectedness have on undergraduates' willingness and ability to enact self-regulated learning behaviors and strategies.

Despite concerns about their validity, self-report surveys remain the primary data collection method in the research of self-regulated learning (SRL). To address some of these concerns, we took a data set comprised of college students' self-reported beliefs and behaviours related to SRL, assessed across three surveys, and examined it for instances of a specific threat to validity, insufficient effort responding (IER; Huang, et al., 2012). Using four validated indicators of IER, we found the rate of IER to vary between 12-16%. Critically, while we found that students characterised as inattentive and attentive differed in some basic descriptive statistics, the inclusion of inattentive students within the data set did not alter more substantial inferences or conclusions drawn from the data. This study provides the first direct examination of the impact of respondents' attention on the validity of SRL data generated from self-report surveys.

In two experiments, learners studied word pairs one or two times and took a final cued recall test. They studied each pair upon its initial presentation and decided whether they would restudy it later, take a practice test on it later (retrieval practice), or forego all further practice with the pair. Whether learners preferred restudying or testing depended upon conditions. Regardless of whether practice tests were followed by feedback, they chose to take practice tests relatively more often when items were easy and the lag or spacing interval between the first and second occurrence was short, whereas they chose to restudy relatively more when items were hard and the lag was long. That is, they preferred testing under conditions in which successful retrieval on the practice test was likely. In Experiment 2, we varied the number of points each item was worth if recalled on the final test. A high point value led to a marked increase in both the preference for testing when the lag was short and the preference for restudying when the lag was long. Results support the hypothesis that learners appreciate at some level that retrieval practice can be a more effective learning strategy than restudying. However, they appear to believe that successful retrieval is necessary to reap the benefits of retrieval practice. As a consequence, their tendency to choose testing is influenced by conditions (item difficulty and spacing interval) that affect the likelihood of successful practice-test retrieval.

No abstract