Self-regulation and culture: Illuminating respondents\u27 understanding of metacognitive self-regulation strategy use

Self-regulated strategy-use has been extensively examined, and, as a result has yielded insight into the processes necessary for academic achievement and learning, in general. However, a majority of this research has relied on self-reported measures among a population of predominantly White, Anglo-American, middle class learners. Second, methodological issues have called into question the validity of self-reports to assess self-regulation. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to address these issues by investigating the relationship of metacognitive self-regulation and ethnic identity among a population of African American, Hispanic, and White undergraduate college students. Two hundred and fourteen students were administered a self-report questionnaire and a subsample of 40 students participated in a structured interview procedure commonly known as cognitive pretesting to further understand patterns of verbal interpretation, coherent elaboration, and overall cognitive validity of common items used to assess metacognitive self-regulation strategy use. First semester grade point average was also collected. Results from MANOVAs failed to find any differences in the measures of cognitive validity by ethnicity. Results from cognitive pretesting suggest that no statistically significant differences were noted among ethnic groups. When the metacognitive self-regulation items were examined for the total sample, two items were found to have relatively lower levels of cognitive validity, whereas one item received a comparatively higher cognitive validity rating. Taken together, this study lends preliminary support for the use of this scale with ethnically diverse populations. It also calls attention to the need to examine self-regulatory processes among diverse samples and the continuing use of cognitive pretesting to improve the measurement of self-regulatory constructs. Implications for research and assessment of self-regulated learning is discussed