First-year Students’ Self-regulation Process through Self-report at a Minority Serving Institution (MSI)
Berkley N. King *
School of Education, Norfolk State University, 700 Park Avenue Norfolk, Va. 23504, Virginia, USA.
Leroy Hamilton
School of Education, Norfolk State University, 700 Park Avenue Norfolk, Va. 23504, Virginia, USA.
Carol J. Johnson
School of Education, Norfolk State University, 700 Park Avenue Norfolk, Va. 23504, Virginia, USA.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
First-year college students face a difficult task of self-regulating in a formal academic environment, especially those lacking the fundamental skills to do so. The purpose of this study is to assess the self-regulated processes of first-year students at a Minority Serving Institution, or MSI. Participants consisted of 822 freshmen (519 females; 303 males) enrolled in an orientation course at a Minority Serving Institution in the United States. Collection of data included using the Self-Regulation Questionnaire designed to assess self-regulatory processes through self-report. The questionnaire was administered through Taskstream system and analyzed through version SPSS 23 for continued analysis of data. The data were analyzed using a regression analysis to determine whether correlations existed within or between variables. The self-regulation score was calculated by totaling all the items.
Analysis of data from this study indicated that females (r = -.12, p<.001) and transfer students (r = .14, p<.001) had significantly higher SRQ scores. The data also revealed that for self-regulation, more transfer students (41.5%) placed in the high (intact) category than did non-transfer students (24.7%). A stepwise regression model predicting the SRQ total score were based on six candidate demographic variables. The final two variable model was significant (p = .001) and accounted for 3.2% of the variance in the SRQ total score. Specifically, SRQ total scores were higher for transfer students (β = .13, p = .001) and for females (β = -.11, p = .001).
Among 822 participants, 306 fell into the low self-regulation range; 293 were in the mid-level self-regulation range; and 223 ranked in the high self-regulation range. Results stemming from the dataset revealed that thirty-seven percent of first-year students have low self-regulatory scores. Nearly 50% of the male students were less favorable to self-regulate than female students during their experience in post-secondary education.
Keywords: Good student, minority serving institution (MSI), self-regulation, self-regulation questionnaire (SRQ), meta-cognition, strategic actions, motivation, self-regulatory awareness plan (SRAP)