Self-regulated writing: Examining students' responses to questions about their knowledge, motivation, and strategies for writing.

摘要

Researchers and educators have become increasingly aware of the importance of students' ability to self-regulate learning. Students' can be described as self-regulatory to the degree that they are metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active participants in their own learning (Zimmerman, 1989). Despite the multivariate nature of this definition, researchers typically use changes in students' performance levels to assess self-regulated learning, or examine students' ability to use a strategy or complete a task independently. Furthermore, researchers who assess students' self-regulated learning typically report a single score, suggesting that students are equally strategic across different aspects of a task.;In the present study self-regulation was conceptualized as a task-specific construct that requires the assessment of students' metacognitive knowledge, motivation, and strategy use. Each of these constructs consists of multiple dimensions reflecting the complexity of an academic task. The purpose of this study was to examine the construct validity and test-retest reliability of three self-report instruments purported to measure three components of fourth and fifth grade students' self-regulated writing: (a) metacognitive knowledge about writing, (b) self-efficacy for story writing, and (c) strategy use during story writing. Furthermore, the study was designed to explore patterns of relationships among the underlying dimensions of these self-reports and students' writing performance.;A total of 713 fourth and fifth grade students participated in the construct validity study and completed at least one self-report. Participating in the test-retest study were 125 students who completed the self-reports also at a second occasion. Data from 163 students who did not participate in the test-retest study but who wrote two stories in addition to completing all three self-reports was used to explore relationships among students' metacognitive knowledge, self-efficacy, strategy use, and students' actual writing performance.;Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis results provided strong evidence for the hypothesized multidimensionality of the three self-reports. Gender, grade-level, and writing achievement differences on the factor scores of the self-reports were overall consistent with findings reported in the literature. Importantly, these results revealed that the unique multidimensional nature of the self-reports may in the future be useful in explaining inconsistent findings related to gender, grade-level and achievement level differences. No noteworthy patterns of relationships were found among the factor scores underlying the three self-reports and students' writing performance. The absence of one or more complex patterns of relationships was puzzling and possible reasons for this finding were explored. Overall, the findings from this exploratory study are believed to add valuable information to researchers' growing knowledge about students' self-regulated writing.