The Relationships among Motivation, Self-Regulated Learning, and Academic Achievement

This dissertation consists of two articles investigating the relationships among motivation, self-regulated learning (SRL), and academic achievement for adolescents: (a) a meta-analytic review of the literature, and (b) tests of a theoretical model using data from an instrument developed by the author and ecologically valid measures of academic achievement of secondary school students in South Korea in both mathematics and English. The theoretical backgrounds of these studies are underlain by the self-system in Bandura’s reciprocal self-determinism and social cognitivism. I employed two research approaches for each of two articles of this dissertation: a meta-analytic review and path analyses of data on the motivation, SRL, and academic achievement in both mathematics and English of secondary school students in South Korea.\n\nIn the first article, a heuristic framework consisting of 11 core constructs of motivation and self-regulated learning (SRL) was extracted from existing theoretical frameworks and instruments. For the meta-analysis, the final samples came from 46 studies for 28,261 middle or high school students. The findings suggested that self-efficacy, effort, and persistence were the strongest factors on academic achievement. Interest and task value, intrinsic goal, cognitive and metacognitive strategy, and attribution also were substantial contributors to academic performance. As expected, test anxiety was a significant detriment to learning for adolescents.\n\nThe second article examines the relationships among initial motivation (i.e., self-efficacy, mastery goal orientation, performance avoidance goal orientation), three self-regulated learning processes (i.e., effort and persistence, cognitive and metacognitive strategies, resource management), and midterm and final exam scores in mathematics and English for 952 middle and high school students in Seoul, South Korea. Prior achievement predicted initial motivation, primarily self-efficacy, which strongly influenced mastery goal orientation. Furthermore, initial motivation predicted students’ adoption of self-regulatory functions, of which effort and persistence made the most substantial contribution to subsequent academic performance. However, cognitive and metacognitive strategies and resource management did not contribute to final exams.\n\nIn sum, this dissertation validated the reciprocal and dynamic relationships among motivation, SRL, and academic achievement for adolescents through multiple research approaches. The findings from both studies suggest that the constructs of motivation and SRL are strongly related to each other and contribute to students’ academic achievement, supporting the suggestions in Bandura’s reciprocal self-determinism and social cognitivism.