ABSTRACT
The attainment of optimal academic performance requires more than high quality instruction and requisite mental ability on the part of students: It requires personal initiative, diligence, and self-directive skill. Research on self-regulated learning grew out of efforts to understand the nature and source of these forms of students’ proactivity, and it has revealed evidence of substantial correlation between their use and academic achievement. Self-regulation refers to self-generated thoughts, feelings, and actions that are planned and cyclically adapted to the attainment of personal goals (Schunk & Zimmerman, 1994). Because use of self-regulatory processes—such as goal setting, use of learning strategies, and self-monitoring—requires both time and effort, a second key issue in understanding students’ initiative to excel academically is their sources of motivation. Students’ sense of personal agency about the quality of their performance has been hypothesized to play a key self-motivational role (Bandura, 1997). An important self-motivational variable is self-efficacy, which refers to beliefs about one's capabilities to organize and implement actions necessary to attain a designated performance of skill for specific tasks.
