The MillerLan - measure of online self-regulated learning: Scale development and initial validation

Enrollment in online education has grown exponentially over the past 10 years, altering both the U.S. educational landscape, and the manner in which education is being delivered on a worldwide scale. A recent statistic reported approximately 6.7 million students in the United States are engaged in online learning, supporting claims of a rapid transition from face-to-face (traditional) classroom instructional settings to online learning environments. This transition has at times left educational practitioners at a disadvantage regarding their understanding of ways in which students adapt their use of SRL strategies to effectively learn in online educational environments.

Self-regulated learning (SRL) is the process whereby learners metacognitively initiate and sustain their cognition, motivation, and behavior, bounded by their goals and contextual features of the learning environment. SRL does not refer to the ability a student possesses, rather, it is the intentional use of adaptive strategies to transform ability into successful learning and achievement outcomes. The most widely used measure of SRL strategy use is the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ). This measure was created based on the confines of traditional learning environments to evaluate SRL strategies students use while engaged in learning in traditional (brick and mortar) classrooms. Consequently, findings from studies that administer the MSLQ to students in the online learning environment have at times been inconsistent with the field’s understanding of, and the prevailing body of literature about SRL.

Guided by Bandura's (1986) Social Cognitive Theory, and Zimmerman's and Campillo's (2003) three-phase cyclical model of self-regulation, a bottom-up approach to item development was used to create the MillerLan-Measure of Online Self-Regulated Learning (ML-MOSL). The ML-MOSL is specifically appointed to assess the use of SRL strategy use in online educational settings. The new measure consists of eight sub-scales and 50 items; it was administered to a sample of 584 college students from 14 academic fields of study and achieved an acceptable internal reliability coefficient (α =.793). Additionally, goodness-of-fit statistics, and canonical correlation coefficients indicate that a psychometrically sound measure was designed to assess college students’ use of SRL strategies in the online learning environment.